I keep thinking about what your business manager said when I spoke to him in those first few hours, that once the news got out it would be a runaway train, out of our control. It didn’t register at the time. I knew you were successful, but you were always so casual and humble about your career that I didn’t realize just quite how much you meant to everyone else. Yet another layer to wrap my broken head around.
By Day Five, the waiting for your body to come home becomes so insufferable that I storm out of the living room screaming and crying at the top of my lungs as if I’m a thirteen-year-old girl in the midst of a temper tantrum: “I’m sick of waiting! This is bullshit! We need to bury him. We need to bury him now! I don’t want to fucking wait anymore! I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE!” No one pays me any attention. This sort of climactic outburst belongs in the scene.
Not that we are super religious, but in Judaism, it’s customary to bury a loved one within forty-eight hours. And in Judaism, the customs are really the point. It takes seven days to complete the autopsy and fly you back home to Houston, where you will be buried beside the plots Mom and Dad bought for themselves, thinking they’d be in the ground long before either of us.
The day before the funeral, I realize I have nothing to wear. I have to go to a store where people are buying dresses for happy occasions and buy a dress to wear to your funeral, a dress that will forever hang in my closet as the dress I wore to my brother’s funeral. I’ll never wear it again, but I won’t ever give it away. It will just hang there, sadly and forever, as a daily reminder that things can always be worse.
04
Week Two
The sun sets and rises as it somehow continues to do, and it’s time to bury you in the ground.
The scene is equal parts sad and surreal.
The shiny black limousines.
The collision of silence and noise inside of my head and the inability to take a deep breath.
The paralysis at the door of the chapel after being hit by the sudden impact of the crowd. Once I go in, I must sit through your funeral, and I don’t want to sit through your funeral. I don’t want to go inside. I physically resist going past the threshold. Someone behind me gives me a shove and holds my hand—my husband, probably—and we walk the long, center aisle to the front row. I don’t make eye contact with anyone but can feel the weight of everyone’s eyes on me. We sit directly in front of the casket and the giant poster of your face that’s hanging on an easel. It’s the photo from the inside of your book jacket where you’re wearing your favorite blue hoodie, black T-shirt, and half smile. I remember when you sent me the proofs. I chose this one.
Then the service.
The eulogy.
The police escorts and the caravan to the cemetery.
The customary shoveling of the dirt into the hole.
The minyan that lasts until 10:00 p.m.
The thank-you and the thank-you and the thank-you and the thank-you.
The brutal exhaustion and the feeling that I very well might die, too.
The events of the following week are equally sad and surreal.
Like the unexpected feeling of betrayal when Leonard Nimoy dies the day after your funeral and your position of Tragic Dead Celebrity of the Week is usurped on social media.
The flying to Los Angeles two days after the funeral with Mom, Mike, and the baby. Dad refuses to go. He can’t handle it.
The packing up of your house and your entire life, every knick-knack telling a story I’ll never hear.
The endless stream of your wonderful friends lining up to help, comfort, feed, console, pack, and lean on.
The simultaneous elation and despair of the tribute shows.
The rehab journals from all three facilities and the overflowing folders of worksheets, suggested readings, and informational packets.
The sobriety chips and the copies of AA and NA in your backpack.
The drugs and the needles still in your bathroom drawer.
The things I wish I’d known, the things I knew but didn’t say, the things I knew and said but should have said more.
The couch in the living room where you died that no one will sit on but me.
We gather in there one afternoon as Iris eats her afternoon snack. It’s the time of day when sunlight pours through the curtains and paints everything in warmth. Surrounded by boxes, giant trash bags, and piles of things to Give, Donate, or Keep, I sit on the couch, while Mike and Mom sit on the floor. Iris wears a T-shirt that says Oh Happy Day and stands facing the couch, using it as a table for her crackers—a mix of water crackers and graham crackers. She has arranged them in a straight line. A few tiny bites in, she realizes that she has a round cracker in each hand but wants one of the square crackers in front of her. Instead of setting one of the crackers down and picking up another, she opts to bend at the waist and grab the cracker with her mouth like a little baby bird so now she has a cracker in each hand and one in her mouth.
“Oh, my god!” Mom cries.
All of us are immediately engulfed in laughter. Because she shares your comedic DNA, our positive feedback motivates her to do the bit again, and it lands even harder the second time. We quickly hit can’t breathe, tears pouring out of our eyes, falling on the floor levels of laughter because here she is, this totally oblivious baby, eating graham crackers off a couch that a person died on a week before, which isn’t at all funny but simultaneously so funny and exactly what we need.
It’s the first of many times that Iris will save us from ourselves.
• • •
We spend one full week in LA, staying at your house with you not in it. Mike and I are literally sleeping in your bed. All I want is to go home and sleep in my own bed. Forever. But there’s a baby, and the baby is sick with a cold, and I’m nervous for her to fly. If her ears get too clogged from the pressure, her eardrums could burst, which would be catastrophic for a baby who already has permanent hearing loss.
