Lessons on Living from the Death of Robin Williams
A year has passed since Robin Williams died by suicide. The question keeps surfacing across the world: how does a man who made so many people laugh, a man who seemed to have everything, end his own life? I want to sit with what his death can teach us, and how those lessons touch our own growth.
Start with the comedy. His gift for making people laugh may have been the mask over his depression. Those who followed his career for years already knew he carried serious depression and wrestled with drugs and alcohol. Old wisdom holds that laughter is good medicine, and people who are hurting often try to laugh their troubles away. Entertaining others becomes a kind of escape, a way to stop thinking about your own pain, and in that sense it is generous. Maybe that is part of how Robin reached 63 rather than leaving much sooner.
Then there is the money. He was worth somewhere around $50 million when he died, roughly half of what he had a year earlier. Not long before his death he spoke publicly about being close to bankruptcy. His publicist later brushed that off, saying Robin should not be taken at his word on it. And who ever took Robin Williams at his word, the same man who put on a dress and played the housekeeper in Mrs. Doubtfire and the clowning physician in Patch Adams?
Look at the estate itself and much of his worth sat in two homes. One was his place in Napa Valley, named Villa Sorrisso, which comes out to something like Valley of Smiles. The other was a waterfront house in Tiburon, California. After the mortgages, the two properties were valued at roughly $25 million. His family said he provided for them, and he set up a trust for each of his three children.
So what can we actually carry away from a loss this painful? The first lesson is old but worth repeating: money does not buy happiness. You can own everything in sight and still sit alone, particularly when the people around you are drawn to what you have rather than who you are. Wealth can be a blessing, and work we love can be a blessing too. But without some real inner growth, a large bank account only makes a person hollow if they truly believe their things are what make them happy. We are meant to look after what we own, not be owned by it. Treat possessions as the wellspring of your joy and they will run you, and you will keep chasing a satisfaction that keeps slipping out of reach.
There is a second thing here, quieter and stranger. Sometimes the very thing we are best at is the thing we are fighting inside ourselves. If we cannot find our own happiness, we may go looking for it by handing happiness to other people. Viktor Frankl closes Man's Search for Meaning on a related note, that we find our own happiness in helping others find theirs. That might guide our own search for purpose. Ask what you struggle with most, because that struggle may point toward your calling and toward the service you are meant to offer others.
And consider the name again. A man builds a home and calls it the Valley of Smiles. Whatever else was true, Robin Williams had found something that made him happy, and it was making other people laugh.
E. Bishop Wooten