Which juices/demons drive you?

2nd September 2014   ·   0 Comments

By Fr. Jerome LeDoux
Contributing Columnist

“You can’t judge a book by its cover” is threefold more true of trying to judge a fellow human by his external appearance and conduct. Actor/comedian Robin Williams surely serves as the poster boy for demonstrating how different a person’s exterior can be from his interior. The person we saw and heard with so much pleasure was a world apart from the person deep within.

When I broached the painful topic of the celebrity’s passing, the usual reaction was, “Oh, you mean ‘Mork & Mindy!’” or Mrs. Doubtfire! Everyone identified him by the characters he created in dozens of cartoon voiceovers and movie tailgating movie in a seemingly endless line.

At a pace that would wilt an everyday workaholic, Robin pursued every gig, large or small, with a feverish verve that startled and intimidated even hardened professionals in the particular fields of comedy, acting and off-the-cuff performances on- or offstage. Spontaneous,  out-of-thin-air antics blew away the likes of Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman. In addition to that, he was a tireless film producer and screenwriter.

Perhaps Robin’s cornucopia of intelligence, wit, spontaneity, complexity and humor stemmed from his grand gumbo of English/Wel­sh/Scottish/Irish/German/French ancestry. On more than one occasion, he must have raved that he was a vital part of the Melting Pot that is America. Can there be any doubt that hybrid vigor played a heavy role in his many gifts?

Little did Robin’s high school classmates know what they were dealing with when they voted him “Most likely not to succeed” and “Funniest.” Even in high school he had begun to pick his way through and improvise the funny and zany side of life and the people around him.

After dabbling in political science, Robin dropped out of college to study acting, but, since not even the Juilliard School in New York could keep up with his genius, he left after a couple of years to do stand-up comedy in the San Francisco Bay Area. He found out “about drugs and happiness” at that time and “saw the best brains of my time turned to mud.”

To all appearances, he fell victim to the same lifestyle trap that he bemoaned as the undoing of some of his friends as well as “the best brains of my time turned to mud.”

Observing that stand-up comedy is a brutal field that always flirts with burnout by its
highs of performance and lows of unwinding, Robin added that partying, drinking and drugs can quickly break a performer down. Through it all, he weathered three marriages that produced three children. He panned his Episcopal religion as “Catholic Lite – same rituals, half the guilt.”

So, were creative juices or demons driving him, or a down-spiraling mixture of both?

Quietly, he helped friends such as Christopher Reeve with runaway medical bills. He supported many philanthropic programs and, most of all, never neglected to support military veterans at home and abroad, going out of his way to entertain them in war zones. Not long before his demise, he made a personal video for a dying New Zealand lady per her request.

It seems unclear whether the pitch-black bile of his melancholy, deep, chronic depression and heavy addiction to alcohol were mostly lifestyle spinoffs or whether Robin developed some bodily chemical deficiency. Whatever cause or consequence, it is fearfully frightening that this condition can drive one to the point where choosing death seems a lesser evil than choosing life.

After the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in China with more than 2,000 suicides, the Golden Gate Bridge is the second Global Destination Zero for suicides. Its hypnotic spell has drawn 1,600 to end it all by launching themselves forth from it, with 80 others being stopped annually before jumping. Several others survived the jump. All said the same thing after being rescued, “The moment I jumped, I regretted having made the jump.” Which answers a nagging question concerning the moral responsibility of one contemplating suicide.

Until a papal decree reversed the ruling in 1983, the Catholic Church mercilessly forbade the burial of suicides in the consecrated ground of a Catholic cemetery. The rationale was that suicide is an irrevocable mortal sin. Maybe. Maybe not. In most cases, a suicide is beside himself/herself, near insanity, greatly diminishing, if not removing, the responsibility for self-murder. Only God knows why it took so long for an institution of mercy to delete that rule.

Further, evidence shows clearly that many suicides changed their minds too late to stop or reverse the suicidal act they had set in motion. In other words, we seldom know. The most wrenching case I recall involved an extremely distraught person who had drunk some Drano. Of course, anything that will unclog drains will burn right through the esophagus. After three days of raw torment beyond all pain, during which the tortured soul received the sacrament of penance and the anointing of the sick, death brought a merciful end to the incredible ordeal. 

With U.S. suicides at about 38,000 annually, the U.S. military over 8,000, and a world total of about 782,000, we must pray for and research a healing for 1 in 10 clinically depressed U.S. citizens and the 121 million people globally. “If I can help somebody as I pass along…”

This article originally published in the September 1, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.