On the Death of Robin Williams

            I like to think that most people do not think about suicide. I like to think that most people, and by ‘most’ I mean nearly all, wake up each morning not needing to will themselves out of bed or coach themselves to carry on. They just do, and most have a reason to, whatever it may be.

            But this week I am thinking about suicide, and I would venture to say, so is most of the world. This week the king of comedy chose the path of tragedy and ended his life. ‘Why’ is a question as much clichéd as it is rhetorical, but we are still trying to reach the answer. Why would a man who was loved so deeply by his wife and children, who was hailed world-wide as a genius and a success, who had the respect and esteem of his peers and icons, who had purpose in philanthropy and charity, why would such a man need to escape the world in so desperate a manner?

            Rob and I disagree. His contention is that those who are highly intelligent and creative are more prone to depression and suicide than the rest of us ordinary people. There is something in the creative mind that causes one to think differently from others, and this difference is so alienating that it wears the genius down. It is exhausting to not fit in and to have to spend one’s life trying to get the world to understand and approve of your peculiar way of thinking. He cites David Foster Wallace, Kirk Cobain, Spalding Gray, Ernest Hemingway. He quotes Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh shouting, “It’s impossible!”

            It’s a very romantic notion, but I disagree. Depression and its by-product suicide are universal. A blue collar worker who dropped out of high school can feel that same alienation. A housewife who never considered college or the arts can perceive herself as misunderstood and unappreciated. I cite the teenage boy who shoots himself after being bullied at school, the distraught mothers who usher their children into the afterlife with them, the elderly who feel they are a burden to others. Anyone can feel desperate. Everyone feels misunderstood. The intelligent do not have a market on depression, nor does creativity require suffering.

            Apparently, studies on this are inconclusive, but they lean in my direction. About fifteen years ago, Scientific America published a report suggesting that men with lower IQ’s are far more likely to commit suicide than those with higher IQ’s. The speculation was that people with lower IQ’s also have a lower ability to problem-solve, leading them to see suicide as the best solution in overwhelming situations. Additionally, men with lower IQ’s tend to have more exposure to violence in childhood. This violent history is ostensibly a factor in many violent deaths. And as for creativity, there is no link to that and mental illness either. In fact, a more recent study by Simon Kyaga  in the Journal of Psychiatric Research concludes that “individuals with overall creative professions were not more likely to suffer from investigated psychiatric disorders….” (The only exception to this is writers. Go figure.) Interestingly, the study also found that siblings of those diagnosed with mental illness are far more likely to have a creative profession in the arts or sciences than their brothers or sisters with mental illness.

            The majority of intelligent, creative people are happy and healthy. They have an outlet for their unconventional thinking, and, I surmise, couldn’t care less if the world appreciates or understands them. They do not fit in, and they are happy to keep it that way. Why would a creative, intelligent person feel desperate at not fitting in with Kardashian-lovers or mass market paperback-readers? Why would a creative, intelligent person decide that life is not worth living because people prefer television to art, rap to music, video games to books? Such resistance is part of the quest. It is essential to the mystery of creative life. It builds a new purpose into the creative process.

            Robin Williams was a good and generous man. Examples of his altruism and selflessness are coming to light as each day passes. He was also plagued by the consequences of his bad choices. We can speculate that his addictions had something to do with his decision to end his own life. We can hazard that the decision was made more to spare his family than to spare himself. But we should also not shy away from saying that it was the wrong decision. Some are being villainized for saying Mr. Williams’ suicide was cowardly. But, as Rob said this morning, one cowardly act does not make a coward, just as one idiotic act does not make an idiot, and one brilliant act does not make a genius.

            No one saw it coming. Suicide is frequently a shock. Despite Rob’s theory, we simply can’t assume that one type of person or another is more likely to take his own life. Anyone can hurt. It seems there is no describing just how much people can hurt inside, and how many different things can drain a person of his objective and joy. It has made me aware of how brutal and lonely life can be, not just for the genius or the creative, but for every living soul, if he or she does not have hope. In The Noonday Devil, Father Bernard Basset wrote, “Because each of us is, in a sense ... utterly unable to communicate even a fraction of our inner selves to others, we cannot by ourselves, unaided, escape such loneliness.” He continues, “We are cut off from the world… sealed inside ourselves.” God alone can reach those sealed-off parts, but we can always be more compassionate, more patient, less self-centered. We can always look a little harder past our own trials and burdens to those of someone else. This reminder might be the flicker of good that comes from a life well-lived and badly ended.

Critters

The groundhog was mangy. It had bare patches on its head and side, and it scratched incessantly as it sat on the deck railing right outside our home library. “Disgusting thing,” I said aloud to convince myself that it wasn’t cute, that it didn’t remind me in the least of the three cats I loved so dearly, that I would be happy to see it gone before it emerged from its den under our deck with a brood of new mangy groundhogs.

            We bought a trap, a humane trap, and researched the best places to release a groundhog to the wild. I had read the trap instructions and knew what bait to use, how to place the bait under the cage, and where to place the trap for best results. I also read with a shiver the warning to check the trap daily since it would be inhumane to leave even a mangy, disgusting animal lingering in a cage without food or water for days at a time.

