Robin Williams has passed on.
I'm listening to his A Night at the Met album as I type this. He's talking about the trouble with marijuana. I know the jokes by rote. When I was still working in theatre and was working alone on deck I would play this album and Weapons of Self-Destruction because listening to his voice ricochet through the space made me feel less alone. It was like having a best friend to keep me company.
Last night a cry went out: a very real and public grief that spasmed across the Internet. I'm still reeling. I keep thinking that if we remember hard enough, if we celebrate enough, if we sing "Friend Like Me" and quote Dead Poets Society and watch Aladdin and Robots and Fern Gully and Mrs. Doubtfire enough that we can raise his ghost. Maybe it would be just long enough to give the man some peace, to pierce the fog of his depression and stay his hand.
Of course that's selfish. What do I know about the man? That he was a brilliant inspiration, that his was the voice that defined my childhood, that he named his daughter Zelda because he was a complete gamer nerd, that he struggled with depression and alcoholism and drugs. What could I, a simple fan, have ever been able to say to him that his family and friends couldn't? I know depression cannot hear love, cannot feel love on its skin, but Christ, I wish I could just sit with him, hug him, tell him he doesn't have to put up the front...
But maybe he already knew. I don't know.
I'm left with a gap, a reminder. The weird dissonance between memory and reality. I'm sitting up and listening to a cyborg version of his voice, the same jokes bounding out of my speakers and zooming around me. The album was recorded in 1986, a year before I was born. The recording doesn't know that, 28 years later, the man joking about the absurdity of the male anatomy and humanity's mating rituals will be dead. It blithely carries on. Nothing has changed. But it has: Robin Williams is dead! There's a liminal space where his cyborg ghost is Schrodinger's Cat, both alive and dead, present and gone.
And I'm reminded...
Sean Logan. Emily List. Seth Bryant.
I don't understand. I don't understand this space between memory and reality. How their memory could seem so real but their absence couldn't be any more obvious.
Do we keep moving forward? How? How do their families continue on? Their friends? Us? One foot in front of the other? Do the days just become fine grains of sand on a vast beach, tossed about by the waves of daily life? Do we get a few bright bits of sea glass, a sea shell, a perfectly preserved starfish corpse scattered throughout? Do we remember? Do we forget? Both?
(An interlude from the album: My son looks at me sometimes, he comes up, gives me a look like, 'Well, what's it gonna be?' 'Hey, Zach [his son], it's gonna be fabulous - eep. No. I don't know, pal...umm, it's a crapshoot, I don't know.
All I can think is, Zach, love, your dad is going to take his own life at 63...I'm sorry...)
I don't have an ending, a neat little tie-off with which to finish this post. But I guess the title will have to do:
Y'all will always be a prince(ss) to me. I love you.
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