Prince, Roger, and Me

Excerpt

“Wait a few days before you waste any prayers on me” is what you said to your fans less than a week before you were found unresponsive in an elevator at your Paisley Park compound. What those cryptic words meant I can’t say for sure. Perhaps you were ready to go, and your words were a forewarning of the transition you were preparing to make. Equally troubling are the circumstances surrounding your death. Despite a hairy episode that resulted in your plane making an emergency landing in Molina, Illinois following concerts in Atlanta on the night of April 14, you elected to leave a hospital three hours after being admitted. Why, because there were no private rooms? And why were you at home alone in the days to follow? I don’t want to hear from your friends that they checked in by phone, and you assured them that you were alright. I ain’t trying to hear that. Those close to you had to understand the gravity of the situation, hence the reason for the desperate phone call to an addiction specialist in California. That reminds me, were you or someone else so concerned about your image that a similar call could not have been made to the facilities in Minneapolis, home to at least one of the most highly regarded addiction clinics in the country? And, what about the medicine for which you did not have a prescription? Who was your enabler? These are just a few of the questions to which we will probably never get answers. Despite knowing this, if I have replayed these questions over in my mind ten times, I’ve done it a thousand times. …