Matthew Perry: A man with a knack of bowing out early

Do you remember 'The Last One,' the one where they say goodbye? 

As expected, this finale episode of Friends, aired nearly two decades ago from this day, put a bow on the Ross and Rachel relationship. 

Still, somehow, it also put the limelight on Monica and Chandler adopting twins and moving to the suburbs, and everyone's fear of what this would mean for the group. 

Of course, the show had to end as soon as Chandler Bing leaves Manhattan; how could 'Friends' even be 'Friends' without him?

The man behind the character Chandler, Matthew Perry, also had a knack of leaving early. 

Remember the episode where Chandler got married to Monica? 

As soon as the shoot, marking the height of the highest point in 'Friends', and also the highest point in Matthew's career, was over, he was driven back to the treatment center in a pickup truck, helmed by a sober technician.  

Matthew had this constant struggle, of trying to remain sober and failing more often than not, throughout his life. 

So much so that, he didn't really remember three years of work on the show — between the third and sixth seasons — due to being "a little bit out of it" at the time. 

Matthew Perry's 'Chandler Bing' was crowned as the sarcastic of the group

His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018.

Doctors gave him a two percent chance of survival, and he was in a coma for two weeks followed by months more in the hospital.

He required 14 surgeries to help repair all of the abdominal damage, and he had to go to rehab 15 times over the years in hopes of kicking his drug addiction.

By the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.

In parallel, Matthew had the rarest of rare quality of finishing his job in time, way ahead of his deadline. 

For example, he published a memoir "Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing" late last year, and unlike other celebrities, he didn't wait for the last minute, or after the deadline had passed, to turn in the submission to his editor. 

Writing the book wasn't obviously the best of experiences for him to pull off. It was full of painful revelations, including one about short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which Matthew described carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket. 

On and off the screen, Matthew had big dreams. 

In real life, he craved fame. On the screen, he wanted to have a million dollars, as he announced in the pilot episode of Friends. 

In the end, the character Chandler never became a millionaire, though the alternative was even more appealing: getting married to Monica.

And the person Matthew Perry, in flesh and blood, got it all (I mean the money and fame, all the while a stable relationship remained eluded). 

But as it turned out, he remained unhappy, unfulfilled and unsatisfied in life. 

Outside the stardom in Friends, his acting career never really kicked off in the way he would have liked, even though he had decent stints in the television series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and films including Fools Rush In, Almost Heroes, The Whole Nine Yards, The Whole Ten Yards, The Ron Clark Story, and 17 Again.

He never liked to live a life under the shadow of the character Chandler. Whenever someone approached him saying, "Hey Chandler, what's up?" he would turn his face away in disgust. But the same man would be the happiest if someone called him by the name Matthew and praised him for the volume of his work that goes beyond Friends. 

And his most ambitious work wasn't even portraying a fictional character on the screen. He had bigger dreams: Showing people the path to light and bringing them out of addiction. That was the sole purpose of writing the memoir in the first place as well.

But as it stands, Matthew has left us stranded in the middle once again. Just like he brought the curtain to Friends with his departure, and as he finished his book ahead of the deadline, he has now left the world for eternity way too early, just at age 54, reportedly by drowning. 

The Chan Chan Man was not wrong unfortunately when he, on the eighth episode of the ninth season of 'Friends' said, "I guess I'll be the one who dies first."

Still, he will be remembered. Not just as Chandler Bing with all his wits and puns and sarcastic remarks, but also for who he actually was, Matthew Langford Perry, survived by his parents, and millions of fans and 'friends'.