Making sense of the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman

I woke up this morning and pawed at my phone, lazily flicking through my news feed to osmotically absorb some pre-shower knowledge, when a wall of grief and lamentation hit me.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his bathroom, aged 46, surrounded by heroin-related ephemera. You've no doubt come to read this story on the back of hundreds of others, all laying out the facts and expressing sadness at the loss of such an incredible performer. You're right to feel sad; it's a stupid, tragic waste of life. This much is obvious.

In the moments before I told a close friend of mine the news, I grappled with how to best convey it. And after having seen headline after headline proclaiming the facts in the coldest, simplest way possible, I decided to simply blurt out, "Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead a few hours ago from an overdose". She took it the same way I did: quite badly. Not heaving, racking sobs, nor a call for smelling salts after having a turn near an antique sideboard, but a kind of quiet ennui. You know the kind; where you walk to work, or the kitchen, or wherever you happen to be headed, occasionally shaking your head and muttering "...damn it" to yourself. 

The internet, however, is a democracy. A filthy, fetid, unsettling democracy where pessimism, contrarianism and being an absolute arsehole is a given. So when expressing your three out of ten on the grieving scale today, you're almost certainly going to be thrown the following curveball from said quarter: why are you grieving? People die all the time. You didn't even know him. Why are famous people so important to you? There are wars going on! Get some perspective! And so on, and so forth, they'll batter away on their keyboards, no doubt flecked with spit and Dorito crumbs. And that's fine. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, just as you're entitled to want to reply to such admonishments by taking said keyboards and using them to 'get your pummel on', as absolutely nobody would ever put it.

Well, here's why I think these deaths affect us so much.

Wars rarely give us faces, or individuals, or personal stories. Wars give us numbers, and numbers are abstract. For example: the death toll in the ongoing Syrian nightmare is close to 100,000. The human brain isn't capable of putting a face on each of those numbers. Imagine getting on a train, and going from your home to another station half an hour away. Now imagine getting off at your destination. Your brain, no doubt, turned itself off for much of the trip, only taking in the crucial details. It's part of how we make sense of, and cope with, the world at large; by picking and choosing. 

It's a muscle, and we have little control over it. Now imagine taking in and processing and pouring over everything seen on that trip. Every tree, every building, every piece of graffiti. Every traffic light, every person on the train. Everything. Your brain instead decides to boil the entire trip down from billions of coruscating, fluctuating, infinitely complex details to a single thing: train trip. It's the same with deaths. Get above a certain number, and the brain pans out and makes things abstract. It's a coping mechanism, really.

But Philip Seymour Hoffman? If you're a cinema-goer, he's been in your life for years. He's portrayed the highly personable Dustin in Twister, the charmingly manic Brandt in The Big Lebowski, the tangled Scotty in Boogie Nights, the indelibly lovable Joseph Turner White inState and Main, the horrendously complex Truman Capote in Capote, the staggeringly dense Caden Cotard in Synecdoche, New York, and the magically true Lancaster Dodd in The Master, to name a few. 

So don't let anyone tell you that you don't know him, or that he didn't mean anything to you, or that his death isn't really affecting you. Performance delivered at the calibre Hoffman delivered every minute he was onscreen is true; acting is, when done right, just that: truth. He found the truth in his roles and drove it through the screen and punctured the part of you that feels, and perceives, and endures. He spoke to us, and he shan't be speaking to us anymore. But he's left a vast body of work, one that will be enjoyed and poured over for years to come.

He also left behind three young children and a partner. In short, he left behind a family, who are no doubt now going through the worst kind of grief, one being scrutinized and shared by the public. And I've seen an overwhelming amount of the following sentiment: he chose drugs over his family. The notion that one chooses to be addicted is at best naive and at worst idiotic; many factors can drive one to drugs, but the part of the brain that gets addicted... it's primal, and it's awful, and you can't reason with it. It becomes a constant struggle, and one shouldn't be berated or vilified for falling in such a battle. But addiction doesn't discriminate between rich and poor. And drugs can find a stranglehold anywhere. Yesterday, the Sun Herald revisited a now iconic and tragic photo taken of a 15-year-old boy being shot up with heroin back in the '90s in Sydney. Within hours, across the globe, a beloved performer with a family, friends and legions of fans would die from an overdose. That 15-year-old, Andrew Johnson, is now a 31-year-old homeless man addicted to heroin. The notion that this could happen to literally anyone, even those with infinite potential and abundant opportunities, might also explain why these deaths hit home so hard: they scare us. And they should. They're reminders. They're lessons. And you're allowed to feel them, and react to them, however you choose.

I don't really have much more to say. I know people who struggle with addiction, and who've been affected by drugs. I guess I'm inclined to fall back on an old truism, but one that I sincerely believe: take care of people around you. If you see someone struggling, or if they come to you for help, don't berate them. They're sick, and they're worth helping. Addiction is an illness, and the death of a seemingly stable creative juggernaut and father of three, wanting for nothing (at least outwardly) should be a stark reminder that love and vigilance are vital allies.