Armen was your best friend, favorite writing partner, and most prolific collaborator. He is having a tremendously hard time with all of this. His mom, who lives here in LA and came down to Houston for the funeral, has been endlessly helpful this week, so in the midst of the chaos, we ask her to arrange for an appointment with a local pediatrician. His office is cluttered with signed sports memorabilia. He writes Iris a prescription and gives us the green light to fly. Thank God. I can’t deal with another fucking thing.
Packing up a person’s life and clearing out someone else’s fully lived-in house is no small feat. There are so many drawers to clean out and papers to shred. It’s also physically painful.
My lower back aches.
My neck is locked into one position.
My jaw is tense.
My head is permanently migrained.
My ankle may be sprained. I keep walking into furniture. At one point, I run full speed into your bedpost and literally hit the ground, writhing in pain, unable to breathe.
Hitting the ground is a repeated theme of the grieving process.
• • •
The morning before we fly back home, the movers arrive to load up the truck and take your belongings back to Houston, where I will lock them in a storage facility down the street from our house until I have the mental capacity to figure out what to do with them. After the movers set out on their voyage, Mom and I embark on ours, driving the narrow, winding road into The Hills to meet with your therapist from sober living, where you’d been since the end of December. Once we finally reach the gate, we have to drive up another steep hill to get to the facility. It’s so steep, I feel as though the car might roll backwards and we might fall off the mountainside to our deaths. As we make it to the top, I wonder if you ever made this drive while high. If so, man, were you functional.
Your therapist greets us warmly. He is a short, bald, rather slight and soft-spoken Indian gentlem
an with a melodic British accent and an unending supply of patience. I’m able to identify him immediately: a recovering heroin addict, nineteen years clean. You always talked about him as if he were a deity. This is exactly how I imagined him.
Once introductions are made, he and the owner of the facility escort us into one of the nearby cottages. It’s a large, sun-drenched meeting room with giant windows and a wraparound porch with a view of lush hills and trees perched beside sprawling, expensive homes. There are plenty of comfortable couches and chairs scattered around the room. It feels cozy. The fireplace mantle is crowded with live plants. A modest flat-screen TV hangs on the wall in the corner. I wonder how many times you sat where I’m sitting now, staring at this tiny TV, wrestling with your choices, trying to figure out why the fuck you do what you do. And, now, here we are, trying to figure out why the fuck you did what you did.
Your therapist kindly and softly explains that the primary thing that kills addicts is the “just one more time” mentality. He’s so gentle in his delivery. It’s a tragic accident that no one intends. It’s a waste. He explains that they had made special allowances for you to work off-site on Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show, Master of None, while you were living here. This was unusual, but they felt like it would be a positive motivator. Of course you manipulated them into this arrangement, I think.
You were always an epic and infamous arguer with a penetrating ability to wear people down. I vividly remember the four-hour screaming match you had with your roommate in the Sherman Oaks house while I was visiting over whether a movie we’d just seen was good or bad. (It was Funny Games, and for the record, it was bad.) The fight started in the lobby of the theater, followed us into the car and, ultimately, moved into the house, where it continued all night. Your roommate literally threatened to move out.
The Analyze Phish podcast, where you tried to convince Scott Aukerman to like Phish, was the most Harris thing of all time because you were always obsessively determined to make people see things your way. Like Scott, I never liked the band Phish either because why would I, but for decades, you refused to accept this as a possibility. Once, when I was living in New York, you finally wore me down enough to get me to a show at Coney Island that you swore would change my life. Even though Jay-Z made a surprise cameo that night, it didn’t. To you, this meant that there must be something wrong with me. I can still hear you say Steph in that way only you say that word with so much disappointment and aggravation.
Here’s what we learn from your therapist: Ultimately, you wouldn’t give up control. You wouldn’t surrender and accept that you were powerless. Three times over the course of your seven-week stay, you refused a Vivitrol shot, a drug that would’ve made getting high impossible by blocking sensors in your brain for thirty days. And you fucking refused it. You weren’t done. You had every intention of using again.
This was your third rehab over the course of one year to the day and the one we all thought would finally stick. You clearly needed something more long term; the thirty-day programs weren’t cutting it. The first rehab was in Malibu. You checked in last year on my birthday, February 20, 2014. Despite the stellar reputation and $30,000 price tag, you relapsed immediately once you got out. Six months later, after you’d started shooting heroin, you checked into another thirty-day program in Oregon that proved to be equally ineffective.
This last (and final) rehab in Hollywood seemed like a great fit. It was close enough to home, so you could eventually integrate it into your life. You spoke highly of the people both in the program and running it. Plus, it was a longer commitment and would allow more time for the program to sink in and change you on a permanent, brain-chemistry kind of level. When you first got to The Hills at the tail end of December, you completed a thirty-day detox then moved to their sober living residence in February, where you were supposed to live for a period of months at least, before transitioning back into real life. But you only stayed in sober living for three weeks before checking yourself out.