            Despite the advice to place the trap near the den opening and to camouflage it, we put it right on the side deck, out in the open. This was where we had seen the brazen thing and were confident he would bumble right in. This is exactly what he did. Within hours, I heard the crash of the trap hatch dropping. But by the time I had gotten up from my desk and to the window, the rocking cage was empty, and the beast was thundering off the side of the deck and back to the safety of its den. The groundhog had foiled the trap.

            Stunned, we relocated the trap to darker regions just under the deck. We set it with fresh cantaloupe, and, as the directions advised, I checked it every day. But from that moment when the trap door dropped on the groundhog’s tail, we did not see another sign of it. The bait withered and composted. I stopped checking it, figuring the groundhog had gotten lost or killed on the roads. Occasionally, when I bent under the deck to turn the hose on or off, I stole a glance at the expensive and useless cage and consoled myself with the fact that it had ultimately rid us of the beast without the bother of putting the stinking thing into our vehicle.

            Some months later, like clockwork, the sky began to darken on a Tuesday afternoon, and warnings sounded from our cell phones, desktops, and local television stations. Another storm was coming, a dangerous storm from which excited meteorologists urged us to take shelter. There was no exaggerating the storms we had endured already that summer, and it was only the beginning of July.

            Winter had been bad, too. Mondays were the days we could expect snow, ice, or bitter cold so bad the schools and businesses closed. But once the weather turned hot, Tuesday became the day of reckoning. We had already dealt with tree limbs crashing to the ground, transformer fires and power outages, and hail dents in our siding and on the roofs of our cars. Now that the ground was saturated from the weekly downpours, we faced flash floods and soggy basements.

            Rob and I hurried to the back yard to gather the garden tools I had been using earlier that day. He carried the tall, paper bags of yard waste to the shed, and I rolled up the hose and stashed it under the deck. I reached up to make sure the spigot was off when my eyes fell on the groundhog trap. Next to the trap, crying piteously, was a small black kitten. It saw me and scurried away leaving behind its hapless sister who cried and fumed to be free from the cage.

            “Check your trap daily!” I had been warned. Now this tiny kitten, no more than a month old, cried from inside the wire box. Who knows how long it had been there. I remembered the night before, sitting on the deck with my husband as we grilled and ate supper, swearing to him that I was hearing a cat, and concluding it was just the mockingbird who must have picked up the sound from somewhere in the neighborhood.

            Thunder rumbled and the wind gusted around the house. I snatched up the trap to carry inside to safety. The little demon inside hissed and cried, throwing herself from end to end of the cage, and I giggled at her fury as I ran ahead of the rain.

            My three male cats fled to secret nether-regions of the house when I placed trap on the floor in the living room. Our daughters and their boyfriends had converged on the house to wait out the storm, and they gathered around to gasp in wonder at the terrified creature.

            She was a beautiful brown tabby. Her impossibly large ears flicked and flattened as she warned us that her ancestors had eaten alive our ancestors, bones and all. We took some deli turkey from the fridge and offered it to her in small pieces. She consumed it without chewing and pressed her nose against the cage for more, hissing, crying, and gulping at the meat. I slid a small dish of water into the cage, but she did not know how to drink from it and kept dropping her nose too deeply into the puddle.

            Finally, we managed to get a small towel wrapped around her, and we removed her from the cage. We took turns holding her, passing her around, letting her drink droplets of water from our fingers. We stroked her and spoke softly to her as the storm raged outside. Rain dumped relentlessly onto the house and yard, and the streets flooded with water searching for a tributary. But in the living room, we snuggled the tiny life who miraculously fell asleep in our arms.

            Hours passed as we tamed the kitten. It was as if she had been born right there in the living room. She played with our fingers, ate from our hands, even nuzzled our noses, and never once, even in her delirious panic, did she scratch or bite us.

            “Well,” Katie said, “I suppose we’re keeping her. We are keeping her, right?”

            I looked at my husband who had so patiently allowed me to have a kitten or three for the entire quarter century of our marriage. His expression told me that it was a given. We were not letting go of this precious cat.

            “What should we call her?” I asked. “What’s the funniest word you know?”

            Joyce, our youngest, has the drollest sense of humor in the family. She considered for only a moment before exaggerating the word, “Moist.”

            We doubled over laughing, imagining the vet calling her name when we took her for a checkup.

            We added the name “Maloo” in honor of our favorite local restaurant, and declared her to be Moist-Maloo.

            The storm eased, and I went to the back door to see if there was damage. I was shocked to see that our little yard was submerged in a foot of water right up to the foundation of the house. The dark area under the deck where the groundhog trap had sat for months was under water. If I had not peeked under to turn off the house before the storm hit, Moist-Maloo would have drowned in the cage. My heart aches when I consider what my carelessness might have cost.

            Moist-Maloo is the darling of the family now. Our older cats are warming up to her one at a time, mostly intrigued by her better-tasting kitten food and new toys. She is insatiable for human touch, rolling onto her back like a puppy for a belly-rub. She greets us with a hiss each morning, then apologizes with adorable squeaks and a purr like a freight train.

            We were tempted to put the trap back out to catch Moist-Maloo’s sibling, but we never saw it again after that night. Besides, the trap is now safely closed and stashed on a high shelf in the basement. Despite this fact, I check it every day.