There is nothing new to be said about Robin Williams and his death, and it’s a good thing. I cannot find words to describe how I feel. I mourn for his wife and especially his children, I mourn for a world that will have one less astute observer to provide gleeful yet sobering reality checks, and I mourn for the man whose inner voices gave him so little peace.
A friend pointed out as I moped through the first day of life without Williams on the planet that “At least he wasn’t a family member or a close friend. . . “ Agreed. But I can’t help feeling like he belonged to me. To my family. He was a glue for us; many Saturday nights when other teenagers were out driving aimlessly in cars, ours were home sharing a Robin Williams video with their (gulp) parents. We loved him equally, and he seemed to speak for us as well as to us. He got us the way we got him, and he made us feel like we belonged together.
An iconoclast who married an iconoclast, I shared a love for Robin with my husband, and with him we completely intersected. It would be difficult to ascribe too much credit to Williams for keeping us together for 33 years; there were so few things we truly, honestly enjoyed in common. Laughing with Williams, I felt like I could endure whatever did not bind us together because the laughter and the tears his performances wrought were delicious enough to make up for all the things that drove us apart. Better still, our kids loved him equally, and we laughed aloud, in unison, in perfect harmony at his jokes and ahhed as one at the deeply human characters he brought us in his films.
Williams spoke to me from somewhere inside me, often observing things in a way I was hesitant to admit, and he gave me courage to see them my own way. My parents died, and my siblings wandered far afield of me, but Robin was always there as a surrogate brother, reminding me that I may be weird, but there are weirder ones on the planet, and weirdness can make joy . . . as well as pain. I learned to savor the joy and swallow the pain.
I imagine the pain Robin Williams swallowed finally choked him. But I can’t judge, can’t know what was in his heart or his stomach. I loved him, I identified with him, but I was never he. In the end, I can only think how lucky we were to have had him with us for his time.
I think about the Apple ad that asked, in Williams’ unmistakable (“Captain”‘s) voice, what our verse would be. He was exactly the right person to ask because he knew about verses — he left us so many, and they were well crafted, eminently memorable. We’ll always have those.
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