Can’t say I’m surprised by the news that Robin Williams apparently took his own life today.  I’ve felt for some time that it was a possibility. I could see, in photos of him, something in his eyes that was light years beyond sadness…

Still, the world is a darker place tonight because a funnyman seems to have decided that his life wasn’t worth living anymore. (There has been no absolute confirmation of suicide, yet; police and coroner are still ruling out all other possibilities.)

How can that be, we ask?  How can a man who gave such joy to the world consider his continuing existence of so little value, or his present circumstances (depressed) so horrendous that not even his love for his family, his contributions to the world, or the basic human instinct for self-preservation could keep him from saying sayonara far too young?

Pain that deep is unfathomable to anyone who has never been there.

I hope you never are and I hope I never am. I have been depressed before, but not to the point of wanting to take my own life. I’ve wanted to pull the covers over my head and hope not to wake up in the morning a time or two, but suicide?  That takes guts and it takes  something profoundly unwelcome inside the brain to go that far, whether it’s sadness, emptiness, loneliness, a sense of “not measuring up”, or something else deeply, deeply personal.

A chemical imbalance can cause chronic depression. Depression isn’t a human failing; it’s a condition. There are drugs to help ease the symptoms, but finding the right one is always a challenge, I’ve read, because of nasty side effects or because they don’t work for everybody.

I’m deeply saddened by Robin’s passing.  I hope his death was accidental. I want to believe that he would not have gone out this way of his own accord. Because if he did, I shudder to think of how much mental or emotional pain he must have been in to take that course of action.  I don’t want to think he died feeling he had nothing to live for except more of whatever it was that brought him to the decision.  The thought saddens me beyond expression.

That’s the thing about suicide. We always wonder what we could have done or said to make enough of a difference that life wouldn’t be so unbearable anymore.

Probably nothing…but we remain haunted anyway.

I pray he is at peace now in some other plane of existence.