Comedian’s mother turns tragedy into comfort, hope
Death became call to action for those who’ve lost loved ones to addiction
Maureen Wittels walks with compact, coiled energy. She talks the same way, without much time for floral embellishment. At an age when many embrace retirement, Wittels, 69, has instead become a source of comfort and advocacy. Her son, TV writer and producer Harris Wittels, died five years ago this week. Because of that, she’s on a mission.
Two missions, actually. Wittels wants to change the way our culture approaches addiction. She addresses antiquated laws, as well as the “stigma, the idea that we treat addicts as an other” with speaking engagements around the country. And Wittels wants to provide comfort for people who have lost loved ones to addiction, turning a taboo subject that feeds isolation into one that prompts connection among survivors. As the country blindly navigates an opiate issue that is always accompanied by the words “crisis” or “epidemic,” she simply wants those who are suffering to feel less alone.
“I’m used to talking about this now without crying,” she says. “And it took me a while to do that.”
Harris Wittels, a Houston native and graduate of the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, was a precocious kid, who after college found his calling in comedy in Los Angeles. At first, he worked on stage doing stand-up. There he caught the attention of Sarah Silverman, who hired him to write for her TV show, a job that led him to become a writer, producer and occasional actor on the beloved comedy “Parks and Recreation.”
He was enormously successful with a bright career ahead of him. He authored the word “humblebrag,” which found its way into the dictionary and became a book.
“I mean, he has a word,” Wittels says. “He was brilliant and he was functional.
“People will remember his life, the things he wrote and did on TV. But I had to find something to do to make Harris’ death meaningful. So that’s what I’m doing.”
Harris Wittels also dealt with an addiction to painkillers that morphed into heroin use because, he said, heroin was cheaper. On Feb. 19, 2015, he was found in his Los Angeles home dead of an overdose. He was 30.
Our information age can be cruel: Wittels found out about her son’s death from a friend, who saw
it on TMZ. She knew he’d struggled with addiction and had been to rehab.
The call destroyed her family — Maureen, her husband, Ellison, and their daughter Stephanie Wittels Wachs.
In the five years since, both mother and daughter have tried to turn the negative energy of their grief into something that helps people. Wittels says her best friend tried to find her a support group in Houston for parents who lost a child to addiction. She found nothing but came across GRASP (Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing), which had chapters in other cities. Wittels asked about starting a Houston chapter.
“They told me no at first,” she says. “They told me they wanted mothers who were 18 months out, at least. This was six months later. And I told them, ‘No. I’m passionate about this, and people need help. We need this, and we need this here.’ ”
GRASP sent Wittels and her friend a packet of flyers to help alert grieving people to a new monthly meeting. They dropped them at police precincts, fire departments and funeral homes. Wittels says she’d read the obits pages in the paper and would occasionally send personal letters to parents who had lost children.
A small group began to form at the Hope and Healing
Center and Institute at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. Wittels says the Houston GRASP meetings often top out at 20 to 30 people, but online membership with GRASP has doubled in about a decade.
“I see these stories, and they sound like my story,” she says.
On one hand, she sees the growth of GRASP as an unpleasant symptom of a growing national illness.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a report that counted 67,000 deaths by drug overdose in 2018, the first time the numbers had trended downward in over a decade. This, after 2017, when more than more than 20 people per 100,000 died of an overdose, compared to 6 in 100,000 in 1999. But statistics don’t deal with the cultural issues that have been embedded with addiction: a culture that sees it as a problem that only affects others and refuses to recognize connections between mental health and addiction.
On the other, more positive hand, GRASP’s growth is a sign that families are more willing to connect with others who have endured similar tragedy.
“Every time I leave the room after GRASP, I feel gratified,” Wittels says. “I’d entertained thoughts of stopping, because I’d gotten so far in my grief. But then I go to a meeting and I’m blown away by the people sharing their worst stories. There’s a feeling of comfort in the room.”
Wittels brings up her daughter, who wrote about Harris’ death in her memoir “Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful,” published two years ago. Wittels Wachs was still processing her grief while writing. Two years later, she’s moved into a more active phase, advocating for a cultural transformation in the way our country deals with addiction. Last year, she co-created a podcast called “Last Day” with Jessica Cordova Kramer, who also lost a brother to an overdose.
Their ambitions for the podcast were modest: about 5,000 listeners. They now average 75,000 per episode.
“What she’s doing is incredible,” Wittels says. “All the work we’re doing, it’s done because we miss him and feel like we need to do something to make him count. That’s it. Both of us feel this way.”
Wittels admits, “grief is forever, it doesn’t end. And look, nobody wants to be in these meetings. This is a club you don’t want to be in. And it’s sad because it’s growing.
“But what I’ve learned to do is live in a world where Harris is not in it. And I had to reinvent myself totally. I’m not that person I was anymore. I’ve reinvented a world in which I’m devoted to my grandchildren, my daughter and her husband, my husband. And he’s still here in my heart. Always. But I don’t have him anymore. I had to learn a new way to carry on without him, and that was no fun to figure out. But I feel a little better knowing that GRASP is here, and it will outlive me and help give people comfort.”