I haven’t been sleeping very well lately. Maybe you can relate. The war in the Middle East has been the primary culprit; being a 50-something woman hasn’t helped.
I have been picking up my phone in the middle of the night, doomscrolling like crazy, even while totally aware that this is not doing any favours for my already teetering mental health.
I have an entire to-be-read system in my bedroom – shelves, piles – but I can’t even seem to focus on books, my forever happy place. The need for distraction is intense; the phone is my frenemy. You can pick it up as long as you don’t read anything about the war, is my 2 a.m. instruction to myself. An impossible task. I can’t just scroll past. I need to know. Even if I don’t necessarily want to know.
The war has been shattering for so many of us with close connections to people involved. For Jews like me, there has been the added horror of feeling targeted by a rising, acceptable, even celebrated antisemitism. It has been a horrible time.
So on these deepest, darkest nights, I’ve been putting down the phone and picking up my iPad instead. Looking for something light and funny to relax me and keep me company, I’ve been going nostalgic. You probably know where this is going, my friends.
For three weeks, on my worst nights, I had been rewatching Friends, in search of fairly mindless – but in fact, very clever – entertainment to distract and lull me back to sleep. As a result, my fitful sleep has had the soundtrack of Chandler Bing et al riffing and angsting about things that were a luxury to care about.
And then Matthew Perry died.
This would have been a blow at any time, but it feels particularly gutting now. I know, comparing a celebrity’s before-his-time death to thousands of innocent civilians being killed in Israel and Gaza sounds ridiculous. And I’m not comparing. It’s just that this character he embodied had become part of my coping strategy. Beyond that, I have felt personally invested in Mr. Perry’s well-being.
Last year, I spent hours listening to Mr. Perry talk about his life. He was candid, contemplative, self-aware and hilarious in his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. Listening to the audiobook, as I did, made absorbing the story even more of an intimate experience. Mr. Perry was in my ears, talking about his Ottawa childhood and coming-of-age, the universe plot twist that allowed him to audition for the role of Chandler, the superstardom that resulted, and his years-long battle with addiction.
As the audiobook experience does, the narrator/author began to feel like more than that. He was a faraway friend and I was rooting for him. Re-watching Friends, I hoped he had conquered his monsters.
This week I have gone from using the show as a distraction – no longer an option – to watching my favourite Chandler Bing episodes. The one where he gets trapped in an ATM vestibule with Victoria’s Secret model Jill Goodacre during a power outage. The one where his relationship with Monica is discovered. The one where he proposes to her.
Mr. Perry was a comedic genius. His perfect timing, his physical gestures, his invention of a way of speaking that has become part of the lexicon – yes, genius. Could he have been any funnier, any more influential? Now what had been an exercise in distraction has become part of my grieving process.
I wish I could end this on some sort of wise, bright, optimistic note. Optimism is in short supply these days, I’m afraid. But there is still wisdom.
Late Monday, the British Columbia government announced that Holocaust education would become mandatory for all high-school students. One speaker at the event was survivor and esteemed psychiatrist Robert Krell.
Dr. Krell, who is very wise, was speaking about how bad things feel in the world right now. He addressed the rise of antisemitism that has followed a massacre of Jewish people. This has been particularly horrific for Holocaust survivors to witness.
“On Oct. 7, Hamas brought Auschwitz to Israel. It slaughtered babies in front of their parents and vice versa, tortured and raped women and burned alive entire families,” he told the crowd.
Trying to offer some sort of encouraging message in the midst of all this, Dr. Krell cited the philosophy of Elie Wiesel – survivor of Auschwitz, author of Night, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. What Dr. Krell had heard Mr. Wiesel say on several occasions concerned Jewish people specifically, but in this dark moment, I hope Mr. Wiesel would be okay with extending this to humanity in general.
“We Jews have every reason to despair, but we cannot,” Dr. Krell said. “We are commanded to hope.”