The actor Matthew Perry of Friends fame died at the end of last month, a year after he published the details of some serious turbulence in his life in a memoir. By his own reporting and what we’ve learned from people in his circles, the particulars had stayed somewhat private—even though his challenges have been evident through his life and career.

I’ve been reading a lot of memorials to him the last few days. I grew up watching Matthew Perry on TV and in movies, sometimes mimicking those infectious vocal patterns he developed for his character Chandler Bing (Could he be any more distinctive?). Last year, his memoir was on the Book Club reading list in the sober mom community I participate in. I scooped it up from the city library.

He used the book to let us in, as best he could. There are some intense and tender and gnarly details to be sure, but he also scrawled out—adamantly—that his story was not over. He asked a lot of questions about why he’d survived so many things that didn’t have to be survivable. He didn’t know exactly how he’d made it as far as he had, but Matthew Perry felt called to share his story and find out how he might help others.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” I wrote in the sober mom forum. A few people posted about his death right away, and we reflected on our experiences reading the book. Celebrity deaths end up with a lot psychic space in our culture; I’ve got no more claim to this topic than many. But here I am, trying to remember this person not as a symbol or object or example of anything. Matthew Perry was a special human. He didn’t ask to be born. He had parents and friends. He ate breakfast and tied his shoes and burped and spilled some coffee and worked some jobs and tried to be well and tried to help other people be well.

It’s a time to remember, even as it hurts and stings raw like a cut, what it means to be human. At this time of year, the changing of seasons and cycles is all around us. So many traditions make space to remember and honor the unchanging change of birth and death—All Souls’ Day, Samhain, Dia de los Muertos.

In a livestream from a local Unitarian service last weekend, I heard a reading from a text written by former minister Kathleen McTigue, whose words remind us of our place in the telling of things:

“It is right to remember the names of those who gave us strength in this choice of living. It is right to name the power of hard lives well-lived. We share a history of those lives. We belong to the same motion. They too were strengthened by what had gone before. They too were drawn on by the vision of what might come to be.”

May we be strengthened by what has gone before. May we be drawn on by the vision of what might come to be.

Matthew Perry—may his memory be a blessing.