Robin Williams’ death is one that hits so many of us so close to home, because he was in our homes as we grew up. He imprinted on us. We could all feel his kindness, his gentleness, his sensitivity and his wicked, whimsically brilliant sense of humor that enveloped all age groups and challenged boundaries, and produced the kind of laughter we don’t get to experience often enough. It’s why we ache deeply for him. It’s why we feel less angry and more compassionate toward him for initiating his departure from this world.
We, as outsiders, have little information to go on, to try to understand what was going through his mind before this happened. I didn't know him personally, but as many of us did, I grew up with him and was utterly riveted by his brilliance, following his career with an enthusiasm reserved for multidimensional talents like his. We know he battled depression, which, when it pervades your life as it did his, means a feeling of profound isolation no matter how beloved you are. It brings the feeling of not being deserving of your gifts. Because of Robin Williams’ notorious kindness, and generosity of spirit, he must also have been haunted until his dying day by survivor guilt from John Belushi's death (when he left the Chateau Marmont where Belushi died, Williams reportedly said, “if you ever get up again, call.”)
Our beloved Robin Williams also battled addiction, prolifically, but then had been able — for years — to keep his addictions at bay. For whatever reason, after reclaiming sobriety again after relapse in 2006, very recently he fell back into old patterns, and then returned yet again to rehab. Reports say that when he entered a Hazelden facility in early summer, it was for a “sobriety tune-up” and we can see his tweets in support of the U.S. team during the World Cup. But when the pain is that deep, the self-loathing that embedded, the ability to hide your despair about what it actually takes to re-enter rehab and face yet again that which you still have not tamed; to try to reconcile the fact that you have to face the shame-ridden, torturous road to recovery yet again, and to hate yourself so much – you already know you have failed before you even try.
For it to have come to this, Robin Williams had fallen into a deep, dark hole of despair so excruciating, so isolating, that the only voice he could hear, above all of those that love him, was his own telling him louder and stronger than anyone else’s that he is worthless, that he doesn’t deserve, that he can't be here anymore. To be as kind, gentle, gifted and generous a man as he, he had to believe that his family, friends and fans were better off without him. That’s the distorted lens of relentless depression and addiction: to actually lose the ability to understand that the people that love you will be ravaged without you. That is reflective of a depth of pain, of trauma, of loss, of shame, of self-loathing that knows no bounds.
What keeps running through my mind is that powerful scene in Good Will Hunting in which Robin Williams grabs Matt Damon by the shoulders and repeats, "It's not your fault. It's not your fault," until Matt Damon begins to weep at the relief of being understood in his trauma.
It's not your fault, Robin Williams. It's not your fault.
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