When Robin Flew Away: The Death of Robin Williams

Updated on February 16, 2024

On my personal scale of the sad and unthinkable, Robin Williams' death by suicide is off the scale. In fact, on its way to being off the scale, it flattened the scale, smashed the scale, and obliterated the scale under morbid, coarse, repugnant tonnage. 

Image source: stockadobe.com

I say all that as a lowly fan, a woman whose existence was unknown to him, a woman who imagined that he was, in some way, ethereal. 

My favorite Williams film, and one of my favorite movies ever, is The Fisher King. In it, Williams plays Parry, an unhoused man with mental illness who lies on his back in Central Park, nude, watching the clouds. 

I saw The Fisher King only once because I was so emotionally wrung out by it that I never quite had it in me to watch it again. Just thinking about Parry, so vulnerable, an innocent among monsters, nearly makes me sob again all these many years later. And it seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that there was a lot of Williams in Parry - or maybe it's the other way around.

When he died, people said they were shocked but not surprised, that there often seemed to be "something about him." My inept description of that "something" is wistful melancholy, a look I liked to think meant that he knew more than all of us mere mortals combined, and that the knowledge weighed heavy. Sometimes that look came with a faint smile, a barely perceptible upward curve of the lips, a smile that belied resignation. 

At other times, he was the impish, pesky child you couldn't bring yourself to punish, and, when the role warranted it, he looked absolutely chilling. All of which unearths a question: When Williams looked in the mirror, which Williams looked back?

When Robin Williams was on, he was very, very on, as though God had strapped an Acme rocket to his backside and lit the fuse Himself. How his mouth kept up with his mind is beyond me, as is any grasp of how he improvised so brilliantly.

At first, I had a romanticized notion of William's death, that he had figured out the meaning of life, identified what lies beyond our universe, and, unlike Parry, grew weary of clouds. I told myself that after analyzing the sad reality of this situation, Williams concluded that it was time for him to go. 

I know now that Lewy body dementia was revealed via autopsy. I know now that he was very ill in his body and his mind, and I know now that that was what led to his death and not some cosmic, dark, angelic, insight beyond the grasp of Earthbound brains. But any way you look at it, Robin Williams cashed in his millions in chips and left the rest of us flat broke. 

Some pundit asked what Williams' suicide would mean to his legacy. I once thought that question was ridiculous. William's death was a separate issue, and his body of work would always stand. 

Until, for me, it didn't. 

Because I soon realized that I could no longer watch Robin Williams movies and that I could barely tolerate even brief clips. Almost 10 years later, I still can't, and trying to just feels too damn sad. Maybe that's a different kind of legacy, and if so, it too feels too damn sad. 

I wish Robin Williams could come back healthy, happy, and adlibbing an Elizabethan blue streak, but he can't. As for me, I have children to praise, bad poetry to write, and a million other things that tether me soundly and happily to life. It seems I like having an Earthbound brain. 

Besides, he took Parry with him, and someone has to watch the clouds. 

  

To Kill a Mocking Watchman

Go Set a Watchman, the prequel/sequel/whatever-the hell to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird has been around for nearly three years (if you don't count the decades it lay in hiding), but millions of Lee fans are still hoarse from screaming out shock and dismay when it was finally released.

Image by Teece Aronin

If you've been curled up in a porch swing with Boo Radley and not getting out much, here's what happened: After insisting for more than five decades that her first first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, would also be her last, Lee released Go Set a Watchman after what was likely a lot of encouragement from her lawyer, Tonja Carter. 

Watchman started life as the manuscript Lee first presented to her editor when she was a bright and shiny new novelist. The editor advised her to rework it and build on the book's flashbacks. The result was To Kill a Mockingbird, about middle-aged Atticus Finch, an attorney, who, in Depression-era Alabama and at the height of Jim Crow, defends a black man wrongly accused of assaulting a white woman. The book made an instant literary giant out of Lee who was struck virtually mute by the hoopla and clung tightly to her privacy forever after.  

