RIP Robin Williams

The news of the death of Robin Williams broke yesterday. Like many of you, I grew up loving his many films, his role often being that of ambassador to the outcast and, like Holst's Jupiter, the bringer of jollity. My impressions of him were well received by people who didn't mind precocious children behaving spastically, or at least were willing to pretend they didn't. 

We had HBO when I was a kid, and I remember when Mrs. Doubtfire came on about three or four times a day and I would watch it in the playroom as I build Lego fighter planes or pretended I was a dinosaur. 

I remember going to a friend's house who had a SEGA Genesis, and being faced with an impossible decision: we could either keep playing, or switch over to the VCR to watch Aladdin. 

The other ones people like weren't so influential. I've never seen Dead Poet's Society, for instance, or Good Will Hunting. No, put your pitchforks down. I pretty much have to now, as Facebook populates with movie playlists in the wake of his death. 

I remember my parents sighing at the deaths of people they grew up with. It's beginning to happen to me, round about the same time that music I liked in middle and high school makes its way onto classic rock stations. 

 I find that I have a troubling tendency to be insulated against tragedies. Maybe some of you feel the same way. Seneca wrote that "constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them", and the Proverbs 31 woman "laughs at the days to come", inviting them to 'bring it on'. But while these things embody a defiant outlook, I think we're all scared of death, especially of dying alone. 

Our society makes it happen behind closed doors. We don't bury people at church anymore, where people have to walk past them to worship. We also don't die at home in bed anymore, either. It happens in sterile, pastel hospitals to smooth jazz as drugs dull our final moments, sometimes mercifully and sometimes out of convenience, so we'll go gentle into that good night.

Our fear of death influences almost everything we do. A band I like, "Darkest Hour", says that "all we need is  a little transcendence to mend us, but all we have is sedation that numbs all our senses."

Poet Phillip Larkin calls religion "a vast moth-eaten musical brocade, created to pretend we never die."

To which Peter Hitchens, a favorite of mine, responds:

"But what if the brocade, rather than being a pretence and a curtain in front of emptiness, was telling the truth?  What if the brocade was created to proclaim, rather than pretend, that we never die – and that we have come to prefer to believe that death is the end because we do not love the implications of the other idea?"

Lots of smart people think that death is the end, and if that's the only side you're ever given, you probably agree with them.

But lots of equally smart people disagree.

I didn't know Robin Williams, but I do know some people who have died, and believe that when one of us is lost we all lose:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 
It tolls for thee.