I don’t know squat about Robin Williams, apart from what I have seen of his work onscreen, his standup routines, and interviews with the likes of Johnny Carson, as well as hearsay passed from those who knew him. His personal life is personal, and I don’t know anything about it, as it should be. So everything I could write about him is based on the impressions I have of his work, and of a tiny bit of hearsay that I have picked up about him from a few select people who knew him and published whatever they knew. I don’t know anyone who knew someone who knew him.
My impression of Robin Williams, is that he was a very good man with a big heart, and the desire to make people happy. I also believe that he was a genius. I have seen him slip up a word in his standup routine and then tangent on that slip for some time, showing how extensively and how quickly his mind worked on coming up with new material. I truly believe that he could have taken any stage at most any time, and adlibbed for longer than most in the audience could bear to sit in one place.
I have enjoyed his work over the years, as early on as watching original episodes of Mork and Mindy, his standup routines, and his dramatic appearances such as Good Will Hunting, or The Dead Poet’s Society. Upon reflection on his drama, and much of its meaning, his end was ironic, and tragic. For the joy he brought through his work, and the meaning, I am sure I am only one of so many who would like to have put arms around him in what ended up being his last moments and told him not to, please don’t take such a treasure from us all. Just as it has been so sad to lose him, it has been so good to have him at all, and like with anyone who lives, it will always come at a price, that final toll that life requires. Bittersweet. Someone said that with his passing, we have lost a world treasure. I very much agree with this sentiment.
I have myself this silly notion that likened his life as a quest to bring light and laughter into every corner. But there was always one dark corner that his light could not fill, and it was one into which he had to go in order to clear away the darkness. Since his suicide, more people than ever have been talking about depression, suicide, and even genius and mental illness. I do not know where Mr. Williams fit onto any spectrum containing these traits. To my mind, he was probably the guy who put all the happiness he could in the world, then looked at it and saw war and rage and conflict, hunger and agony, and all that the world has wrong with it, and figured he did all he could, and it was still not enough. So he left. That is not right to think that. But it answers to me the way in which a human can be out of place in a world that is sort of beneath him. And that is a way for me to say I respected him.
And now to suicide. That breaks my heart. I did not know him. Still it breaks my heart. There are those who have since said he is in Hell for what he has done, for taking his own life. As usual with me, I only wish there was a Hell for such people and their self-righteous attitude towards those who break, or break-out, or break down, or however you look at it. Nobody can know the life, the pain, the heart of another. Nobody can know it, no matter how similar the path taken. Nobody can know the mind. How can one who brings so much laughter into the world bring his own life to an end? I do not know. I cannot judge. I will not support or endorse those who do. For any who leave us in this manner, I only have sadness and loss, and wish so much that the world would have offered you enough. Mr. Williams made a very good living, so this is obviously not what I mean by enough.
So I hang my head down, with so many others in the days since his passing. I think of the mime that he once saw, an actor without a voice. I hear in my head that unique voice calling out loudly, proudly, begging the world to look at itself and just relax, and don’t take itself so seriously. I can see his face, like so many, as though he was a close friend. I shed tears, my heart beats harder, and I feel the loss. Unlike most distant or celebrity deaths, I am among so many who feels this one so close, so near the bone, so deep in the heart. In perhaps this way, the lack of understanding of why, I understand better than ever why some people chose to die. I understand better that it is just not something to be understood. The greatest comedian of all time in his final bid for irony, to help me to know the unknowable.
Thank you Robin, for all of it. You gave so much. I never knew you. Yet I received.
Kelsey J Bacon