I Crashed a Cocktail Party

Robin Williams, James Foley, and the Role of Restraint

Last week, my husband was sprawled across a bed in a cabin in a remote wood, iPad on one knee.

“Oh,” he called out.

I braced myself, reading in the other room. I waited for him to announce that the zoo was closed tomorrow, or that a friend had lost his uncle, or that a co-worker was getting a divorce.

“Robin Williams had Parkinson’s disease.”

“Oh,” I echoed, trying to sound interested. “That would be a lot at once.”

“Depression and Parkinson’s disease?” he called back.

“And bi-polar disorder,” I muttered, remembering a headline I had seen earlier in the day. I picked up reading again, but my mind drifted to the two people I knew with Parkinson’s.

I imagined it was not pleasant, but I was not upset for Williams. I was more bothered by the fact that we knew he had the disease at all. I was bothered that we knew about his depression, his bipolar disorder, his substance abuse and that last stint in rehab that wasn’t really for “rehab.”

Earlier in the day, we had driven away from our holiday hut in the woods where we were deprived of decent internet. As we left dirt roads and re-entered civilization, I lapped up my 4G, skimming all my portals to the rest of the world.

Every other post that flooded in was about him. Sometimes it took me a while to figure out who, because the headlines and some tributes, which claimed to outdo the last, “the best,” and the “most heart-wrenching,” didn’t even bother to mention his name.

It felt as if I had walked out of my wireless hut and into a cocktail party where everyone had been gossiping about Robin Williams’ death for the last quarter of an hour. No one was saying who anymore, only what. There I stood with my freshly shaken dirty martini, wondering what the hell everyone was wide-eyed and talking about.

“Did you hear about his daughter?”

“Yeah, I heard. She left Twitter.”

“Rush Limbaugh said he was leftist and that leftists are unhappy and lazy and that’s why he died.”

“Good god, what an asshole.”

“I totally agree.”

“I read he was bipolar.”

“It’s so tragic. It’s like the genie is finally free, and I am so sad about it.”

“Wow, how poignant. Can I use that?”

“He died of asphyxiation, but he hung himself.”

Then the party falls quiet, because we are imagining the man, unable to breathe in his last moments.

At this point in the conversation, someone might have turned to me and whispered, again, “It’s so sad,” to which I would have answered, “It’s so personal.”

Robin Williams was a public figure. People are upset because they liked to see him onscreen, and because he played people we all want to know. It’s a shock for his audience to learn that the man behind the screen was apparently so unhappy.

We, that audience, subsist through social media: we exist in dimensions of information and participation. We define ourselves by the exchange of our tweets, blogs, reads, posts and comments. Participation lends us inclusion, and inclusion lends us validation.

Yet I wonder if, within these dimensions, we are able to move in reverse. Are we capable, namely, of limiting ourselves at those moments when “common decency” once dictated a motion toward modesty, self-restraint or understatement?

A week after the world learned of Williams’ passing, the documented death of another American has gone viral. The execution film of the reporter who worked in Syria has since been removed from social media, though not before a public plea from his cousin: “Please honor James Foley and respect my family’s privacy. Don’t watch the video. Don’t share it. That’s not how life should be.”

It’s not how death should be. After the much publicized assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, his compatriot Boudewijn Büch, a writer and poet, mourned what he coined the “democratization” of death. In his essay, written twelve years ago, he lamented the need for death’s “apparent celebration” — broadcast live on television, displacing private, quiet rage. Büch called for a removal of death from the streets, from banners, from any partnership with applause. He mourned its collective ownership and the mass “carnival” that death had become.

For if there was ever an instance to let a legend take his life and for us to simply be sad about it, that is now.

If there was ever a moment for us to mourn — without needing a history of mental health, a beheading, or our curiosity to go viral — that is now.

Let the girl tweet her grief about her dad, and leave her be. Can we do that?

Render censorship unnecessary. #Blackout the democracy of one man’s death. Can we do that?

I am sad, because we cannot.

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