Speaking Up

NOTE: It has been exactly 50 years since Berkeley resident Betty Van Patter, who worked as a bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party ,disappeared. My in-depth look at her unsolved murder case begins here tomorrow.

(Photo by Laila Comolli)

(I wrote this in 2020.)

Over the past few days, I've read several articles about the tragic death of Tony Hsieh, the entrepreneur who co-founded Zappos, the online shoe service, and who was known as a one-man “ambassador of hope.”

Among his many accomplishments, he reinvigorated a neglected area of downtown Las Vegas to become a vital center of commerce and culture, and was in the process of trying to do the same for Park City, Utah.

If you think about it, we do not have many ambassadors of hope among us; that's a pretty rare quality. I sensed his impact when I was a tech industry blogger years ago and I interviewed a group of Zappos employees who seemed unusually inspired by working at his company.

I didn’t meet Hsieh or knew much about his mission to spread hopefulness but I definitely sensed its impact among that group of people who worked for him. They straight-out loved him.

But somehow, according to the recent profiles in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, Hsieh pivoted from hope to hopelessness in recent years in a descent fueled by alcohol and drugs, which in turn caused him to isolate from his friends.

Among those friends was the singer Jewel Kilcher, who visited Hsieh not long before his death and was so deeply distressed by his condition that she warned him to seek help for his self-destructive tendencies, which apparently included (literally) playing with fire.

Not long afterward, Hsieh died in a suspicious fire in the home where he was staying on Thanksgiving night. As the fire broke out, he reportedly locked himself in his room, and died of smoke inhalation.

***

For any of us, hopelessness can grow in a void, and when you have to work too hard filling that void, addictive substances that are all too available tend to show up at just the wrong time. Once present, they speak in a seductive voice that urges usage like that which may have led Tony Hsieh to his death.

Even an ambassador of hope can fall victim to hopelessness and addiction.

The only thing any of us can do about this kind of problem, when the signs appear, is to pay attention. If you sense a loved one or a colleague is slipping into addictive behavior, try to find the way to say something. 

These are among the most difficult conversations you will ever have, but speaking out like Jewel Kilcher did to Tony Hsieh is the loving thing to do, because addiction can clearly be a terminal disease.

And much worse than one awkward conversation is not having it, and later realizing that you’ve lost a life that might have been saved.