In the Twitter age, “famous last words” aren’t what they used to be. Amy Winehouse’s final message to her public, tweeted two nights before her death, was … “oinka oinka oinka why you awake.”
Not quite the tragic harbinger of impending doom that might have served to romanticize the 27-year-old singer’s demise.
Any time a celebrity succumbs to a drug-related death -- which is the leap to judgment made by virtually the entire world, in this instance -- it’s tempting to want to construct a narrative of sadness and depression leading up to the star finally no longer being able or willing to hold onto this mortal coil.
Also read: Amy Winehouse: 'I'll Be Dead in a Ditch, on Fire'
But in Winehouse’s case, she didn’t seem to have hit bottom at all, though there’d been troubling and embarrassing incidents in recent months. The very worst seemed to be in her past.
The scariest thing, then, may be that it’s possible to damage a body so much through years of abuse that even a minor or momentary relapse can be fatal. And that kind of protracted end is far too anticlimactic for satisfying art or life.
The year 2011 had started promisingly for Amy Winehouse, or at least less ominously than any other recent year.
Over a period of days in the first week of January, she was photographed walking the grounds of a resort in Brazil looking happy and relatively healthy, despite a couple of huge, conspicuous bruises on her legs.
She was visited by the Stones’ Ronnie Wood, which might sound like a recipe for trouble, except that he had entered a rare phase of sobriety, and neither appeared to be drinking.
Also read: Singer Amy Winehouse Found Dead at Her London Flat
Winehouse even looked like she’d been eating. There was the admitted boob job, to be sure, fleshing out her bikinied appearance, but that part of her body no longer stood out quite so radically from the formerly emaciated rest of her.
Moreover, she did a short South American mini-tour -- her first since 2008, and what would turn out to be her last -- which wasn’t even a disaster.
Though the British press was always looking for her weak spots, even they seemed to be rooting for a comeback. A Daily Mail headline declared that she was “back and in fine form” on her opening night in Brazil.
Even under the best of circumstances, Winehouse tended to be an anxious, distracted performer in concert, and the Mail noted “small hiccups” in her first comeback set. But the Sun reported that she would make 5 million pounds for the brief tour, which provided another reason to keep it together, public perception aside.
Since those dates went so comparatively well, a more extensive European tour was booked for her in the summer.
