Robin Williams: the terrorist in his brain About all I can say about this piece of writing (click on link, above) is that it's extremely important. When Robin Williams killed himself two years ago, he was, in essence, already dead. But by the time the true story came out (in the results of the autopsy, which took three months), everyone had moved on. When it happened, there were lots of editorials written about how he was a sad clown who killed himself because he secretly suffered from depression (as in "but doctor, I AM Pagliacci"). His suicide spawned a lot of fevered articles about how we really really have to stop stigmatizing mental illness because look what it can do, even to a rich and famous person (and it's REALLY not supposed to happen to them!). A few people claimed he was "selfish" and just moping over his career slowing down, throwing his life away to hurt his family. And I remember a lot of people flung up web sites and Facebook pages just to talk about their depression because they were sick and tired of being ashamed of it and hiding it, but those sites just kind of faded away after a while. At any rate, I don't see them any more. Here is what really happened.
Williams died from the effects of a horrible disease called Lewy Body Dementia. It devoured him, mind and body, frighteningly quickly. Though the symptoms caused his doctors to believe it was Parkinson's, it wasn't. It was something so much worse that I can barely get my head around it. I have no idea why anyone should have to go through such a hell on earth, and I believe he ended it while he felt he still could. Because no one had heard of Lewy Body Dementia and because people preferred to just see him as a sad clown and a poster boy for Reducing The Stigma, and because they had lost interest anyway, the public missed it almost completely. Robin Williams' widow wrote this eloquent piece, this cri du coeur about the hell they walked through together,for a neurological journal. They probably would not normally publish a piece by a non-neurologist. But this woman got a closer look at the ravages of Lewy Body than all of them put together. It is an incredible piece of writing, long, but it barely scratches the surface. It is almost unbearable to read because it brings home the fact that all our lives hang by a thread, all the time. It is a powerful truth, and it continues to be powerful whether we believe it or not.
This picture reminded me of a certain non-joke I kept hearing a few years ago, mainly because I heard it wrong. The original was quite poignant, but it was hashed or rehashed in one of those dystopia/sci-fi movie things that I hate so much, the Watchmen or something.
After Robin Williams died, it became apparent to most people that this sad-clown joke kind of explained the whole thing. To paraphrase it badly:
Doctor, Doctor, I have this unbearable existential pain.
Then go see this fantastic clown, he will cheer you up.
But I AM this fantastic clown!
This was supposed to explain the death of Robin Williams.
Robin Williams died because he had something called Lewy Body Dementia which is far worse than Alzheimers and slowly eats its victims alive. He was a wraith, a shell of himself, and his "suicide" was his way of taking a final bow after his life had already come to a close. Could he have gone on? There was no "on" to go to. People have chosen physician-assisted suicide for less.
Though his Parkinson's disease is very rarely mentioned, no one ever says anything about the Lewy Body because it came out in the autopsy results a few weeks later. By that time, everyone had lost interest. He was a tragic clown, that's what he was, it was all settled, and besides, what the hell is all this Lewy Body stuff? He was romanticized as a tragic victim of Hollywood and his own excesses. The truth is, he died of a horrible disease.
Thus, yet another opportunity for the public to learn something landed in the sewer.
The famous picture of Chaplin and Einstein at the top of this post surfaced today as I perused the Weekly World News - oops, I mean The Vintage News, my current favorite source of internet comedy. There was a caption featuring a supposed conversation they had. Something like this:
Einstein: Must be nice to have the whole world love you when you never say a goddamn thing.
Chaplin: Nobody knows what the hell you're talking about, so would you please shut up?
I am sure they never had this conversation! I am making it up out of whole cloth. But I did find many, many versions of it in many languages on internet memes with photos of the two of them together, two stuffed shirts, one the Stuffed Shirt of Physics and the other the Stuffed Shirt of Silent Comedy. So I guess it brought back the clown thing, the bad joke endlessly replicated and memed to death.
But that's not why I'm posting this.
