Joel Thomas Hynes on Ron's drug use

A note to say thank you for all the messages and emails and phone calls and handshakes and hugs and tears and laughs and stories. It's been rough, hard to know where to put all this. Personally, I've never experienced such bottomless grief and my heart goes out to all his many loved ones - family, friends and admirers of his music and enigmatic character. 

Ron was a fiercely ambitious, prolific artist, a wondrous man with a brilliant gift, no contest. But while his passing is still fresh in everyone's hearts and minds, I'm feeling a sense of duty to offer up a hard truth that's being downplayed or overlooked in all this - the reality of what his battle has been these past years. Yes he died of cancer, but cancer was a seemingly inevitable symptom of the much darker, much more aggressive, hungrier "disease" of addiction. Ron died with next to nothing left, emotionally estranged from those who tried their best to reach him, materially destitute, spiritually adrift, physically shattered. It was beyond shocking how much he resembled his father on his deathbed. Except my grandfather was 92 years old, and for all that, grandfather had a bit more light in his eyes. 

Ron had no property to call his own, had sold all his priceless, historic guitars for a pittance to feed his demons and line the pockets of drug dealers. There was a time, when he moved to Ferryland after my grandmother died, when those of us close to him thought, wow, he just might make it. He just might let himself grow old with his guitar out on the deck with a cup of tea, watching the grass grow and counting his blessings. But that obviously wasn't to be the case. Despite what you may have heard, or thought, or hoped, he remained a hardcore addict right to his final days. And it killed him. That's what killed him. He passed the point where he was strong enough to save himself. And he was surrounded by so much love, so much worry and heartache and concern, so many loyal hearts who were desperate to offer him help that he just couldn't or wouldn't accept. And in the end he choose drugs over everything and everyone he ever loved. And he let himself die. And that's the hard truth. Being a lifelong addict myself, educated and in recovery now these past number of years, I find that so frustrating and infuriating and near impossible to swallow. So much rage here, so much confusion, remorse, guilt, just bottomless heartache for what we've lost and why. I can't imagine what everyone else is going through. Really, where does one put all this? What good can come of it?