On March 19, 1994, my uncle Jud committed suicide after a slow-motion spiral into the abyss of depression - a spiral that none of us could pull him out of. Twenty years later, I cant shake the feeling that Ive lost another uncle in Robin Williams. Though I never had the opportunity to meet the larger-than-life man in the flesh, every time I saw an interview with him, he reminded me a lot of my uncle: frenetic, sharp-witted, and incredibly gifted. Robin was there at every point in my life: from his bit role on Happy Days that segued into Mork and Mindy with Pam Dawber (who just so happened to be a classmate of my uncles) to Popeye to Comic Relief to Good Morning, Vietnam; Dead Poets Society to Fisher King to Good Will Hunting and What Dreams May Come. That last role really resonates with me... From a novel by the late, great Richard Matheson, the themes of this incredibly underrated film are dark, disturbing, and taboo in our society, namely death, suicide, depression, and the afterlife. Its difficult to find any interviews or quotes from Robin Williams about WDMC, but I suspect he had many personal reasons for taking on the role, not the least of which was that it provided him a way to confront internal demons that none of us could ever possibly comprehend. This morning, a quote crossed my feed that stuck with me throughout the day... From David Foster Wallace, another troubled soul snatched too early from this world by the ravenous jaws of depression: The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or an abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows: Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling. Ive never heard depression described this way... Inside, theyre burning; outside, theyre falling. Meanwhile, the rest of the world tells them to buck up: its not that hot and its not that high. I think that sums it up pretty succinctly.... #RIPRobinWilliams #RIPUncleFunkieJunkie
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 05:06:55 +0000
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