The Lawyer, the Addict a High-Powered Silicon Valley Attorney Dies

Some really shocking lines in here:

…[based upon self-evaluation,] 21 percent of lawyers qualify as problem drinkers, while 28 percent struggle with … serious depression. Only [25% of] lawyers answered questions about drug use… “It’s left to speculation what motivated 75 percent of attorneys to skip over the section on drug use as if it wasn’t there.”

Of all the heartbreaking details of his story, the one that continues to haunt me is this: The history on his cellphone shows the last call he ever made was for work. Peter, vomiting, unable to sit up, slipping in and out of consciousness, had managed, somehow, to dial into a conference call.

At Peter’s memorial service in 2015, [q]uite a few of the lawyers attending the service were bent over their phones, reading and tapping out emails. Their friend and colleague was dead, and yet they couldn’t stop working long enough to listen to what was being said about him.

This is a sad, sad recitation of a man who lived to work rather than worked to live. The following was the saddest to me:

"Peter battled his own brand of melancholy, something I found attractive in a tragically poetic, still-waters-run-deep kind of way. He used to tell me he wasn’t someone who ever really felt happy. He had moments of being “not unhappy,” he said, but his emotional range was narrow.

When something great happened, he didn’t jump for joy. When something sad happened, he didn’t break down and cry. The only times I ever saw tears in his eyes were in the hospital, right after each of our children was born."

For all he did, for all he gave, he never allowed himself to just breathe. Sadly, he missed so much in life including what life is all about.