Memoriam Tribute Poetry

Heaven’s Comedian

Composed in tribute to Robin Williams 21 July 1951–11 August 2014

Sometimes… very rarely… Celebrities make a mark on our lives, in our hearts. Robin Williams was one such celebrity for me. He made you want to be better… to dream better.

When he died in 2014, it was like a member of the family had died unexpectedly. Maybe it hit so hard because he committed suicide. Maybe his suicide brought up that old trauma of my teens when one of my favorite great aunts killed herself. I don’t know. I do know it felt almost like laughter itself died with him.

In the immediate loss, I composed “Heaven’s Comedian,” trying to capture all the loss I felt. I need to put into words what I felt had left this world. I would go on to compose “Laugh Clown… Laugh,” which is a deeper expression of grief, tinged with anger. This one, I think, is more of a celebration of Robin.

I created the image below with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop from a public domain image of the actor. The image I found was rather washed out. It was also tiny and lacked fine details, as you can see below:

Public domain image used in the artwork which follows

I used image trace to convert the low-resolution image to something I could scale without extreme artifacting. I expanded and ungrouped that result so…