Lee did reveal, however, that Atticus Finch was modeled after her father. In 1963, To Kill a Mockingbird became a masterpiece of moviemaking, and the film earned Gregory Peck a best actor Academy Award® for his portrayal of Atticus. Generations of predominantly white people revered Atticus, many naming babies after him and patterning their parenting styles after his. But in Watchman, Atticus, now in his seventies, is easily identifiable as racist.

“How could this happen?” people cried, again mostly white people. Many of us had deified Atticus, or at least made him as godlike as a fictional character can be. After all, Atticus Finch sat up all night outside a jail, armed with nothing but a floor lamp and his own shining goodness to defend an innocent black man from vigilantes. He defied all of Maycomb and then some to defend this man in court. How dare Harper Lee take all that away from us? WTH? (Whites Thinking Hopelessly).  

Watchman's release made me wonder if Gregory Peck went spinning in his grave, screaming about his legacy. I also wondered what the conversation might have been like had he visited Lee on the eve of Watchman's release. What might such an encounter have been like? Imagine with me, if you will:

. . . a stormy evening in Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee's hometown and inspiration for the fictional Maycomb where To Kill a Mockingbird is set. Eighty-nine-year-old Harper Lee tugs the vinyl cover over her old Olivetti typewriter. It’s time to call it a day. For all practical purposes she is blind and deaf but one needs no eyesight nor any hearing to find one’s way around a typewriter, especially when one has been typing for nearly 70 years. 

Lee smiles to herself. She's been secretly writing novels since Mockingbird was released, and they'll all sell like hotcakes when she's gone. The one she's working on now is her 112th. "Steven King, you're a hack," she chuckles. On top of the typewriter, she plops a stack of typed papers designed to throw off her “bloodhound of a lawyer” and those “snoopy publisher people.”

Atticus/Schmatticus, Atticus/Schmatticus, Atticus/Schmatticus reads the type.   

“Atticus/Schmatticus, Atticus/Schmatticus, Atticus/Schmatticus,” chortles Ms. Lee.

Typing gibberish is how she gets to keep a typewriter without arousing suspicion. If people think she’s a trifle demented, let them; it's a brilliant ruse. Still, she’s miffed at herself for allowing the bloodhound and the publishing people to talk her into publishing the book due out tomorrow. Maybe she was demented after all. No, not demented - curious. If she hadn’t been so curious about what would happen when all those Atticus groupies got their boats rocked, she could’ve gone to her grave with her legacy intact and they could have published the book posthumously if they took a mind to. 

By the time the grits hit the fan she’d have been settled in Heaven with her harp and her halo and wouldn’t care a bit. In the event there is no afterlife, her light would have blinked sweetly out like that of a Maycomb firefly, and she wouldn’t know what people were saying about her. She pads on blue-veined feet to the bathroom, grateful that she needs little assistance from the young, strong staff whose hands work her over like a swarm of locusts whenever they bathe her. She lifts her nightie with one hand and grasps a grab bar with the other. She eases herself onto the toilet. 

"Har-PER?" booms what Lee first fears is the voice of God but seconds later, recognizes as Gregory Peck's. She's not totally surprised. She's often wondered what Peck would think of the new-old book or the old-new book; even Lee isn't sure which it is. Not appreciating his tone, she meets fire with fire: 

"Wait until I'm off the damned crapper!"

Peck, ever the gentleman, falls silent while Lee is in the bathroom.

"Could you think of no one but yourself?" he chastises as soon as she returns. 

"Nope!" she replies, not even pretending to attempt eye contact since there is no body in the room besides hers. She sits on the bed and attempts to swing her legs in without giving Peck's ghost an eyeful. 

"Harper, you're making me look bad! You're sullying my image!" intones Peck.

"Really!" barks Lee. "You didn't do that yourself when you played that whale-happy Captain Ahab? And I suppose Josef Mengele, was a kindly old doctor who retired in Brazil so he could save the rain forests! Honestly, Greg, you actors really fry my soup!" 

There is a lengthy silence before the once booming voice mutters, "My apologies, ma'am."

"That's better!" Lee barks, hiking her blankets up to her neck, turning her back on Peck's ghost, and switching off the lamp.