I'm going to start with a confession. I'm not nearly cool enough to have spent much time listening to Amy Winehouse's music. So at the time it wasn't really a big emotional punch in the gut for me when I read of her death this summer. I had what I think was a pretty common reaction: Wow, that's really sad but hardly very surprising. This weekend, British officials revealed the results of the inquest into her death, that she died of alcohol poisoning. Her blood alcohol level at the time of her death was .416. It's nearly impossible for most people ever to get that drunk. You have to work long and hard at building up an alcohol tolerance before you can get there. But she did.
When Winehouse died, a much-cooler-than-I-am friend of mine posted on her Facebook page a link to some celebrity blog about the funeral, and that same friend noted that sometimes fantastically creative people wind up using drugs to create the internal drama of highs and lows from which great inspiration comes. Maybe that's what drove her to addiction. And of course, people use drugs and alcohol for all sorts of reasons, most of which stem from the basic truth that they make you temporarily feel good. Some people then become addicts and some don't, and the ones that do sometimes are able to get better and sometimes aren't. It's sad, and if you're a parent, it's scary.
The celebrity blog article about the funeral contained the following: Amy's father Mitch delivered the eulogy, which he closed with the line "Goodnight, my angel. Sleep tight." As for the music at the service, Reuters reports Carole King's "So Far Away" was played at the end, and that it was first song Amy and her father had sung together. I still haven't yet been able to read that with dry eyes. She was over the top celebrity crazy, a walking sideshow, a complete hot mess, whatever else you want to say. But her dad was saying good night to her like he undoubtedly did countless times when she was a little girl. And they sang songs together, just like parents do with their kids sometimes. At least to her father, she was through it all Daddy's Little Girl. How many times during her adult life must this man have stewed and worried that this exact thing would happen to his angel? How many times must he have wondered what he could do to make it better, to keep her from poisoning herself to death? How many times must he have cried himself to sleep knowing that the answer was, of course, that he could do nothing except love her. What are parents supposed to do when they can't chase away the monsters under the bed anymore? What happens when those monsters, instead of disappearing, move into the person's head to live? That's a hard one, and a scary one.
(NOTE: I tried to post a YouTube link to Amy Winehouse singing "Rehab," but couldn't. Too bad--it's a great song. Dark, ironic, and damn catchy.)
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