A Bit of Fiction: They Will Find You.

“She’s a suicide. Suicides go somewhere else.” — What Dreams May Come

I can’t be the only person who has noticed, now, after Robin Williams committed suicide, that so many of his movies mentioned depression or suicide in one way or another. One of my favorite movies by him, What Dreams May Come, which contains the above quote, breeches this subject, suggesting that suicides don’t get to go to Heaven… at least, not normally, not on their own.

It forced a story down the throat of my brain. It’s a story that comforts me, and it’s out of fiction. This house, this place in this still from the movie, this is where Robin is now. He’s living out an eternity where everything is wrong — which, in his mind, what drove him to commit suicide, I would guess, in the first place. There was no other way.

A young girl of about eight in a dingy white dress walks into his shamble of a living room. It’s certainly nowhere to live. She asks him, Are you okay? and he tells her…

“No, I don’t… wait, no. I can’t seem to keep a woman happy… and I am almost broke… I won’t be able to keep my house… my kids all hate me… I never seem to do anything right… I can’t seem to find my dog, he hasn’t been home in weeks… Booze helped for a while, but that wasn’t the right way… at least that’s what they told me… and I can’t find my old movies… and I can’t even afford a pack of cigarettes and a load of bread… and I can’t find my shoes… I just don’t know what to do…”

He takes a breath, and she steps up. As she steps up, he sees there are more. There are five or six people in his living room — a young teenage girl, and a boy about the same age, and a man about his own age, and several others. What did they want? How could they possibly take anything else? Nothing was left.

Come on. Come on, Mister Robin. Just up. Just stand up. Take my hand. I’ll help you. The young girl holds our her hand, and he sees her smile. How can she possibly smile in a place like this? Let us take you. I want to go outside. It will be okay, I promise. I have a surprise for you. Come on, Mister Robin, let’s go.

He takes her hand, sheepishly at first; but she wraps her hand around his as if it were the warm enveloping hand of a grandfather. With a single motion, she lifts him up, and he is surprised at, with her assistance, how quickly and easily he moves across the floor. Several of the people in his living room step aside, and several of them step back out the… well, it’s the broken front picture window… and into the front yard. “I love you, Dear.” He hears the voice behind him… and it is so undeniably familiar… but as he looks over his shoulder, he’s already outside.

Outside isn’t how he remembered it. He cann’t remember anything but dark, save for the little puddles of light that was normally on it from the single tiny lamp on the living room floor. (Why aren’t any of the overhead lights — or fans — working?) These moments of sad wonderment arefading, though… and they are being replaced with these new surroundings.

The Yard is a soupy gray. There isn’t tar — there’s grass. It isn’t green — not by any stretch of the imagination — but it’s grass. He looks up from his feet, and there are more. There aren’t just the two or three who had walked out ahead of them. There isa middle-aged mother with her baby in her arms. There is a jolly old gentleman. There are nine or ten children, six-seven-eight-nine he counts… all standing, shoulder to shoulder, standing still, looking up at him, smiling.

Smiling. In this land, devoid of anything happy so far, here is happiness.

“What are you all doing here? What do you want from me? I don’t have anything to give.” He holds up his hands, fingers splayed out, then drops them down to his sides. “Nothing.”

The young girl, the one in the dingy white dress, is beside him, then in front of him again. She giggles. She giggles once, then twice, then outright laughs. At first, he thinks she was laughing at him; then he realizes she is laughing for him. “Oh, Mister Robin, don’t you see? You have given us all so much. You have given us pictures, lines, memories… and laughs. So many laughs!” She stretches her hands wide, the same way that he had; but this time expressing fullness, not emptiness. “You have given us all so much. We’re all here for you now. We want to give you the all so much, like you gave us the all so much. It’s our turn now. Come here, come here! Give me a hug.” She puts up her arms, like a tiny child waiting to be picked up, but from a taller-than-tiny one. She looks up at him with puppy dog eyes, but never losing that smile. “Please?”

He looks down at her, and the happiness from her creeps into him. He smiles a bit. He gingerly gets down on one knee, and she steps up close to his face. He wraps his arms around her waist, and she wraps hers around the very top of his head.

He closes his eyes, with a smile on a face, and in that instant they vanish from this place.