On Saturday, the world lost a talented actor: 39-year-old Nelsan Ellis, best known as Lafayette Reynolds on HBO’s “True Blood.” Ellis suffered from drug and alcohol abuse for years and was in and out of rehab — but his sobriety didn’t last. Tragically, Ellis died of heart failure during an attempt to quit drinking without medical supervision.
“During his withdrawal from alcohol he had a blood infection, his kidneys shut down, his liver was swollen, his blood pressure plummeted, and his dear sweet heart raced out of control,” Ellis’ father said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. The symptoms surrounding his death are consistent with those of delirium tremens (DTs). According to Alcohol Health and Research, the DTs can be fatal for 5-25% of alcoholics who experience them during withdrawal.
Ellis’ death reveals a seldom-discussed problem with alcoholism: It can be fatal even during a brief period of sobriety. Alcohol is toxic to the body and changes the user’s metabolism and central nervous system. Alcoholics slowly adapt to the new toxic environment, which can cause serious problems when the alcohol is removed from their systems. “Your body develops a homeostasis with alcohol,” Dr. Robert Schwartz, chairman of family medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, told Live Science. “As soon as you take it away, you’re upsetting that balance,” Schwartz said.
In 2011, the father of late singer Amy Winehouse revealed his daughter may have died from DTs as well. In an interview with NBC, Mitch Winehouse said his daughter suffered a stroke while attempting to detox by herself and “there was nobody there to rescue her.” Mitch Winehouse also said his daughter was taking Librium at the time, a drug used to reduce the chances of seizures and anxiety during alcohol detox.
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.