As usual, the comments section in The Vintage News is the best part (especially that guy who always strenuously defends Hitler. His Facebook page has all sorts of war medals and shit on it.) There were the expected comments about what beloved figures Chaplin and Einstein were, along with people telling each other to fuck off (for no reason at all except that they could), and then someone said, "wait. What is that creepy face in the middle?"
Can you see it? It seems to be peeping over Chaplin's shoulder.
Good question! Secret Service? I wondered. These guys may or may not have been wearing bulletproof vests under their tuxes. But maybe not! Einstein kept trying to work out how he could make himself into a time traveller, while Chaplin wanted to dominate whatever time he had here and now. Meantime, here is this guy! This mysterious figure - in dark glasses, is it? And on the left, you see more shadowy figures. I keep thinking I see Don Corleone of The Godfather.
These are either beings from another dimension, or - time travellers.
I also want to set something straight that everyone gets wrong. The joke about the clown - they always call him Pagliacci. That means "clowns". So the punch line is, "but Doctor, I AM clowns." Unless you're making one of those wretched unfunny jokes about "schizophrenia", it makes no sense. "Pagliaccio" would be closer, but it means "Clown". "I am clown". The main character in the opera Pagliacci is called Canio, but no one would say, "I am Canio". Sounds like a dog or something.
Another thing. I don't know how many times I've heard Leoncavallo's opera called I Pagliacci.
That means something like "I clowns", which is worse than "I am clowns". I'm not sure where this got started, but there are even excerpts from the opera posted on YouTube labelled WRONG, and it just pisses me off.
The aria posted above isn't from Pagliacci and it isn't by anyone alive. But it is my favorite aria, and by one of my favorite singers, who did not survive long enough to prove his true greatness. As a tenor, his voice would have bloomed some time in his late 40s, so he had all his best years ahead of him.
nza died suddenly the morning of October
,
, whenhe was justthirty-eight years old. The particular physicalcatastrophe responsible for silencing forever a voice judged“black and warm and dead on pitch,”
1p249
“a voice such as isheard only once in a hundred years,”
1p20
will never be known.What remains of Lanza’s medical record is far too meager toreveal the secret of his premature death, and an autopsy wasnot performed. All we know for certain is that his health wasalready unraveling when he entered the Valle Giulia Clinic onSeptember
,
, to rest and lose weight. The day beforehe died he was fit enough to sing “E lucevan le stelle” from
Tosca
for the clinic staff, and the next morning to conversewith his wife and his agent on the telephone. Shortly after thetelephone calls, he was found “reclining on the divan [in hisroom], motionless, extremely pale and with his head bent to
I remember that we "took" this poem in school, way back in Grade 7 or thereabouts, and the chagrin, the consternation of the class: "But why did he DO that?" "He had everything." "Everyone envied him." "It's not fair." "It's a joke, isn't it?" " That would never happen." My "favorite" was this lovely statement, which I have heard echoed many times and from many people - I mean adults who should know better, not kids:
"You kill yourself because you're crazy, and you're only crazy if you want to be." I wonder now, if that kid is still alive, whether he thinks the same way. I'm not supposed to think about any of this, of course. As one writer said, Robin Williams' death caused many people to suddenly come out of the closet and proclaim, "Yes, me too". But where are they now? No doubt they have retreated in terror, hoping against hope that no one remembers their foolishness.
I've written about this before. Halloween is coming, and in the past I've seen "mental patient" costumes, often with restraints and lurid "nurses" with syringes full of "sedatives". It's funny, isn't it? Come on. Come on, don't you have a sense of humour?
No. If that's what humour is, then no.
My brother was in these "loony bins", "nut wards", etc., on and off for years. I loved him dearly, and by his own admission he was not just crazy but "ca-RAZY". Eerily, I used to compare him to Robin Williams in his madcap ability to riff on outrageous themes, putting on characters and taking them off like masks, only to change at light speed to another subject entirely. One time he did a riff on the '60s TV show The Real McCoys, doing every voice from Grandpa to Luke to Little Luke to Hassie to Kate to - his personal favorite - Pepino. Some of it was so x-rated that we fell out of our chairs.
