Sad but not surprised

It's impossible to have missed out on Whitney Houston's remarkable career and equally remarkable demise, but it's no surprise that she died young.

I tuned in to the radio on my way home Saturday evening to hear the mega-star singer had been found dead in a hotel room in LA, and my only surprise was that she was still with us. Houston was a magnificent singer and massively talented but she fell down the rabbit hole of addiction and just couldn't get back out.

Like Amy Winehouse's death a few months ago, Houston's seemed inevitable. Sad, but inevitable.

Before we lament the fame and the money and other contributors, take a look around. Families everywhere cope with the heartbreak, failed parenting and hideous fallout of substance abuse. But for most of us, it's not quite so public. I would wager none of us knows even one family untouched in some way or another by addiction. It's a tragic failure of our species to want to alter our experience, whether we prefer to get high or low. Red wine for some of us, crack or tobacco for others, it's the nature of our beast. Some of us just get higher or lower before we're done.