Where the Light Hits

TW: addiction, suicide

I found out Matthew Perry died while I was tipsy in an Uber on the Williamsburg Bridge. It was almost comical, how I audibly gasped, as if there were cameras on me at that moment, awaiting a reaction. I felt myself sober up. I sucked in my breath and bit down hard on the inside of my cheeks. You do not know this man, I told myself. It is Halloween weekend in New York City and you are on your way to the Lower East Side to drink overpriced liquor and pretend to party. You have no connection to this man who was and now is not. In fact, it is selfish of you to grieve someone who was in no way yours. But in the backseat of the car, while we idled in standstill traffic, I felt the degrees of separation between me and Matthew Perry become thin. There was the one where I saw David Schwimmer early one morning in Washington Square Park. The one where my first month in the city I waited for the kids I nannied to come out of school on Grove street. How I pointed up at the apartment on the corner, where tourists posed for pictures, and told the eleven and five year old, “that’s a very famous exterior to a very famous TV show you know.” The one where I couldn’t get out of bed and watched Friends until my eyes felt hollowed out and raw. The one where dad told me, “Don’t tell papa I let you watch this show. He’ll  kill me.” The one where me and dad watched Friends from the glow of his desktop computer. Him in the corner and me in a fold up navy camper chair. For the jokes I didn’t understand, I mimicked his laughter because to know what he found funny was to know how to love. “One more episode, and then it’s time for bed,” he’d say. And I’d start to feel that slow sad pulse in my chest of our night coming to a close, of the comfort wrapping up. Folding up the chair with my back to the screen, I’d suddenly hear a rumble of studio laughter, artificial and warm all at once. A fresh new episode. “Alright, just one more.” The night extended. A goodbye and goodnight postponed just a little while longer. The one where me and dad spoke in a language of our own. With the sarcasm and quips of Mr. Bean and Flight of The Conchords and Malcolm in The Middle and Freaks and Geeks and Chandler Bing. The one where dad told me, “people don’t have this much sex in real life,” pausing an episode whenever Monica or Rachel or Phoebe mentioned “sleeping with someone.” The one where I was too young to know that sleeping with someone meant sex and that sex didn’t always necessarily mean love. The one where Dad died and all our inside jokes went along with him. The one where Robin Williams died. The one where there were pills and alcohol and suicide. The one where funny men died alone. The one where my dad was fifty four and Matthew Perry was fifty four. The one where nothing was funny anymore. The one where the very thing that once gave me comfort became the very thing to tear me apart. 

When my dad first died I protected his death like a sacred emblem. If I couldn’t have a father the least I deserved was sole custody of his grief. Of course it was my mother’s and mine. My father’s father and mine. My father’s sister and mine. But I considered mine more significant. I was his daughter after all.  The one he’d chosen to bring into the world and the one he’d chosen to leave. Who could possibly hurt more? And aside from my mother and me, how dare anyone else claim to be more than a footnote in his life? Any lingering presence of my father could disintegrate at any moment if anyone else got their hands on it. Like our inside jokes, and forehead presses, and anxieties and ways of seeing the world. There was no way anyone else could possibly understand his complexities. There was no one else who could see both the magic man and the monster. 

Not until five or so years after his death could I understand how others lost him too. How he was not just mine to grieve. Once, at my kitchen table on the Upper West Side I held my cousin’s hands while we cried about my dad. It was the first time I’d seen her cry about him. One of the first times I’d ever seen her cry. I rubbed my thumbs against hers and submerged from my precious grief cocoon so snug to realize that one of my favorite people in the world had lost someone too. How I’d never thought about her hurt. How he wasn’t just only my dad but a husband and a son and a brother and a teacher and a friend and someone’s first love. He was someone to so many someones that weren’t me. With my cousin’s palms in my hand I held her as she wept for her uncle. A man who made her laugh. A man who told her to call him if she ever got drunk or stranded or scared. A man she’d known even longer than me. It was then that my grief cracked open. For a moment all possessiveness was gone. To quote one of my father’s favorite books, “I was within and without.” It was then I learned that a crucial part of my mourning would be to see all facets of my father. To turn his personhood over like a prism and  watch where the light hit. 

Perhaps Matthew Perry’s death hits because he made me laugh when I was sad. Perhaps it hits because of how big of a crush I had on Chandler’s cadence and self-deprecating charm before I even knew what crushes were. Perhaps because Matthew Perry was in pain. Perhaps because he tried so hard not to be. Perhaps because it will always seem wildly cruel and unfair to me that some people have to try so much harder than others just to be happy. Perhaps because he was only 54. Perhaps because he died alone. Perhaps because right about now, all I can think about is my own father alone in an apartment he’d just signed a lease to. With booze in his blood and a photo of me propped on his desk.  And how I can picture the whole scene, like an episode I have watched a thousand times, without having ever even been there. And how that image and feeling will now and again reveal itself at random like a sudden and unexplainable high pitched pinging in my ear. How it will throb against my skull until I quench it. Until I pour it out of me onto paper. Until I remind myself how my father wouldn’t want me to make that memory. How he wouldn’t want me to suffer like he did. How he’d want me to distract myself. To brew some tea. To put on a show like Friends and zone out into a fuzzied spectrum of 90s nostalgia. To “veg out” as he called it. Watch until my brain turns quiet. Until I can even let out a little laugh. 

In a tribute Matthew Perry’s ex-fiancé posted on her instagram she wrote, “while I loved him deeper than I could comprehend, he was complicated, and he caused pain like I’d never known.” 

Matthew Perry was so much more than Chandler Bing. He helped men struggling with addiction and pain. He probably made a lot of people feel angry. He probably made a lot of people feel loved. 

A few of my dad’s former students have reached out to me since his passing. They recount to me memories and facets of my father I never witnessed. They only saw the magic man. The man that read them Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and gave a handshake every morning before the bell. I will forever be grateful that to some people he was only ever the magic man. Just as I’m sure those close to Matthew Perry are grateful that to some, he will only ever be Chandler Bing.

How beautiful it is to let others join us in our grief. How beautiful it is to remember someone as more than one thing. How beautiful it is to grieve someone we’ve never met. How beautiful it is to laugh until we cry.