Losing Robin Williams: It’s Okay to Mourn a Stranger

Unless you live under a rock (or the outer lying regions of the Pee Dee area, which are really one in the same place), you’ve heard the news about Robin Williams. You’ve heard that Robin Williams is dead by his own hand.

Last night, when I heard, I sat in the love seat in my parents’ living room, and I wept openly. My mother expressed her concern for me several times, like any good mother hen would, and I kept telling her I’d be fine. I apologized for crying over a stranger. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” I said. One, two, three times. I said it again and again, for as many times as I started to cry anew.

But this morning, when I woke up, I was still sad deep in my gut. And more than that, I was peevish. I thought to myself, “FUCK that.” Why should I feel ashamed for crying over Robin Williams? Why should that make me feel stupid or in any way like I’m weak?

True, Robin Williams was no friend of mine. I didn’t meet him at Disney World. I wasn’t his roommate at Julliard. I didn’t see him perform live anywhere. I never even shook his hand.

I never knew him as Mork or Garp or the Fisher King. But I knew him.

For me, and millions of Millennials like me, Robin Williams is inexorably bound up with memories of childhood. Robin Williams is, for me, the face of the 90s. Those fantastical years when I was a kid and the most pressing concerns in my life were if I would get home in time to watch Wishbone and if I could maybe read a little in my American Girl book after that. Those years when staying up late with my mom to watch Jay Leno and eat Nutty Butty ice cream cones were a little bit deviant but also really, really special. Those years when my sister and I still shared a bed because my parents didn’t have the money for an extra mattress, but neither of us cared because we fell asleep snuggled up like bugs in a rug every night.

I still remember the very first time I saw Robin Williams on film (kinda). My parents schleped all three of us – my brother, my sister and me – to see Aladdin in theaters. My sister was still an arm baby, my brother about two and half, and I was four. No easy feat for two mortal parents, especially since my M.O. was to ask as many questions about EVERY LITTLE THING as I possibly could. I’m sure the outing wasn’t an easy one. But we went, nonetheless. And it remains one of the earliest, strongest memories I have, not because I loved the movie so much but because my dad did. I remember my dad laughing hysterically at the Genie doing celebrity impressions, and I laughed too. It would be years before I understood the jokes, but the sheer, unadulterated amusement on my dad’s face was contagious. Four-year-old me peeled into giggles at the mere sight of my daddy laughing so hard. Something good must have been happening. I knew it then. And I know it now. To this day, I can picture vividly the way my dad’s face looked, his eyes closed, his head tilted back, his whole body given over to laughter and happiness.

Robin Williams did that for him. Robin Williams did that for me.

He recreated Peter Pan for a generation of Millennial viewers who may well have otherwise forgotten a Disney movie long ago shelved. He gave life to a cross-dressing nanny, a flamboyant cabaret owner, a man destined to finish a game before dinosaurs destroyed his town, a fifth-grader who looked older than most of his friends’ parents, and a professor who discovered the existence of flubber. Robin Williams didn’t just shape my childhood; he was my childhood. He was my innocence.

And he continued to be. For as long as I have been alive, Robin Williams has been a constant. He was always there, quietly, occupying space in the recesses of my mind, in the place where everything is normal and stable, and I don’t have to think or keep track or try to muddle through.

But yesterday, the last and possibly one of the best vestiges of my childhood died, not in contentment, but in sadness. Not with a whimper, not with a bang, but with a giving up.

And maybe that’s why I’ve had such a profound emotional response to the death of a man I’ve never met and will never meet. This is the end of the road for Millennials.

We are no longer children. Our Peter Pan is dead.

Yes, I know there are more pressing issues. I know Iraqi children die every day in ISIS’ hate-fueled genocide. I know millions of Americans live below the poverty line and can barely afford to eat. I know that ebola has entered our country and black men still can’t walk in the streets without fear of retaliation for little more than being black and women now have to face the added horror that their rapes might end up as internet memes.

But just for now, let us mourn. Let me mourn. Let me mourn the dying pieces of my childhood as I make my ever-quickening journey toward thirty, toward adulthood, and further and further away from the magic of simply being a silly little girl, in the theater with her family, laughing at a big blue genie. 

"Oh, no. To live... to live would be an awfully big adventure." - Peter Banning, Hook

Bangarang, Robin. 

All original content copyright Kimberly Turner, 2014-2014.