Requiem for Robin Williams

Hmmm, is that the collective quiver of hearts in mourning which resonates so bittersweet?

I am normally not one to pay much attention to Hollywood celebrities. Their lives are too far removed from my daily reality. But I confess that my heart shuddered when I heard the radio report of Robin William’s death and the tragic circumstances surrounding it.

I was, and am, a great admirer of his body of work both as a comedian and an actor. There are many talented performers in show business. The number of true artists is considerably smaller. Robin Williams was one of them.

Comedy is, if you will excuse the pun, a funny thing. What tickles one person’s funny bone may elicit no reaction from another. Humour is a language all its own with many dialects – amusing, droll, silly, biting and slapstick, to name just a few.

Then there is that rare form that leaps across boundaries and unites us in its universality. It infuses laughter into both the light and the dark in Iife. Few are those who can master that language. Robin Williams was one of them.

He was a comic tour de force on stage or before the cameras – a virtual whirlwind that fed on its own momentum. We often forget that humour is emotion, perhaps one of its most healthy forms. It can be cathartic and liberating when employed by those born with the gift to make it so. Robin Williams was one of them.

Williams could have made a very comfortable living based on his comic genius alone. But he had greater aspirations and achieved acclaim, including an Academy Award, as a comedic and dramatic actor. There are a handful of actors I enjoy to the extent that their appearance in a movie, regardless of the plot, makes it a must-see for me. Robin Williams was one of them.

Good Will Hunting earned Williams his Academy Award. But perhaps his most prophetic role, in retrospect, was in Patch Adams. His sensitive portrayal of a man suffering from depression, who admits himself to a mental institution and finds that using humour to help his fellow inmates gives him a new lease on life, was hauntingly close to his own experience of life.

In the stories and tributes that have streamed out of Hollywood in the last few days, Williams is portrayed as a sensitive, humble and loving man who never let success change who he was. Tragically, the backdrop to his onscreen and onstage brilliance was a long struggle with depression, as well as alcohol and drug addiction, which eventually overwhelmed him.

This I know. Those who dare to soar the highest have the farthest to fall if they lose the joy. They take the risk because it is bred in their soul to do so. We should not condemn them or consider them weak for falling. We should praise their choice to fly without a net.

Robin Williams was one of those who dared to fly. He is a heroic metaphor for courage in the face of a crippling weight few of us could bear for as long as he did.

Rest in peace, Robin. We mourn your loss but are truly grateful that you shared your heart with us. We wanted so much more of you. But you gave all that you had to give.

~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel” – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog .

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