He died in 1980, not of suicide as almost everyone assumes, but an accident. Two months later, John Lennon was shot and killed. It was a point of despair in my life.
So what is it about people who seem to have everything, who do themselves in anyway? I think of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, relapsing most awfully into a habit he thought he had beaten. I think of Amy Winehouse drinking a gallon of vodka and poisoning herself at age 27. I think we think they are immune. Not just that they are rich and famous, but loved - aren't they loved, too, I mean by friends and family?
Are they? Is there - is there balm in Gilead?
I have already published a couple of eerily similar photos of Robin Williams with dear friends who hold him so tenderly, he looks like a baby bird fallen from the nest. I once read that people who don't feel loved are like sawdust dolls with a tiny hole in the bottom. It keeps trickling out, almost imperceptibly, until the person is desperate for more supplies to keep from bleeding out.
What got all this started again? Well, it's close to Halloween which makes me think of all those awful mental patient costumes, totally dehumanizing but seen as ghoulishly funny, and CERTAINLY not anything to be offended about. (You're too sensitive, you know? That's your whole problem.) We don't have Parkinson's or MS or ALS Halloween costumes, but then again, these illnesses are "physical", "real", no one's fault, with the sufferers seen as dignified and courageous, and therefore not frightening or subject to mockery. After all, it would be in very poor taste.
It's also from remembering Williams, who seems to have died a very long time ago (but at the same time, only yesterday), but most of all it's because yesterday I bought Billy Crystal's memoir, Still Foolin' 'Em: Where I've Been, Where I'm Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys? It's typical self-deprecating Crystal humour, but not excoriating, with a sweetness, a gentleness that I have always loved about him. In fact, he is my favorite comedian.
He and Robin Williams were best friends. Closer than brothers, in many ways. This book was written and published before his suicide, but on the back is a quote from Williams that now seems poignant and unsettling: "This book is kick-ass funny and truly unique. A Hollywood autobiography with only one wife, no rehab, a loving family, and loyal friends."
I wonder if Williams secretly feared he had none of those things. It's a bit scary that he focused on that, as if to shame himself for having three wives and multiple trips to rehab. To imply, almost, that Crystal was a superior version of himself - or, at least, not so scarred, not so vulnerable.
I don't want to go much farther into this because I don't fancy triggering off a lousy day of depression. It wouldn't do anything to change the situation. But oh how I wish people would wake up. I thought of a scenario that might have saved him - everyone has a theory, so here goes, here is mine:
He is pacing the floor, both despondent and frantic, knowing there is no way out of the crushing adversity that is coming at him from all sides. Soon he will be paralyzed from Parkinson's, his career will be over, and he won't be able to take part in the cycling that has kept him sane. Rehab did no good at all and made everything worse. He looks back with shame over the battlefield of his life, and for that moment he can't see anything good about it. At all. He has made a mess of things, and there is only one way out.
Though it is agonizing to do, though he has to stand up to an immense shame that is nearly overwhelming, he goes over to the phone, picks up the receiver, dials 9-1-1.
"Hello. I'm going to kill myself. Come get me, please. NOW."
CODA. From Leonard Bernstein's Mass. I used to carry this around written on a little piece of paper. Once a counsellor took it from me and read it in a sing-songy, Betty Crocker voice, then handed it back to me saying, "Oh, that's nice."
Everybody said the same thing. Oh, they said it all right, but only officially, and only because it was a fad. A fad, in that, like the ice bucket challenge, everyone was doing it, and almost no one was thinking of the true significance of it. And it was a lie. What did it mean to "reach out for help"? If things spilled over and it was just too hard and the loneliness too agonizing, what were her choices? Her friends were uncomfortable with her grief and always tried to cheer her up. They talked brightly and continuously, trampling her attempts to communicate. Sometimes they brought things over, cookies, a hand-crocheted tea cozy. They steadfastly didn't talk about her depression, and made it know somehow that she wasn't supposed to, either. Then they said to themselves, "There. I have tried to help Sarah, but she doesn't want my help."
