Published in the Sept. 3-16, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
News of the suicide of comedian actor Robin Williams stirred memories in me I thought I’d submerged in the shadows long ago. A night or two after his Aug. 11 death, I woke and stared at the bedroom ceiling for a couple of hours. I wondered what the man must have been going through to end his own precious life.
I never met Williams, but it would have been fun to have a manic-comic coffee chat with him. During my early morning insomnia, I wondered if I might have encountered him during those dark days that were his last, what could I have said to dissuade him from hanging himself. Maybe I might have told him how he helped to save my mother from a similar fate.
I imagined I’d tell Robin about the first time I saw the emotional pain my mom sometimes suffered. I was nursery-school age and it was around lunch time on a bright summer day. My eyes adjusted from the sunlight to the black-dark bedroom where she laid under a feather bed. She sobbed uncontrollably into the pillow.
As I stood staring at her, she whispered to me, “Daddy doesn’t love mommy.”
Years later when I was 13, my father suffered a major stroke. Mom’s life now became centered around caring for her severely paralyzed husband. It was hard on her to lose her freedom taking constant care of him. She was from Germany and so had no nearby relatives to help her.
Sometimes the hopelessness would get so overwhelming that she would go into these deep dark states where she just stared glassy-eyed at some point in the room while in her fog. I learned to let her just talk on and on, listening to her pain in the hope that maybe her sharing it would be cathartic. She’d often talk about ending it all. “I make suicide,” she’d say, her non-native English vocabulary confused between the word choice of “make” and “commit.” One time, she locked herself in the bathroom and kept screaming, “I kill myself. I kill myself.” I wished I knew how to save a life.
Soon after, I saw Robin Williams promoting his latest movie on a TV chat show. He started going manic with his various characters and weird, brilliant observations. It got me to thinking that maybe comedy was the way to save my mom’s life. I found a book that gave the tricks of being funny and learned a few of the techniques.
One Saturday afternoon when mom was in her fog once again, instead of letting her dwell in her own depression, I tried to do a mind-switch on her by going into a Williams-like stream-of-conscious patter of weird voices, outrageous characters and the first goofy stuff that just came to my mind. The sadness seemed to dissolve from her eyes and she started laughing in her charming little German giggle at my improvised comedy. Mom came out of her fog.
There’s power in laughter. I think that power is the chemistry of the mind, releasing a deluge of endorphins and other molecular keys into our neurons to unlock the more pleasant emotions. Laughter helps people join together socially. It also serves as a psychological stress release much like the mechanism on a pressure cooker that releases spurts of steam before the energy builds up too dangerously inside the pot. Laughter also lets us recalibrate our brains so we can get a better grip on reality.
There are statistics about suicide. Nearly 30,000 Americans take their lives every year. It’s the 11th leading cause of death in the U.S. – homicide ranks 15th. For people between 15 and 24 years, it is the third leading cause of death. More than 50 percent of the American population has had or will have serious suicidal thoughts.
But a human being is not simply a statistic. People are part of a web of friends and family. When a person kills himself or herself, that violent act creates a ripple effect of tremendous emotional consequences across his or her social network.
We are all fragile. My mom was. And so was Robin Williams.
