When I Read About Robin Williams, I Was Filled With Compassion and Envy

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This weekend I read the news that Robin Williams had Lewy Body Disease when he killed himself. I felt a wave of compassion and understanding roll over me. Then sadness. Then envy.

I imagined him experiencing his slowly disintegrating psyche, and coming to the realization of the horrors awaiting him and his family. So he decided to save them all. At least, that’s the story I tell myself because I’m on the other side. My mother has Lewy Body Disease, and it’s hell.

My mother was an aloof yet dramatic, funny woman who had created for herself a world in which she made small pleasures seem large, and it gave her peace. Her life and ours unraveled last year when she went blind and demented. Her world is now one of hallucination and delusion. On good days her delusions are happy ones, and she acts in a play no one else can see. But the bad days are many. Anxiety shifts her delusions in an instant to a fear and paranoia, and when the chaos exceeds her capacity to cope: violence.

How does one judge the pain of someone else’s life? Whether it’s worth it or not? I can tell you with 100% absolute certainty that if my mother could have envisioned herself now, she would have asked to die. She was not one to tolerate chaos or emotional outbursts, in herself or others.

But life is not so clean and easy.

It is not my right to make that decision for her, even in theory. But I can appreciate Robin Williams’ desire to make that very same decision. There is some part of me that selfishly wishes my mother had made that decision.

It is so hard to watch her go through this psychic hell of hers. I sometimes wonder — is it her pain or my pain that I fear most? Probably mine. I can only truly inhabit and understand my own pain. I make an educated guess at the pain of others.

Sometimes I judge myself. I think a higher being than I could bear witness to her pain without anger, resentment, guilt, and running away. But I’m all I’ve got to work with, so here we are.

I want to say goodbye to her now because it would be easier, but part of her is still here.

So yes, when I read about Robin Williams this week, I was filled with compassion and envy. I don’t know the pain of losing someone to suicide, and each pain in life is incomparable to another. But I can’t help feeling a little bit of envy that they did not have to go through my particular pain.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could each acknowledge that we are going to die? Then maybe we could allow ourselves some agency to decide when life is good enough to keep going, and when it isn’t.

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