Sounds like another self-destructive music star I can think of who met an almost identical end (at least that was the official story) forty years earlier.
Source
The latest reports say there were prescription pills found in her hotel room:
Bottles of prescription drugs were found in the Beverly Hills Hilton hotel room where Whitney Houston's lifeless body was discovered Saturday afternoon just hours before a huge Grammy party she was to attend, a report says.
Police discovered "various pill bottles" in Houston's room, TMZ reported, adding that family members said Houston had been taking the prescription drug Xanax, which is often used to treat anxiety.
When combined with alcohol, Xanax can cause drowsiness. Houston was reportedly found in her bathtub -- TMZ says her head was underwater -- and could not be revived by paramedics after being removed from the tub.
No alcohol was found in the preliminary sweep of Houston's room, TMZ reports, but there were multiple reports that Houston had been drinking with friends the night before at the hotel.
Whether she passed out drunk and drowned or whether she had a heart attack or aneurysm and then drowned, there is a life lesson to be learned from Houston's sad fate. "Success" is not having a box full of Grammy Awards or gold records. It isn't about selling millions of records to people appreciating your talent. It isn't about making millions upon millions of dollars a year and living in monstrous mansions. It isn't about having your name in the media 24/7 and being one of the most famous people in the world. In other words, success is about how you well live your life, and by that I don't mean how many material things you obtain.
Unlike most of us, Whitney Houston had all of the advantages in the world. She had this singing talent, but there were others far more talented than she who have toiled in anonymity and are unknown to or forgotten by the public. She was lucky because she had great connections with a mother who was a professional singer, a cousin named Dionne Warwick, and a godmother named Aretha Franklin. Houston couldn't miss being famous and admired all over the world for her singing talent, and she didn't. Yet she pissed it all away in favor of substance abuse and alcoholism. How really is that "success"? It isn't.
Compare her life with the life of the recently deceased Jill Kinmont Boothe. Boothe gambled with her life excelling in a dangerous sport, skiing, and she seemingly lost when she crashed in a slalom competition in 1955 and broke her neck. The accident left her a quadriplegic. She could have committed suicide, she could have allowed herself to spend the rest of her life being institutionalized, she could have simply given up and wallowed in booze and substance abuse, especially in those days of rampant discrimination against the disabled. In the face of daunting odds, she didn't give up. She took that drive which made her such an outstanding athlete and channeled it in a different direction. Boothe had gone to college majoring in German and hoped some day to be involved in some capacity with the sport of skiing, but her life took a turn when she began tutoring students. She found her true "calling" in life as a teacher, you know, one of those people much despised by the vulture philanthropists these days. It wasn't easy to attain that dream, for she had to go to Washington state to get her teaching credential when UCLA refused to admit her in its program, and then she was rejected by school district after school district because of her disability until she found one willing to give her a chance. How lucky she was to have been given a chance to prove herself, and how lucky those students, many of them disabled themselves, were to have such a great teacher in Jill Kinmont Boothe. When she retired from teaching in the mid-1990s, she still stayed involved in the profession and also spent much time painting. Along the way she married a man who appreciated her and remained a great and loyal companion. They were together until she died last week. While Boothe never became hugely famous, she affect more lives in a more positive manner than the vast majority of those "icons" beloved by our celebrity culture and media put together.
Who really was the successful one here? Who really was the one who was a role model for us all in how to live a life well lived rather than one lived well materially?
With all of the media hype surrounding Houston's death, it is time for some perspective. One can feel terrible for her friends and family because they lost not a celebrity but a friend and family member while condemning the celebrity culture that made her early death possible.
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