INTO THE DARK

I don't suppose that any day that started with me hearing about the death by suicide of a popular comic actor like Robin Williams was ever going to genuinely turn into a good day.

I feel at a low ebb... Work's not going well (in my mind at least), I've kind of lost a friend (or at least lost proximity to one), and suicide's all over the news which is churning up some bad memories from darker times in my life.

I know that the world is a damned depressing place to be at the moment, with all of the rest that is going on, but somehow, this particular news story has struck a chord with me, and triggered some very dark memories of a time when someone else that I cared about couldn't be persuaded back to the light and away from bouts of self-destructive behaviour.

Why now? Why THIS time?

Why has this particular instance triggered these memories, when so many others in between times simply have not...? Well, not in quite the same way at least. It's not that I don't care about the others, but, I've never found myself brooding quite so long and hard about what it was that they must have been feeling when they took their own short walk into oblivion.

Sometimes I think that we all need someone to talk to, someone to take a moment to listen and try and understand, even if what we're saying isn't really understandable.

We all need someone to hold our hand in the dark when things start to get scary.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the life and work of Robin Williams, well I won't claim that I liked all of his films but the early video of "Live at the New York Met" was a joy, perhaps the funniest thing I'd ever seen at that point in my own life, so much so that I bought it twice.

Both before and after the burglary.

Someone else must have found it funny too, given that they left most of the other videos behind.

Another joy was "Mork & Mindy" which was just ever so sweet and ever so enjoyable back then, and films like "Cadillac Man", "Good Morning, Vietnam!", and "Dead Poets' Society" were all personal favourites, if you can remember them from the fresh and funny first time you ever saw them during his earlier film-making years, even if other, later movies, were less enjoyable.

Good. Well made. Well performed, but sometimes a little too sugary and "family" targeted for my particular tastes.

But as, like so many others probably did when they heard the news last Tuesday morning as they got up, I went looking for a list of his films, it turned out that it was very easy to forget just quite how many films he'd actually appeared in during that surprisingly long and successful career, and somehow, realising that, made the sense of loss seem far more acute.

We sometimes just take it for granted that such people will be around forever, or for at least as long as we need them to be.

And yet we also find ourselves asking how exactly can someone that successful, that clever, and that funny, be in so much mental pain…?

But it is, of course, far too easy for any of us to be so afflicted.

Perhaps we should all take up our glasses once more and "Let's all drink to the death of a clown..." (but only with a Club Soda, of course, for obvious reasons).

Late, late into the following night, I woke in the middle of the night realising that what I had clearly remembered as being a reconciliation with a friend I lost about two decades ago, had only been a dream, and then I began to wonder whether everything that I had in life was also only a dream, and this scared me so much that I found that I had to wake up, and, because the thoughts were bouncing around and around inside my head, try to write it all down in a room that I knew to be real, and so I went down into the living room.

Then, because I'm stupid, and was using notepad software instead of, oh, I don't know, an actual note pad, I accidentally deleted it all (with no undos!) and then struggled to remember those very words that I'd just written moments before, even though they'd been keeping me awake for hours, because I'd written them down so that I wouldn't have to remember them.

So, if it turns out that life is just a dream after all, and not the nightmare that I sometimes come to believe it is, at least none of this will be true either, and clowns can be funny, happy folk, and whatever demons we all struggle with will just be the workings of our own fevered imaginations…

In a happier, happier place, somewhere over the rainbow, in Neverland.

Robin Williams, July 21st 1951 - August 11th 2014.