Chickens, Eggs, and a Robin

It’s been days now since Robin Williams’ suicide, and we’re still talking about it. I think this is my third post on this – and if you pull the plug here, I’ll certainly understand – but it’s a clear indication that many of us have been affected at a very deep level. This fellow was not a head of state or a religious leader or a military hero. He was a comedian and a movie star. Are we overdoing it? Some of us still have to talk about it.

Not all the talk, IMHO, has been useful. The other day, one of the cable channels had some expert on with two graphics: one of a “normal” brain and the other of an addict, showing the areas of damage in the addict’s brain. No, the news anchor hastened to add, the damaged-brain graphic was not Robin’s.

Still others have posted Robin’s astrological chart to show why this was a rough time for him. Now, his widow has revealed that he was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, and the docs are on TV again, telling us about the statistical relationship between Parkinson’s and depression. If someone diagnosed me with that, I think I might be a little depressed. Even the medical expert said that while there is a relationship, we don’t quite know exactly what it is, which is the chicken and which the egg.

The one that bothers me most is the attempt to link genius or extraordinary artistic talent with mental illness. We know what genius is when we encounter it. “Mental illness” is something we have to define, with experts telling us what’s normal and abnormal and whether we need to take pills for it. Yes, clinical depression and bipolarity are real things, but reducing genius to a chemical imbalance is offensive, at least to me.

Is Williams’ suicide a wake-up call about the prevalence of mental illness? One former actress actually called on Congress to do something about it. Ah, now THERE’S a bastion of sanity for you. And don’t we always say the same thing after a wacko shoots up a school?

It’s interesting that we refer to artistic talents as “gifts” – maybe a bad word, since they usually come with a price, and for whatever reason you want to plug in here, Robin Williams just couldn’t pay it. Should it be left there?

I guess, though, we have to cut ourselves a little slack. Trying to arrive at a conclusion won’t make us feel much better about Robin Williams’ death, but it’s our coping mechanism to avoid feeling too much grief. Are we learning something about the human experience from all this discussion? Yes, but explanation’s chief benefit is that it allows us eventually to put this tragedy on the shelf so we can go on with our own lives. It’s that awful word “closure.”

At some point, however, we’re going to have to admit to ourselves that we’re just not qualified to dissect souls.

Robin et al

I really didn’t need to hear this today about Robin Williams committing suicide (or so it is suspected at this writing). It was only a few days ago that I was asked to read a blog draft for a former colleague before she posted about the suicide of one of her closest friends. So I have been thinking about this topic.

One of these things happens, and we tend to fall into two camps: Judgers or Explainers. The Judgers go on about how offing yourself is giving up, that it’s the ultimate act of selfishness, that it’s unfair to those left behind. The Explainers review the departed’s life, the events leading up to the act, or start talking about chemical imbalances or clinical depression or bipolarism. I talked very glibly about a sense of humor requiring the sense of its opposite, and how that applied in Robin Williams’ case. Shouldn't a sense of humor be the very antidote to depression that keeps comedians alive, we might ask.

But what do you do about this feeling in the pit of your stomach that won't go away after the shock?

Suicide comes in many forms. It could be from a sudden feeling of despair. In the case of my friend’s friend, a debilitating disease caused many circumstances to go south in her life over time, Antartically so. She stepped in front of a train. Not an “approved” method of self-destruction, as it traumatized others, including, of course, the train engineer, as you might hear from the Judgers.

A distant relative committed suicide because he didn’t think other family members could take care of themselves financially. He couldn’t do it alive, so he figured his life insurance policy would do it for him. He left no note, so the family will never know. Still another, a woman I know, left town, went to a dumpy hotel in another city, and took an overdose of pills. She did leave a goodbye note. In it, she said she was dying of cancer and didn’t want to be a burden on her family.

Is there anyone among us who has never considered suicide? I was raised Catholic, and suicide is a mortal sin in that faith. Even after "lapsing," I often joked that I would never kill myself, simply because the Catholics might be right about what might come after, and I didn’t want to take the risk. I guess I figured whatever doo-doo I was in here would be a lot deeper on the other side. That’s only half a joke, because it’s a powerful argument when you’re a child, and it lingers. We don’t know what’s on the other side, and of all the decisions we make, this is the one absolutely that cannot be undone, so we better get it right.

And then there is the discussion about whether suicide should be legalized and facilitated by the medical profession.

But all that’s for another day. We can neither judge nor explain these events satisfactorily, at least not immediately -- and perhaps never. But we try anyway, because otherwise, we might have to fully embrace that pain in the pit of the stomach that many of us are feeling at this moment.