OK then: so how else does one "reach out for help"? How about a minister? The Word of God would solve everything. No, SHOULD. Not only that, she must obviously be faithless to be in this state. Cheer up, for the Lord helps you all the day long, even if you are too ungrateful to recognize it. "Sarah. Soooooooo. I see you are having some feelings of slight depression." Slight, my ass. But what am I supposed to tell him: that I want to cut my wrists most of the time? "Well, I'm having a little bit of trouble sleeping." "So how much sleep are you getting, Sarah?" How much sleep are you getting? How much sleep are you getting? "Four hours, maybe five."
"Well, dear, as we get older, we require less sleep. This may just be an adjustment. But I'll give you more Seroquel just in case." "I've gained thirty pounds on the Seroquel." "Well, dear, we'll just have to exercise more self-control, won't we ?" Self-control to forfeit her one form of self-comfort? An adjustment to the weird jangles and patterns in the air and on the walls which she knew represented months of severe sleep deprivation? But no. Don't tell him about that. It would be antipsychotics for sure, the big guns, and then it would truly be over. CUT! CUT! Don't print any of this, throw the footage away because it is useless. There is NO ONE to talk to about ANY of this: "resources" do not exist because everyone is uncomfortable with the erosion of her personality. It's too macabre, so it isn't happening. There, now, we're finished.
When Dan died, she felt as if she were falling endlessly, the air whistling in her ears, sure she would never hit bottom, but then when she did, she began to fall again. Everyone told her to go on a cruise. She remembered widows who had done that, who seemed suddenly liberated and twenty years younger, joyful for the first time in decades. Dancing, kicking up their heels, getting new boy friends that their families didn't approve of. It didn't happen to her. A year and a half went by, her friend Doris died suddenly of a heart attack, then her grandchild Nathan committed suicide. The act was a searing thunderclap, followed by white noise that blotted out every colour there was. Can all this happen to one person? Oh, no, I guess it can't then. But it did. There was lots of hand-patting, a ton of advice and homilies ("a person is only as happy as they make up their mind to be", "the only thing we can control is our attitude", "it's always darkest before the dawn", etc.), but also some savage things leaping out at her from nowhere (or somewhere?), including her daughter snarling at her, "This is all your fault. You had a bad influence on him, all that mental illness crap. I never should have let you near him."
You walk along. You get through the day. Friendships wither because it is harder, and harder, and harder to keep a smile on your face, harder and harder to "act normal", cover the abyss. Then one day you walk into the living room just as a news announcement flashes on the screen, some sort of message: "The Williams family requests privacy at this time." Then it quickly moves on to the next item. The Williams family. As you head upstairs to the computer, hoping to find out more, a thought hits you, a jolt coming straight down on you like lightning out of the sky. It's Robin Williams. And he has killed himself.
For a while the news bubbles and burbles. Some people say it was his fault, others say he was being selfish. A psychologist writes him an "open letter" long after he is dead, telling him why suicide is such a bad idea and why he shouldn't consider it. Helpful. He should have reached out for help, of course. All you poor, distraught fuckups out there, make sure you reach out for help! But if you were so in touch with things that might help you, if you were a real person, a normal person, not a percentage point dwelling in the sludge at the bottom of the human barrel, reaching out wouldn't be needed to begin with. All right then. I know this is a bad idea, probably an unpopular idea, but he set an example, didn't he? The brightest, most effervescent personality who ever lived, hanging himself with a belt. Myself, I always thought it was a good idea to use two ideas concurrently: take the pills, THEN hang yourself. Cut your wrists, THEN jump off the bridge. That way, you won't have the sagging-through-the-floor humiliation of waking up from a failed suicide attempt, the entire family furious with you for being so selfish. But what about throwing yourself in front of a train? I've run out of prequels there.
