On Robin Williams
Peter Eisenstadt

For the most part, television comedies and the movies are distractions, from our daily realities and from the sad world around us, but at times, they intrude, directly, into life’s darker places. The death of Robin Williams, by suicide, is such an occasion. One thing that is almost always true of the aftermath of suicides is that most people do not know how to talk about it. It is the most shocking form of death, more uncomfortable than any form of “natural” death or even murder. It seems to question, in the most direct way possible, our efforts to find life meaningful or worthwhile. “There is only one truly philosophical problem,” wrote Albert Camus in the famous opening of his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, “and that is suicide.” But if suicide is a philosophical problem, it is not the sort of problem which has a single, right, technical answer.

We deal with the uncomfortableness of suicide in many ways, most commonly by not talking about it at all. (Which is why it is generally unknown that there are twice as many suicides as homicides in America annually.) Many blame the victim, either through religious notions of sinfulness, or more secular imputations of cowardice. This is no longer fashionable, and the most common approach to suicide is to medicalize it, to attribute it to a disease, depression. There is much to be said in favor of the medical model of suicide; depression is a disease that cuts off options, limits us, and makes the possible seem impossible. Still, I wonder the facile conclusion that suicide can simply be attributed to mental disease, has the effect of erecting too high a barrier between the mentally healthy and the mentally sick. Most of us had, at one or another low point in our lives, have said to ourselves, “I wish I was dead.” And as a writer on suicide once said, if there was a simple on and off switch to our lives, most of us, in moments of despair, would probably have pushed it. What makes suicide so frightening is that successful suicides have overcome the most basic human instinct, that of self-preservation.

For all of these reasons, what most people want to know about suicide in general, and individual deaths such as Robin Williams, is why? But the why question rarely has satisfactory answers. Suicide creates an intellectual and emotional black hole, which sucks in outside explanations, and offers up nothing in return. This only makes people try harder to explain it, and they often try too hard. I suppose it was unavoidable, given Robin Williams’s celebrity, that information was released about how he died, but I find this to be a gross invasion of privacy, akin to releasing details about rape victims. The coroner need only tell us that someone died at their own hand, the details (which are not important), should be left for family and close friends.    Let us respect the intimacy of death.

Unlike any other kind of death, suicide crowds out all other details and perspectives on a person’ s life. Every action gains new significance, reinterpreted in the light of the final act. We don’t think of someone who dies from cancer primarily as a cancer sufferer, or even someone killed violently only as a murder victim, but all too often, someone who takes her or his own life is always, first and foremost, a suicide. This is unfair. Let us remember Robin Williams as the brilliant comedic talent that he was, and remember that comedy at its best, as Williams practiced it, is a free-flowing spigot of improvisational wit just gushing out of him, submerging us in its life-enhancing froth. His was a gift that made many of us, happier, more content, and perhaps a little wiser. Let’s remember the way he lived, and give him in death the dignity he, and every person, including suicides, deserve. And let’s remember that his life was far, far more than its last moment.