This is Kind of About Whitney Houston, But Mostly About Myself

I generally stray away from doing memorial posts for people who I don’t talk about much when they’re alive, but sometimes someone’s death makes you reflect on life a little. When I was a kid, Whitney Houston was virtually inescapable. Turn on the television, a Whitney video was playing. Go to the movies, The Bodyguard was playing. When I lived with my aunt and uncle for a number of years, Whitney Houston was one of the only artists they listened to. And I’m not talking just the hits, I mean everything from deep album cuts to the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack. Even though I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m not much of an R&B fan (probably because it was played so much around me when I was young), there was no way of getting around Whitney. So I did just like everybody else: I tried my damnedest to hit the high notes on “I Will Always Love You.”

She touched a lot of people. She was one of the most gifted singers in the world. No one can take that away from her.

There’s this really cruel thing that Middle America does, which is to ridicule people with serious addictions, as if it’s a chosen way of life and not a disease. That’s what people had been doing with Whitney for at least fifteen years, now. They crack a few crack jokes, make a snide reference to Bobby Brown, and go about their days. Maybe I don’t do the same because I’ve seen addiction wreck many lives, including the one of the woman who brought me into this world.

I don’t know how this makes me feel. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m angry that my childhood was taken away from me because of my mother’s drug addiction. Sometimes, it’s a bummer that she loved drugs more than she loved me, but shit. I wouldn’t be where I am right now if she didn’t. If anything, I’m disappointed at how all of my aunts and uncles treated her; she was ostracized from the rest of my family because of her addiction, cast as the “black sheep” because her own family didn’t care enough about her to help her. She was the baby of her family, she had three older brothers. The baby girl is the one person in the family who is supposed to have the most protection.

And now, I don’t know who she has. She may be completely on her own. She may have started a new, cleaner life. I hope for the latter. And I hope Whitney died with a family that loved her and cared for her and cherished her, one that tried to help her get clean instead of abandoning her and throwing stones like the tons of people who have never even met her are probably doing somewhere right now.

Notes

  1. hotelnova reblogged this from douglasmartini
  2. imathers said: Thank you.
  3. holyfarts said: this was lovely, thank you. i hope my status post wasn’t offensive.. i just have always hated my middle name and that i was named after a singer haha.
  4. aliealiealieee said: it’s killing me to see all kinds of jokes about her addiction. regardless of how people feel about her as an entertainer, it’s in really poor taste to even go there. ever. they’ve clearly never loved an addict. i’m glad you wrote this.
  5. yokellyyyyy said: luv u
  6. oldtobegin said: thank you. for sharing, for being you, for everything.