Busy Working, Robin Williams Fought Demons

[EEO]

A rare look at the war Robin Williams was fighting within himself.

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LOS ANGELES — Peering through his camera at Robin Williams in 2012, the cinematographer John Bailey thought he glimpsed something not previously evident in the comedian’s work. They were shooting the independent film “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn,” and Mr. Williams was playing a New York lawyer who, facing death, goes on a rant against the injustice and banality of life.

His performance, Mr. Bailey said Tuesday, was a window into the “Swiftian darkness of Robin’s heart.” The actor, like his character, was raging against the storm.

That defiance gave way on Monday to the personal demons that had long tormented Mr. Williams. With his suicide at age 63, Mr. Williams forever shut the window on a complicated soul that was rarely visible through the cracks of an astonishingly intact career.

Given his well-publicized troubles with depression, addiction, alcoholism and a significant heart surgery in 2009, Mr. Williams should have had a résumé filled with mysterious gaps. Instead, he worked nonstop.

The reasons for taking such a dramatic action as suicide vary from person to person. What I do know is suicide is not selfish. It is the result of someone being in such overwhelming pain they can no longer take it any more. People who are physically healthy and emotionally happy do not commit suicide.

On the topic of overwhelming pain, this can manifest itself in three ways. This pain can be emotional pain, physical pain, or both. Not only have I witnessed and been impacted by the struggle of family members in all three cases, but I fit into the third. And while I do not know whether the emotional pain or the chronic physical pain came first, I do know they take a great deal of effort to fight every day. Even as I write a novel I deeply care about, and a project that gives me something to devote myself to, the physical pain and feelings of hopelessness are always there, and they weigh heavily on me.

I know some of what Robin Williams was going through, though I will never claim to understand everything he thought or felt. Even the people around him can never answer that. It is no small thing to be a prisoner of one's own body and/or thoughts. To be at constant war within oneself changes someone like any other war. And like any other war, sometimes a person would rather take his own life than suffer at the hands of the enemy one moment longer. Unfortunately, the enemy of someone who commits suicide is inside them.