We inquire about your mental state the day you checked out without telling us because you knew you’d be met with resistance. From our sporadic phone calls and emails, you sounded like you were doing well, and we wanted you to stay that way. We knew you would be moving to New York in two weeks to start shooting Master of None but hoped you’d stay in sober living until then. Any lapse in treatment could jeopardize your sobriety.
According to your therapist, you had your final session with him on Tuesday afternoon, February 17, right before checking out for good. You seemed perfectly fine, he explained. Totally sober. Nothing out of the ordinary. He had no reservations whatsoever about your transition back home.
You overdosed and died two days later.
Driving away from the Hills, I wonder why we even felt it necessary to visit. It wasn’t going to bring you back. I suppose it’s all part of the manic investigative phase, which is missing from the stages-of-grief flowchart. I keep trying to piece together a timeline, to crack the case, as if this will somehow soften the blow. I go over and over and over the facts like some deranged, sleep-deprived detective: You checked out of sober living on Tuesday afternoon. You booked your Airbnb for New York, where you would be heading in two weeks’ time to start production on the Netflix series. The Airbnb tab was still open on your laptop. You did stand-up at Meltdown on Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. After the show, you came home. Or maybe you didn’t come home. Maybe you went to Skid Row. Maybe you already had the drugs in your bathroom drawer or in the center console of your car.
Mom emailed you earlier that night about the Parks and Recreation series finale:
So is each show going to say goodbye to the characters from here on out? I get the feeling this is how it’s going to wrap up. It’s very cute and sweet actually. Time to say goodbye. Hope you are on good footing still. I am very excited to see you. Are you nervous about living in NY? A great new adventure for you. I think you are up to the task. How is the house hunting going? Steph turns 34 on Friday BTW. Love you very much. Mom
You responded at 12:00 a.m. her time, 10:00 p.m. your time:
There’s only one more Parks episode left and it’s the big farewell episode that will make you cry. i found a cool place to live in Manhattan. I feel good!! I am feeling very fortunate. Love you.
And you were found dead on Thursday around noon.
It doesn’t make any sense. It will never make any sense. What happened between clicking send and sticking a needle in your arm?
I spend hours trying to figure it out, sifting through texts and emails, listening to voicemails, interrogating your friends. Nothing. There is nothing. There is nothing to figure out because there is no case to crack. You were an addict, and it was a stupid, senseless fucking accident. It’s as tragically simple as that.
• • •
This random guy who lived with you at The Hills has messaged me several times about coming by your house to pick up some of his gear from your music room. Aside from his gear not being my priority at the moment, I don’t know this person and am hesitant to invite him into your home to potentially steal your drum kit and whatever other fancy shit you have back there. In the midst of this whirlwind, I don’t know how to gauge who’s a legitimate friend and who’s out to capitalize on your death. Your tragic story has been plastered all over the internet for two weeks. Everyone has something to say. One girl wrote a detailed piece that she shared all over Facebook chronicling the details of your sexual relationship. Our mother read it. Lots of people we’ve never heard of have reached out to Mom and me on Facebook to say how close you were, how much you meant to them, and how devastated they are that you’re gone. It’s a difficult thing to field, and I’m paranoid that people will take advantage of that.
I check with Paul and Michael, your bandmates from Don’t Stop or We’ll Die, and they confirm that you did, indeed, have a “Secret Rehab Band,” so I give this guy the green light. He comes with a drive
r or chaperone or something—a Henry Rollins type. The bodyguard tells us six people from sober living have overdosed on heroin in the last nine months. Six people. Six daughters, sons, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers. Six other families have lived through this merciless nightmare. You knew the statistics but were convinced it wouldn’t happen to you. I make shitty small talk with the guy from Secret Rehab Band, all the while resenting that he’s alive and you’re dead.
05
Week Three
Once the house is packed up and the movers have come and gone and the rooms are empty, aside from a couple of beds, dressers, a dining room table, and the sofa in the living room, we say goodbye to your house in Los Feliz that we’ll never see again and head back to LAX. We return the rental car and take the shuttle to the terminal, and as we sit at the gate, waiting for the plane to arrive, it hits me that we’re flying back home to Houston, but I’m not ready to go back to my life.
I can’t go back to my life.
It’s March 7, and I haven’t been to work since February 19. I text my boss to tell him I’m still a mess and currently have the baby’s cold and possibly a sprained ankle (from the bedpost). I ask for more time. He tells me to take another week. One week plus spring break, which is the following week, will give me two more weeks. To do what? I don’t know.
The grief takes up so much space that there’s not much room for anything else. When I’m not thinking about how bleak life is going to be without you, I’m signing on some dotted line and trying my best to wake up every day for the sake of Iris. I force myself to smile in her presence because she’s a loving, innocent baby who deserves a smiling mother. This is taking all the energy I have. As a result, my ability to think and remember is notably compromised. I frequently say one word but mean another. Constantly, I hear “You told me that already.”
Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful Page 4