"I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon is the unapologetic biography of the fairly recently (September 2003) departed Warren Zevon. I got the book for Mother's Day from my husband, who knows of my almost cosmic connection with the man and his music.
I learned something in the opening pages that broke my heart. Then it made me angry. Then, once I backed up from it and thought about it, helped me recover from my first reaction and feel ashamed of my second.
See, Warren Zevon was a hard-living, cynical bastard of a drunk most of his adult life. Then, in 1986, while I was still two months from high school graduation, he got sober. I didn't know this until I got sober myself, and that endeared him all the more to me. He lived like I did and he lived like I hoped to live.
In August of 2002, two months before I would take my last ride on the party bus (gee, maybe there's something to this "two months" thing), he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.
I always forgave him for his morphine consumption (after all, cancer causes the kind of pain that requires strong shit), and I held onto his more than seventeen years of sobriety as a symbol of hope for me. I had health issues. He had health issues, big ones. He stayed sober.
But he didn't. There was a period in there, between diagnosis and death, when he withdrew back into the bottle. Months of it. Locked everyone out and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it doesn't get any better. And that broke my heart. Then pissed me off.
Then...well, I reminded myself, he got sober again before the end. While he could have drank himself to death, cheating the old hooded one, he chose instead to put the bottle down and spend his last days finishing his work and making things right with his family.
I'm not nearly through the book. I've just begun it. I got through the beginning, which started at the end, read about his relapse and return to recovery, and put it down.
I think I can go back and finish it now, trying my best to reserve my anger for the disease and not the man.
Till later...
I learned something in the opening pages that broke my heart. Then it made me angry. Then, once I backed up from it and thought about it, helped me recover from my first reaction and feel ashamed of my second.
See, Warren Zevon was a hard-living, cynical bastard of a drunk most of his adult life. Then, in 1986, while I was still two months from high school graduation, he got sober. I didn't know this until I got sober myself, and that endeared him all the more to me. He lived like I did and he lived like I hoped to live.
In August of 2002, two months before I would take my last ride on the party bus (gee, maybe there's something to this "two months" thing), he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.
I always forgave him for his morphine consumption (after all, cancer causes the kind of pain that requires strong shit), and I held onto his more than seventeen years of sobriety as a symbol of hope for me. I had health issues. He had health issues, big ones. He stayed sober.
But he didn't. There was a period in there, between diagnosis and death, when he withdrew back into the bottle. Months of it. Locked everyone out and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it doesn't get any better. And that broke my heart. Then pissed me off.
Then...well, I reminded myself, he got sober again before the end. While he could have drank himself to death, cheating the old hooded one, he chose instead to put the bottle down and spend his last days finishing his work and making things right with his family.
I'm not nearly through the book. I've just begun it. I got through the beginning, which started at the end, read about his relapse and return to recovery, and put it down.
I think I can go back and finish it now, trying my best to reserve my anger for the disease and not the man.
Till later...
Comments
On the message boards, over many years, he's been known as OH--Our Hero. It used to have one meaning. Now, it has another.