O Captain, My Captain

Robin Williams, dead by apparent suicide at 63.

This one hits me hard.

When I stand up in front of a few hundred people and try my best to be funny and inspirational, I draw my schtick from two fathers: my old history professor Horace Perry Jones, and Robin Williams’ character John Keating in Dead Poets Society.

All I ever wanted to do was approach the profession I love with that kind of passion, and inspire the same in my students.

He was the most gifted improvisational comedian of our time; quicksilver wit and a heightened sense of the absurd. He was sublimely silly in a way that I could only marvel at and admire. He was a talented actor with an amazing range. He had a huge heart.

He was also using his towering talent for entertaining others to hide his pain. It is a cruel twist that so many of the gifted among us, the ones who can amaze and inspire us at the height of their talents, can also experience the lowest depths of despair.

And were it not for a wonderful woman perceptive enough to spot the broken man hiding behind my mask of humor, who knows how long I’d have struggled with my depression. I was a sad clown, too, albeit with but a fraction of his talent.

I am lucky in that I have someone who loves and supports me, who knows me well enough to spot the signs, someone to call me on my behavior and drag me back into the light.

Be that person for someone else.

It’s a crying Goddamned shame that a celebrity has to die to for the world to notice, when ordinary people end their lives every day, convinced they are alone in this world and that no one cares about their pain.

Reach out. Be that light in the darkness that exposes the lies that depression tells. I for one am tired of hearing of soldiers, cops, firefighters and EMTs committing suicide.

Look out for each other, because sometimes, each other is all we’ve got.