"There aren't many cowboys left these days, not like Pecos Bill. Hooh, boy, Bill was a piece of work. He was the dog-gonest, gosh-dangest, dang-blingest, son-of-a-prairie sod who ever rode across these great United States of America. Any cow puncher worth a lick will tell you that if it weren't for Bill, there wouldn't have been a Wild West. It just would have been plain, old mundane and who wants to hear stories about the great, mundane west? How, hoodeedoo! It took a man like Pecos Bill to conquer the west. Before he came on the scene, cowboys didn't know a thing about cows. They had read some books about sheep but what's that gonna do?"
That's Robin Williams reading the children's story Pecos Bill. He did the recording for Windham Hill Records in 1988, with the equally legendary Ry Cooder providing accompaniment on guitar.
Take out the word cowboy and substitute it with the word comedian and Williams could be talking about himself. He was a transformative entertainment giant and a creative genius, adored because, like all great athletes and artists, his mind moved at a speed that allowed him to see opportunities and then respond to them with his mouth and his body in a way that is impossible for lesser mortals.
The connection between incredible creativity and mental illness, however, has been well-established. Manic bursts of energy and output come with the likelihood to suffer from psychological disorders at a rate much higher than the norm and that link has also been shown to run through families.
Yet it's important to not go too far down this road. Not all geniuses are mentally ill and not all people who suffer from mental illness are inherently creative.
Some see suicide as a selfish act or a cop out but clearly those individuals have never been trapped in what the late novelist Iris Murdoch called the million-times rat-run of the mind.
Others prefer to tie suicide and mental illness together in a tight knot. After all, how could such a successful and talented man like Robin Williams, famous, wealthy and admired, take his own life unless he had a serious mental illness?
There is truth in that line of thinking, but not in the way many would like to face.
Most people unfortunate enough to be afflicted with depression and other mood disorders are aware they are not well, in the same way that people know when they've got a cold, a broken arm or cancer.
Trying to bring cheer to a depressed person with suicidal thoughts is as helpful but limiting as telling someone suffering from advanced arthritis to keep their chin up and have a good attitude. That comfort wears out quickly against the relentless barrage of pain.
The treatment for severe depression is dehumanizing drugs that save people from summoning up the energy needed to kill themselves but the worst side effect of these medications, on top of the weight gain, the inability to concentrate and the many others, is they also sap the energy to do the things that bring joy. Many people on powerful anti-depressants continue to live in a physical sense but their interest in being happy and being intimate with our loved ones is dulled to the point of non-existence.
Maybe Robin Williams had a mental illness that filled his head with suicidal thoughts. But what if the egg came before the chicken? In other words, maybe the suicidal thoughts emerged as a choice from his rational mind. What does a reasonable person do when faced with unending pain and the only form of treatment to dull that pain are powerful drugs that would reduce him to a shadow of his former self, a person with his name but now with the social engagement level of a potted plant?
Difficult philosophical questions for ethicists to debate but real issues that demand an immediate response for those suffering. To hang oneself, as Williams did with a belt, takes preparation, focus and willpower. He made a choice, for reasons all his own, regardless of what others would have decided for him, and he acted on that choice. Along with our sadness at his passing should be respect for that choice, as hard as it may be for us to understand.
"Don't you go feeling bad for Bill. He wouldn't have wanted you to get all sentimental. He's not really gone," Williams says at the end of his reading of Pecos Bill. Those words can carry his family, his friends and his fans going forward. He left an incredible body of work and changed the lives of everyone who ever knew him.
His final choice and the manner of his death do nothing to touch the gift he left the world.
