The Awful News
[ ] The awful news– This news about Robin Williams dying, apparently at his own hand, hits the same way as the news not long ago about Philip Seymour Hoffman. Again, I think, he didn’t have enough imagination to solve this? he didn’t have enough enjoyment of life to draw on? Enough intelligence, wealth, friends?
I’ve been trying to find some analogy for the irony and paradox of it.
A big fuel truck, hauling thousands of gallons of fuel for others, runs out of fuel in its own tank and can’t go on. The hose that would make this just a comical delay is an inch too short.
Maybe the fuel he ran out of was the ability to fend off alcohol addiction, or depression, or some other kind of mental illness. It wasn’t that he lacked the intelligence, humor, ingenuity, money, successes and pleasant memories, friends. He had an king’s treasury of the resources and reasons people normally call on to get through trouble. But something kept all that from being enough.
Maybe some little bit of knowledge or medicine we don’t have yet. It’s like a person dying in a blizzard just yards from safety because the iPhone and GPS isn’t invented yet. Or because they failed to recharge the battery.
I guess you’ve heard the saying, “Rome was lost for want of nail.” Something like “The empire was lost for want of a victory, the victory was lost for want of a message, the message wast lost for want of a horse, the horse was lost for want of a nail: great Rome was lost -- for want of a nail.” The nail that should have held the corral door shut.
We might have lost an amazing human for someething as small as that. It’s tragic for that to happen with anyone. Maybe uniquely tragic when it’s someone so weirdly, overabundantly full of ways to keep on living, reasons to find life too short, not too long.
I heard it from a cashier at the supermarket, a young black woman. “Did you hear, Robert [sic] Williams just died?” she asked me. “They think it was suicide.” I asked if she meant Robin Williams, the comedian, and I said, “No, I don’t believe it. That can’t be. Not him.” But she assured me it was. She’d heard it from several customers. “I haven’t had time to understand it yet,” she said. “Mrs. Doubtfire is my favorite movie in the world.” I couldn’t speak in reply. I could only smile and nod.
As I walked from the store, along the sidewalk, I thought about the paradox of this person deciding to leave the party early. A party he was the life of. You feel, “He’s gone” and then, “Wait…He’s gone?” I thought, “If everyone on the block somehow got the news of this right now, there would be a sound on this street I wouldn’t want to hear.” A sound of people being punched in the stomach...and then punched a second time, harder than the first. ~ August 12, 2014 / Email to Rob McCaskill