Robin Williams

His death is just feeling so heavy to me, and I think to many others as well.  I'm disheartened to hear so many people judging his final choice.  I truly have no idea what it feels like to want to end your life, that thought/those feelings have literally never come into my head, which I'm so grateful for.  But I think I can understand where the judgement comes from - it's from fear and pain.  We look at someone who seemed to have so much going for him, seemed so gifted and full of joy, and yet his inability to feel the joy that he gave to others is very scary.  And we feel pain from anger, he took himself from us, denied anyone the ability to reach him through that pain.  It rattles us when someone takes their own life, it feels so wrong, not part of Gods plan, something so out of synch that we can't make any sense of it.  A life just gone, over, aborted, disrupted.  That's how it feels to me anyway, no good bye's, no chance to get used to the idea of a world without that person.

Some years back, I knew a woman named Linda.  We became good friends very quickly, and were involved in some of the same, shall we say, extra-curricular activities.  I'll leave out the details for now.  Linda was beautiful, smart, funny, had a great job and good friends.  But she dealt with clinical depression and bi-polar disease, which I didn't know.  She was on meds, but they didn't always work. I hadn't heard from her in some time, and a mutual friend finally asked me if I had heard the news about her.  I called her phone and her parents answered, hoping it was me ,,, she'd told them about me, about our friendship, but had cleared the numbers from her phone.  Linda had paid all her bills, checked her dog into a kennel, cleaned her apartment, and with champagne & sleeping pills, ended her life.  Her sister had found her, after not hearing from her either.  Her mother was very sweet to me, told me Linda had wanted to go for some time, had in fact tried it twice before, and that we needed to let her go in our hearts.  She'd been in pain, deep emotional pain, most of her life.

That was so hard for me to accept, I grieved Linda in private for some time.  I have one picture of her and I together, and I will always treasure it.  It's so hard to imagine how someone can just end their life on purpose, what those last few moments must feel like.  I can't imagine frankly, and finally, with Linda, I stopped trying and just let go of her.  But Robin's death reminded me of how that time felt, and how we never really know what's going on in other people's minds & hearts.  I couldn't help Linda, no one could.  But I know I touched her life in some small way, and perhaps she took some of my strength with her into what came next for her.  I can still hear her laughter and see her smile, so in some small way she left a bit of herself behind with me too.

Hugs to all. xoxo