Oh all right, this method will do. I know enough to follow the correct procedure because I have read up on it. There's just tons of stuff on the internet now; you don't even need to go to the library and get that odd look when you check out all those books. I know the drill by now, mainly by doing it wrong. Don't just take the pills, because you'll throw them up for sure. Have a sandwich first, a sort of symbolic Last Supper, the final meal before the convict is executed, with a nice hit of alcohol. (I've been sober twenty years, but what does it matter now? My family told me I never should have been an alcoholic to begin with.) Then a few Tums and two Gravol to avoid puking them up. Let it settle, then start to take the Seroquel, but NOT all at once. My God, someone must have supervised this to get it exactly right! But they call it mercy killing, or they used to. Assisted suicide? There's no one left who will assist me. A life is done, then it's undone. It's completed, meaning that it is finished. (Didn't Jesus say that on the cross? Such a wag.) People can run around and scream all they like, blame me, say everything is my fault, which they will. But they won't have Sarah to kick around any more. Oh, no they won't. She lies down on the bed, and in a last bitter joke that no one will understand, spreads her arms out in a crucifixion pose. Blessed assurance: the wave passes over her, enveloping and dark, bringing her at last the peace that passeth all understanding.
Just enjoying this on a day that is not horrible, no, not horrible at all. Not particularly good either, but then, why are my expectations so high anyway? Saw a poignant but disturbing retrospective of Robin Williams' career (not his life, his career only) on PBS last night, and was affected by it. Not by his talents, gifts, etc., but by the loyalty and insight of his friends. And at the end, Pam Dawber, looking not much older than in her innocent Mork and Mindy days, asking, "Why? . . . Why?", with one more distraught, disbelieving "why?".
It still bothers me that he hanged himself with a belt, it just does. One of the best-known, and blah blah blah. It means nothing, I know, but I guess I always wanted to make a name for myself somehow, and now I know it's not going to happen. Did it save me, after all?
So sometimes all you can do is listen to Mahler, and in spite of its long, pensive, sometimes dysphoric and grief-stricken third movement, this is probably his most buoyant and life-loving work. But he was only on the planet for 53 years or so, anyway, so needed to get his joy in as quick as he could.
As do we all? I'm not sure about that. They showed a scene in Good Will Hunting that scared the jesus out of me, where he grabs Matt Damon by the throat and says something like, "I will end you." His eyes are this glacier blue, ice and stone, not sweet or loveable at all, not even sane, barely human, almost reptilian. A killer, after all? He did kill someone, so he was capable of it.
Everyone else has moved on, I am sure. After all, nearly a month has gone by! And I didn't even know him. Didn't even know him at all.
Flowers are placed in memory of Robin Williams on his Walk of Fame star in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/AP
When a much-loved celebrity dies in a sudden and shocking way, the immediate human desire is to find an explanation. We want to rationalise brutality. We need the reassurance. We kid ourselves that knowledge is a bulwark against falling into the same situation. If we know what caused it, the flawed reasoning goes, we can prevent it from happening again.
So it was that, in the days after Robin Williams took his life, media outlets were filled with speculation. Was it the threat of bankruptcy or career worries or a lifelong battle with addiction or a recent diagnosis of Parkinson's that made him confront the meaning of his existence?
The questions were futile. Depression is not a logical disease, a matter of straightforward cause and effect. Suicide is a devastating and complex beast. In truth, the only person capable of telling you why they did what they did has fatally absented themselves from the discussion. And sometimes, even they would be unable to pinpoint a reason.
But alongside the hopeless search for motivation, something else emerged in the aftermath of Williams's death. There was a lot of chatter surrounding the "stigma" of mental illness. Social networks were clogged with people urging others to seek help for their depression and not to feel "stigmatised" by their illness. There were magazine articles about mental health issues being "taboo" and how we must counteract this state of affairs by talking about our own struggles.
