(CNN) – Loss often brings with it a period of reflection.
Whenever there is a death, grief is accompanied by the desire to process emotions and think about future plans. I at least try to find a silver lining in difficult times.
This week has certainly been hard as we have lost one of our dearest “friends”.
Matthew Perry’s death at age 54 was shocking for many reasons.
Not only was he too young to leave us, but as part of the Friends cast, he was also part of a group we had always thought about together.
It’s unimaginable to imagine Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer without Perry. They apparently feel the same way, as they released a joint statement this week in which they described themselves as a “family” and said they were “completely devastated by the loss of Matthew.”
You know, as we all do, that a large part of the show’s success is due to Perry’s character, Chandler Bing. His romantic, sweet and sarcastic portrayal of Chandler made Perry feel like the heart and soul of the series. And he did it so well that it hardly looked like he was acting.
Maybe in some ways I wasn’t.
“It was as if someone had been following me around for a year, stealing my jokes, copying my mannerisms, photocopying my suicidal but funny outlook on life,” she wrote in her 2022 memoir. “It’s not that I thought I was could play Chandler.” . I was Chandler.
“Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” memoir by Matthew Perry, published in 2022. (Source: Julia Weeks/AP)
While working on the series, Perry struggled with substance abuse off-screen. In his book, he noted that it was difficult to recognize the physical change he underwent during his time on the series.
“I was brutally thin and the disease was destroying me,” he wrote.
But Perry still managed to do his best in Chandler and make audiences around the world laugh across multiple generations.
In his imperfection as a human being, Perry was able to give us a mix of sass and vulnerability on the small screen. That’s why it’s so hard to deal with this last episode where we all lost a friend.