Songbird Whitney Houston was laid to rest today. Her funeral was celebrated on television and the internet for all the world to see…her final performance. I am confused, because it seems she was surrounded by good people who thought highly of her. They hold her up now in glory, when she doesn’t need them anymore. I’m not pointing blame…maybe they grew tired of having their hands slapped away when she began to stumble.
Fame didn’t kill Whitney Houston…excess and addiction did. Fodder for magazine and sensationalistic television, she became a paperless doll, dancing in the fairy dust trail that her superstar left in its wake.
In recent interviews and photos she looked lonely and confused and desperate…like a gambler who needs to let it ride one more time.
“We love you Whitney” was the theme of the Grammy Awards…and yet, the silent “but” hung there like a bad note. It was a rock n’ roll version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”…a room full of recovery and rehab graduates and gonna-bes, silently thankful it wasn’t them found naked in a bathtub.
The closeness that they claimed to Whitney in her death seems hollow and makes me wonder where they all were in the preceding days when she was so obviously in trouble.
Now the praise and glory drips from their mouths like honey…sticky and a little too sweet.
Whitney made bad choices and surrounded herself with parasites who saw her celebrity and her money as their own path to glory. They will crawl out of the woodwork now and claim they tried to help…just to get an extra fifteen minutes of fame.
I wonder if she would have gone down the same road, had she been an ordinary girl living a regular life…or was addiction just part of her destiny? Her life of privilege could have afforded her every kind of help there is…her life of privilege afforded her every access to what eventually destroyed her. She had it all…but it wasn’t enough to fill her void. In the end, the choice was hers to make…and she chose badly.
Addiction turns you into a selfish cannibal.
The light of the tarnished woman with the golden voice went out without a whisper…alone. The radiance of the little girl who stood in the front of the church and sang for the joy of it was gone a long time ago.
I leave you with the words of Dylan Thomas….
- Do not go gentle into that good night,
- Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
- Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
- Because their words had forked no lightning they
- Do not go gentle into that good night.
- Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
- Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
- Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
- And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
- Do not go gentle into that good night.
- Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
- Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
- Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- And you, my father, there on the sad height,
- Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
- Do not go gentle into that good night.
- Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Day three hundred and seven…life is fragile and precious.
Cynthia Neilson