All of which is entirely admirable, but is there a stigma? The very fact that the internet was abuzz with people sharing their own stories of depression and encouraging others to do the same suggests that, thankfully, we live in a more accepting age. Most of us will know of close friends or family members who have dealt with depression. Some of us, myself included, will have experienced a form of it ourselves. Celebrities, too, have spoken out, fostering this culture of greater acceptance. The actresses Carrie Fisher and Catherine Zeta-Jones have talked about their bipolar disorders. Stephen Fry has written movingly about his depression.
As a result, I don't view mental illness as a scary, strange thing or as a form of weakness. Do you? I doubt it. And because we are talking more openly than we might have done in the past, many employers have become more attuned to dealing with it. If a workplace failed in this duty of care, there would, rightly, be outrage.
Stigma exists in other places – in the long-term care of the elderly, for instance: that unglamorous world of colostomy bags and daily drudgery we don't like to talk about because we're scared it lies ahead of us all.
There is still work to be done. An applicant for a job might feel less inclined to mention a history of mental health problems than, say, a battle with cancer. That is wrong. But bandying around the term "stigma" in reference to mental illness is unhelpful. It does precisely the opposite of what it intends to do: it means we're actually more likely to think of it in those terms because of the repeated association. Can't we just ditch the word?
What does "stigma" mean, anyway? The original definition has its roots in a Greek term that referred to the marking – by cutting or burning – of socially undesirable types such as criminals, slaves or traitors. Later, the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman defined social stigma as "the phenomenon whereby an individual with an attribute which is deeply discredited by his/her society is rejected as a result of the attribute".
Does that apply to mental health? Increasingly, I would say the answer is no. Yes, we should keep talking about depression. Yes, we should be profoundly sensitive to those who grapple with it every day of their lives. But let's stop saying there's a stigma attached to it.
(Emphasis mine. This article echoes one of my previous posts, expressing the belief that juxtaposing the ugly, scary word "stigma" with ANY condition "marks" it in a way which reminds me of the plural of stigma - stigmata. No more bleeding wounds, eh? No more creepy supernatural manifestations, "demons" (a word people casually use to describe mental illness without ONCE stopping to think exactly what they are saying), or any of the crap that still hangs around human pain. Let's get real, use some sensible and sensitive language, and get on the path to real healing.)
Now here's a strange thing, almost an eerie thing. Not long after Robin Williams' tragic suicide, I found this lovely picture of him with Terry Gilliam, the director of The Fisher King. I noticed how Williams seemed to be snuggled into his shoulder like a little kitten, almost shockingly vulnerable.
But last night, on finding out Billly Crystal will be hosting a tribute to Williams at the Emmy Awards, I found this. Of course I immediately saw the remarkably similar position, the arm around the shoulder, the closed eyes and bowed head and vulnerability. It's uncanny.
But then I noticed how similar Gilliam and Crystal looked, with the same smile, protective, warm. Really, it's the same expression.
I had to try an experiment by flipping the photos.
Now, the other way.
For all the world, it's as if the've been told to pose that way. It just seems so unlikely that it would happen spontaneously. Really, the biggest difference is Gilliam's height. If Crystal were six inches taller, it would be so similar as to be downright scary.
So what does it mean? Humans seek to find meaning in all things, whether there is a connection there or not. The more you study these photos, the eerier it gets - not just the closed eyes, tilt of the head and facial expression, which is close to exact, but the hand under the chin in a sort of gentle caress. Gilliam and Crystal have their heads in the exact same position and wear a remarkably similar expression.
These photos were random, I didn't seek them out. I just noticed them. I don't know how many others there are. I noticed Williams has dropped off the radar in just over a week, a typical response to a suicide. We just don't want to believe it happened. I don't want to believe it happened. It's something that is almost beyond imagining.
POST-BLOG REVELATION. I just keep finding these! Now, more than a month later, I find a photo of Robin with his close friend Billy Connelly, and look at it.
