RIP

While I have a seemingly endless amount of things I have still yet to do today and other thoughts and pieces I have been yearning to write but have not done it because of said things, I had to make time for this post. At age 63, Robin Williams is dead, and that is simply something I cannot postpone my thoughts on for another time.

Admittedly, I am not typically one that pays much attention to celebrity deaths. A lot of that is due to being removed from pop culture in general, and there is a component where perhaps I feel the death of a celebrity can be talked about in a manner that is somewhat inappropriate to me. It's obvious why so many people care when a celebrity dies, but it wouldn't be innately right to place a celebrity death above the death of an "average" person. I also don't know how it would feel to be a family member of a deceased celebrity, but I imagine the whole situation being run on the news and talked about by the general public does not make it easy to go through the grieving process. I by no means feel indifferent to celebrity death; a loss of life, no matter who it was nor what the cause, is always a painful thing to someone else, and while as individuals we may never share contact, experiences, or the like, we as people all experience the same emotions. We know what it is to laugh, to cry, the joy of life and the pain of loss. So death, by and large, is a sad event, but one that I don't drastically differentiate based on the person who dies, aside from people close to me in my own life. So what makes the death of Robin Williams different? Why did I drop everything to write about his death and not that of others?

Undeniably, celebrities have touched the lives of so, so, so many people. If they hadn't, they wouldn't be called celebrities. I can't say that Robin Williams moved me on a deeper level than other celebrities or that he has any extraordinarily profound significance on me, personally Of course, it is obvious to say that he touched, many, many lives all over the world, but that does not make him unique relative to other superstars. After seeing the initial reaction of those around me, though, it really accentuated just how loved and just how much of an impact this man had on so many people, and that was primarily due to his ability to make us laugh, and laugh in the purest way. What I mean by that is that to laugh, truly laugh, is an unfiltered expression of joy. To laugh is to, at least momentarily, remove one's self from any negativity and sorrow, to enter a state where everything melts away into happiness, even if only for a second or two. Even in the darkest of times, there is solace in laughter, and though it may be hard to come by in those times, being given the gift of laughter is perhaps the greatest gift one can receive. Indeed, there may be times where when engulfed in a bleak reality, one of unrelenting darkness and misery, that laughter may be all we have, our only reprieve. That is the gift Williams so regularly gave to us all, and all the while, his life may have well been in the blackest of places, illuminated only with his desire to hang on to the laughter, to give this gift to the world, to smile and spread the elation that he may himself never possess again. If this is the case, and only he knew for sure, that desire burned brightly for so many years, but even the brightest flame will dull to a flicker before becoming extinguished, and much to the dismay of all of us, that flame finally burned out.

It may come as a surprise to so many that the man once titled "The Funniest Man Alive" could be possess such sadness that he would take his own life. There are many people with depression, myself included, that know all too well how unsurprising this is, though. The routine putting on a skin that is not your own to fool the world just enough to make it through another day is all too common. And here's what's interesting: there's a key word in that previous sentence. It's "fool". The word fool, as a noun, is used interchangeably with the word jester. As a verb it obviously is used a bit differently, but the job of a fool or a jester is to entertain and to make laugh. Obviously as a verb, to fool is to trick or confuse, but depending on the context, it can also have the entertainment element to it, typically because the manner in which an individual is "fooled" is to the bemusement of onlookers. So when those of us who have depression decide to take on the world again for at least one more day, many times we arm ourselves with humor to fool the world. Perhaps Williams was the best of us all in this regard. And in his death, hopefully Williams gave us yet another gift, maybe almost as valuable as the gift of laughter he gave us in his life provided we as a population are attentive enough to see it, and that is the gift of awareness.

The fact that suicide as the cause of death for the funniest man alive is such a terrible and ironic fate, one most never could have imagined, should draw people's attention to the seriousness of the problem that is mental illness. "If this man, of all people, took his life, then this may be more serious than we imagined". It might be too soon for people to open this dialogue up for discussion, but when a beloved man such as he dies with that affliction being the primary cause, it's hard to imagine this issue going unnoticed. It's my hope that there is awareness generated and that the topic of mental illness does not get pushed to the background. It would be a small bit of solace and great continuing legacy for this incident to go on and become the impetus for change, for more open discussion about the prevalence and severity of mental illness all over and the resources available to help remove the very real and very painful barriers that range from preventing someone from operating at the fullest extent of his/her abilities to being a completely debilitating and crushing weight on a person's daily life. I don't know that this may come out of this all, but I'd like to think I can play some small part by being someone to talk about it. Rest in peace Mr. Williams, and may your death be a means to help save the lives of others.