Mathew Perry’s (Chandler) Death: Tribute and Lesson Learned
It's been exactly a week since the Earth shook with the news of Mathew Perry's (Chandler) death.
Also, a week since I started reading his memoir 'Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing'.
Side note: don't read the memoir of your favorite person immediately after their death or you'll never get over the grief, not in time at least.
Unlike most people, I didn't watch the sitcom 'Friends' in the conventional way.
It was sometime in 2018, I was on my bed in the university hostel, scrolling through Facebook and watching whatever video clip popped up.
I don’t recall the very first Friends clip I saw, but I saw one and instantly fell in love, that when I saw the next clip, I didn’t swipe up but let it play till the end, and so it was for every Friends clip I came across on Facebook.
So thank you Facebook, for making me know Friends.
I woke up quite late on 29th October, 2023, and when I did, as usual, I checked my WhatsApp (bad early morning habit btw) and there was a text from a friend.
"Your guy from Friends is dead, I heard. Chandler" the text read.
I didn't know what to make of it, and like every human, I subconsciously did the thing where we act like a sudden death prank is a real thing, only I didn't say the usual catchphrase.
"You're joking right?" no, I didn't say that.
What I did instead was go on Twitter. If they're talking about it there, then it's real.
Sadly, it was real.
"We're sad to announce the death of Matthew Perry…." was all over the block.
I didn't cry. Yet.
I kept scrolling, not sure of what I was searching for, but I guess I found it.
There were videos of his acting on Friends, pictures, especially of him and Matt Leblanc (Joey), and then there was my first tear, then the second, then the river.
I also saw many tweets where people said things along the lines of "after all he's been through".
My first instinct was "Did he go bankrupt at some point?" pardon me, I guess when the lack of money is your major problem, you tend to think anyone else with an issue lacks money.
I was curious. What did he go through? The biography Wikipedia offered said nothing about bankruptcy, but it did mention his book and I recalled I had planned to read it.
So I started reading.
I won’t be telling you what Mathew wrote in his book, but I can tell you this;
When a rich man says "money isn’t everything" and one Canadian artist goes on to say in one of his songs "they say more money more problems, bring all the problems(2x), bring all the m^therf^cking problems" because he knows a lot of lowlifes like myself would vibe to it, that rich man knows what hell he’s seeing.
And man, was Mathew one unlucky rich man!
Don’t get me wrong, I still want money, in fact, you can buy me a coffee to help with that.
But the death of Mathew, which brought about the motivation to finally read his book, is an eye-opener to always count my blessings even in the trenches.
I hate that he's dead, I literally commented "sarcasm is dead" on one of the posts on Twitter, but I guess I'm also happy that he wouldn't have to deal with all he had to.
No more fear of relapsing.
And I'm hoping he's in heaven, peaceful and smiling, not feeling lonely and knowing that he is/was enough.
Tell me, how do you deal with grieve and have you ever deeply felt the death of a celebrity?
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