It’s been 81 days since you left and I still wait with bated breath for someone to exclaim that it is all a dream and what I know isn’t really happening.
It’s been 81 days since you last smiled a cheshire cat grin – the kind that makes you feel something, everything.
It’s been 81 days since you last spoke some words any words but being five thousand miles away I will never know what they were.
It’s been 81 days since I last saw your face on my screen as a human being alive pulse beating.
81 days later and it has yet to sink in that you’re not coming back that you will not laugh sing cry joke breathe or be again.
It’s hard to know where to begin. This is not a post I thought I would be writing for many, many years, and yet, here we are.
On Sunday morning, I woke up to the news of Matthew Perry’s passing, and I cried, in a way that I haven’t cried over a celebrity’s death since Cory Monteith. Full-on snot-sobs. I am heartbroken and devastated, to say the least. Days later, and it still feels so surreal to me.
Mourning the passing of a famous person you love is a bizarre thing. You have no physical personal connection with them in the way that you do with your friends and family, and yet, you feel the grief as deeply as if you knew them intimately. It is as raw and as painful as losing a member of your own inner circle. But, it is a testament to the meaningful impact they have had on you through their work.
The first thing you are overwhelmed with is shock. For any death, even if you know it’s coming, it’s still shocking. As humans, we are not innately programmed to think about mortality, and it is sometimes a curse that we are the only sentient species on the planet that are aware of it. I think a lot of us see celebrities as being immortal, but the truth is, they are not. It is the one thing which we all share – the inability to escape our eventual demise. We do not ruminate on it during everyday life otherwise we would find it simply impossible to function. But, when it happens to someone we love and admire, our brain is confronted with reality, and it is startled because it spends the majority of its time shielding us from it. We feel the shock reverberate through our body – sometimes physically, as we end up hiccuping through our sobs, or a tightness in our chest when it feels like our heart is physically aching.
Hearing about Matty’s death shocked me to my core. And yet, there was a part of me that was not surprised. After all, if you read his memoir – Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing – he had so many near misses with death that it genuinely made you wonder how it hadn’t happened sooner.
I listened to the audiobook version of his memoir last year and flew through it. It was heartbreaking, funny, and poignant – perhaps three words that best sum up Matthew Perry. For somebody who found so much joy and purpose in trying to make others laugh, he battled some dark, dark demons. He spent decades struggling with an addiction to alcohol and substances, and as a result, his body succumbed to real wear and tear.
In 2019, at the age of 49, he nearly died from a burst colon – the result of his overuse of opioids. He underwent seven hours of emergency surgery, with doctors only giving him a 2 per cent chance of survival. After the surgery, he slipped into a two-week coma and spent a further five months in hospital, as well requiring a colostomy bag for nine months, and another 14 surgeries to repair the damage.
He also shared another of his near-death experiences at a rehab facility in Switzerland, where had been taking hydrocodone to treat his stomach pain before surgery. In the operating room, they had administered Propofol – a common IV medication used for induction and maintenance of general anaesthesia – but the two drugs interacted and caused him to enter five minutes of cardiac arrest. (Note: cardiac arrest is not the same as heart attack which is caused by a blockage to the blood flow. CA simply means the sudden loss of all heart activity.) They managed to resuscitate him, but broke eight ribs in the process, causing him to pull out of his role in the film Don’t Look Up, alongside Meryl Streep.
It is at this point in the book, where he asks you to temporarily pause reading/listening and time five minutes with a stopwatch to appreciate the gravity of how long it actually feels, because while it seems like a short amount of time for us in everyday life, when there is nothing happening – at all – it feels like an eternity.
He also shared that more recently, he was diagnosed was emphysema – a disease that involves damage to the lining of the lungs and the destruction of alveoli – as the result of his decades of smoking, to which doctors told him that if he did not quit, he would die.
And yet, this is not even the tip of the iceberg of everything that he had been through.
But, he was on the road to recovery. After 15 trips to rehab clinics and $9 million dollars later, in 2021, for the first time in his life, he was completely sober – no drink, no drugs, no alcohol, and no smoking. He was passionate about helping people, especially those with addictions, and even opened his own sober living facility – Perry House – in Malibu, overlooking the pier.
And yet, I wonder if he had any idea how much he helped those he didn’t know – who tuned in to the television and turned on Friends because they found comfort and joy in the loveable, awkward, and sarcastic character that was, and is, Chandler Bing.
Of course, as you’ll have read above, Matthew wanted to be remembered for more than simply being Chandler. And, while it is undoubtedly true that the majority of people will remember him for this iconic role, I think it is important to at least try to honour his wishes.
It is true that Matthew lived a troubled life. And yet, it is evident – not only from the handful of tributes below, but also from the tens of thousands of tributes being posted from every corner of the world by celebrities and fans alike – that he was also a kind, wonderful, decent, and generous human being. From the way he would interact and smile with fans who came up to him on the street, to his appearances in interviews – everyone who came into contact with him, has nothing but nice things to say. And isn’t that a beautiful way to be remembered?
I know that this is a hard time for all of us, but when you feel ready, please read/listen to his book. It’s heart-wrenching, but I am thankful that he got to speak so candidly about his life. I know that for many of us, watching Friends will never be the same again, and if I am being honest, a part of me is tempted to never watch it again because I fear it will make me too sad when I remember what we have lost.
But then, I think, Matthew’s whole purpose was about making people laugh and helping others. He lived for it. And if Friends does both of those things, then doesn’t that mean that as long as we’re watching, his purpose and legacy lives forever, within all of us?
The world is a little less funny without him in it, and I am devastated that he never got his happily ever after when he fought so hard to survive. But, I hope that after all these years, he finally has the peace he so desperately yearned for.
So, while I and the rest of the world sit quietly in our grief, I will also take this opportunity to say thank you to Matthew – for our lives simply would not have been the same without him. He was there for us, until the very end.
Matthew Langford Perry. 19th August 1969 – 28th October 2023.
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