Like the rest of the world I woke up Sunday to the news that Whitney Houston had died. Opinions were flying fast and furious through the cyber sphere, and sadly a fair bit of it negative and judgmental.
I spent the day sequestered in my room working. At one point I overheard snippets of a program B.I.L was watching in the next room. Chris Herren, a former basketball player with the Boston Celtics was sharing his story of addiction. He spoke graphically about his drug use. He held my attention as he dispassionately recounted his complete enslavement to his addiction, even as he endangered the well being of his wife and small children. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the impact of his actions, he was helpless to change them (Herron endured police arrest, media exposure and public humiliation on a few occasions but his behavior didn’t change). Addicts talk about hitting bottom and only then being able to successfully make the changes to head down the road of recovery. Chris Herron eventually hit it and is now more than three years sober. Whitney Houston hit the end of the road before she hit bottom.
Celebrity often inures us to the humanity of the individual. Whitney Houston was more than an award winning talent, she was more than the subject of jokes and parody, she was even more than an addict. She was a mother and a daughter, and there are people in pain over the loss. Everyone is allowed their opinion and sitting in judgement is a sad fact of modern culture, but we should all remember that no matter the level of celebrity, in their private lives they’re just as human and afflicted as we are. And change is hard, for everyone.
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