Thanks, Robin, for the joy in my weird little world
Originally posted on August 12, 2014.
I can’t believe he’s dead. What’s worse is that he had felt so despairing that he committed suicide. He didn’t know (or didn’t believe) how much we loved and needed him. I will miss him as much as if he’d been a relative or a friend.
I wasn’t going to make a blog post out of this. It hurts too much. Everyone’s writing plenty of tributes. How could mine matter? Yet, here I am, unable to quiet my grieving heart without giving voice to it.
I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about how a mere 24 hours before Robin had been planning to end his life. What an awful feeling that must be. I’ve never ideated or planned suicide, but I’ve come close to feeling that low. I don’t know if it would’ve made me feel better to know that people (anyone, someone) loved me or not. I cannot fathom that kind of unending pain.
Twitter‘s trending topics yesterday were nearly all about Robin’s life. It might be nice to think we could’ve saved him, like he saved Tinkerbell as Peter Pan, if we’d all shown our love sooner, more often. Then again, maybe not. I don’t understand the kind of demons he was dealing with. Perhaps those demons wouldn’t have let him hear us, even as we filled up Twitter with our mourning, leaving room for little else to be discussed. It is comforting and yet startling to realize so many others loved him like I did. I guess I thought he was mine, kept in a secret place in my heart, like a treasured gift you mustn’t lose or break. But it seems like everyone felt that way about him, not just me. Even the trolls laid low (Todd Bridges notwitshanding). On the one hand, his universal appeal makes me feel joyful, knowing I’m not alone. On the other hand, it makes me so, so heartbroken that he’s gone and that he was in such pain.
Could we have saved him? Or were we doomed to lose him all along?
Maybe none of us could’ve eased his pain.
He lured me with laughter when I was young, with Mork & Mindy. He made me think in a different way. My writing style, my love of the wordplay used by Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, and many other parts of me were inspired first by him. My sister and I spoke in funny accents and strange voices because of him. We memorized his album, Reality…What a Concept. I learned my first curse words from that album, too. I tried to memorize the way he thought, not just his words.
Yet, as we both grew older, I came to love him most for the warmth of his other roles. I had a serious school-girl crush on him. I even got my taste for hirsute men from him. Good Will Hunting, The Fisher King, What Dreams May Come, Dead Poets Society. I don’t care what critics may say about the “quality” of some of his movies. (Even I find some of them atrocious.) However, reading all the tributes and comments this past day has shown me that even in the movies I thought were his worst, there were some people who loved him in those movies. He managed to touch the best of humanness, a warmth inside me and, it seems, everyone who saw him perform. (He also touched the hearts of those he met during the regular course of his life — on the street, on the backstages of a set — as evidenced by the many tributes I’ve read today.) He made me want to be like him. Both the laughter and the warmth he gave me brought me joy. I can’t believe we couldn’t give any back to him, some of ours to spare, or that he couldn’t feel so many souls on the planet sending him positive energy. Only an insidious, evil disease could take that away from him. It makes me crushingly sad.
It’s undeniable that I am a different person than I would’ve been without his influence over the course of my life.
It’s very hard for me to come up with another person — public or private — who could even come close to matching his influence on me. My sense of humor, my ability to be goofy, my playful joy of words, my heart, my compassion, and many of the things I haven’t yet mastered but still aspire to: being nonjudgmental of others, being my own authentic self, following my bliss, generosity of spirit without fear… I owe of all this to Robin Williams’s influence on my life. He showed me that it was alright to be my own weird self.
We have lost a fine example of the best that human beings can be. And I have lost a friend who never knew I was here.
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Originally published at www.nataliemootz.com on August 12, 2014.
