Friday, October 1, 2010

"Who's Killing the Great Lawyers of Harvard"

Comedian Greg Giraldo died of an apparent over-dose this week. While I knew he was a lawyer, I had no idea that he was a Harvard Law School grad until today when I came across this Esquire article from 2000 about HLS grads who struggle to find happiness in the law and which prominently features Greg Giraldo,


KIDS WHO PULL STRAIGHT A'S in grade school don't often scare teachers. But for all his smarts, Greg Giraldo couldn't focus in fifth grade, and it disturbed those in charge. The kid from Queens daydreamed about funny people, guys who made other guys laugh. How thrilling to live at a time when John Belushi roamed the earth! How glorious to be Mad magazine artist Don Martin and to invent words like thwap and glork! Watch the face of a kid in love with laughter; it's not a face that soothes the schoolteacher's soul.
Mr. and Mrs. Giraldo were summoned to school and asked, Is something wrong at home? Is something troubling Greg? Nothing that we know of, the parents replied. And they returned home and asked Greg if there was something wrong. Not that I know of, he replied, and he returned to recording funny little thoughts in the journals he kept. Mom and Dad couldn't protest much; Greg was a perfect student, the kind who might fulfill an immigrant parent's dream that he become a doctor or a lawyer, or, better yet, an Ivy League doctor or lawyer. Or, best yet, a Harvard doctor or lawyer.
Go read the entire article.

1 comment:

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

Accidental deaths from drugs, mostly prescription drugs, have increased phenomenally in the past few years at a time when homicide and almost all other kinds of accidental deaths (e.g. traffic accidents and work place accidents) are at or near record lows.

Methadone (which has quite complicated and exacting dosing requirements and is taken to deal with the withdrawal associated with escaping heroin additions) and prescription pain killers (often taken without a legitmate prescription) appear to be the biggest culprits, although there are a wide variety of causes.