I wasn’t going to blog about the drug-overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.
So much has already been said and there is not a very positive message in such a profoundly sad event. And I didn’t know him. But a friend of mine in recovery said today, “This hits so close to home.” He’s right.
Literally, in some respects. Julee and I live in Chelsea, one neighborhood north of Hoffman’s, just a couple of stops downtown on the 1 train from us. I first got sober at about the same time Hoffman did, some 25 years ago, before he made it big. An article about his death mentioned a small but well-known 12-step meeting he attended back then. I went to that same meeting too, almost every day. We probably sat together at some point, told each other our stories, held hands and prayed together at the end of the meeting, went out with a group (first names only) for coffee after. I probably bummed a cigarette off him.
I can’t count the number of hands I’ve held and the number of times I’ve recited the Serenity Prayer in the years since. The thought that many of those hands turned again to a drink or drug is very unsettling, even though researchers agree that addiction is a disease of pernicious relapse. But when someone who has been sober as long as Hoffman relapses, it sends out shock waves. And when they die, to an alcoholic like me, it’s as if reliable ground has shifted dangerously beneath my feet.
It may sound selfish, but any addict’s death is primarily a reminder of my own mental, physical and spiritual vulnerability. It is a dark blessing. It tells me that no matter how many years I am sober I am only one instant away from where I started. And that starting point was a particularly personal type of hell known as my bottom. Relapsing is like falling from the sky, the ground–your bottom–rushing up at you. There’s no such thing as a gentle landing.
Relapsing is a fall from grace. The concept of grace plays a big role in 12-step recovery. To me grace is the spiritual equity you accrue one sober day at a time, the blessings of a Higher Power that carry us up from our bottoms. Yet since it involves the frailty of humans, and of a particular type of human who wants to escape reality but cannot possibly escape himself, sobriety is a tenuous reprieve. It can be snatched away by the darker forces within us and around us at any second.
I don’t know why this man of such great gifts couldn’t hold on to them, especially after all those sober years. But it happens every day to people whose names we’ll never know. In the end, that’s what really hits so close to home.
