SALON

Friday, Jun 22, 2012 3:30 PM UTC

Losing Nick Stahl

The actor -- who has struggled with addiction -- has been missing for two weeks, and his family has lost hope

By

Topics: Celebrity, addiction,

Losing Nick StahlFILE - Actor Nick Stahl attends a screening of "Sleepwalking" in 2008 (AP Photo/Evan Agostini, File) (Credit: AP)

Nick Stahl is missing. For many, the only surprise in this news may be that he’s missing again.

After a marital separation last winter, the actor disappeared for two weeks in May. But shortly after Rose Murphy Stahl — his estranged wife and mother of his young daughter, Marlo — filed a missing persons report, Stahl reemerged and announced he was entering a 30-day rehab program. Days later, against his doctor’s wishes, he checked himself out. Stahl was last seen at a friend’s house on June 14.

The actor, whose credits include “In the Bedroom” and “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” has a lengthy and public history of drug and alcohol abuse. But what makes his latest episode particularly agonizing — even as tabloids continue to make jokey references to calling in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator to find him — is the utter sense of defeat this time around.

Just a few weeks ago, during his last disappearance, Stahl’s wife told reporters, “I want my husband to come home. He is an amazing father and we miss him…. He wants to be well. He’s a good man and we want him home so we can help him.” In stark contrast, now she says, “I’m backing off. He knows exactly where home is. It’s the loving thing to do for him, myself and our daughter.”

The hardest, most heartbreaking thing in the world about substance abusers is that they are so often good men and women. Our culture shames them and labels them as weak; it writes them off and makes fun of their self-destructive spectacles. Yet those who care about the junkies and the alcoholics and pillheads of the world know who these people can be when they’re not messed up, how often they truly do “want to be well.” But wanting to do well and being able to do it aren’t the same thing. Four years ago, when his Stahl’s “Bully” costar and friend Brad Renfro died of a heroin overdose,  he observed sympathetically, “For someone like me, who has been through drugs and drinking, it was pretty easy to spot that Brad had problems.”

It’s tremendously hard for an addict to give up on his vices. But it’s a whole other kind of grueling for someone who loves an addict to give up on him. It means conceding that the addiction has become bigger than the person living with it — the person you know is still there inside of it, hurting. It’s horrible. Because no matter how many times the addict stops trying to save himself, it’s a very different ballgame when his friends and family stop as well.

Nick Stahl, the alcoholic train wreck who’s been spotted so often staggering around L.A.’s Skid Row, is also a father and a husband, a son and a friend. So are a lot of those other men and women passed out in alleyways and drug dens right this minute. They were loved. They still are. And there’s a special kind of grief that comes the moment that people who care about them decide the loving thing to do is “back off.” It’s the brutal, grief-inducing admission that they’re not just missing. They’re lost.

Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 21 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
334 points335 points | 101 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
59 points60 points | 3 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
36 points37 points | 3 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
33 points34 points | 2 comments
vote
With the help of Photoshop, artist Yao Lu has made shanshui — traditional ink paintings — of China's landfills
32 points33 points | 1 comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations