Don’t forget Dead Poets Society. One of my favorites.
I never really liked Mork and Mindy, but I did like much of his stand-up material. Less so things like Ms. Doubtfire. Never saw Alladin.
All about Flubber, Jumanji (probably only like these because I saw them as a kid)
How can you have never seen Alladin? It’s like that one guy who never saw Star Wars. I’m pretty sure he was an alien scouting out the Earth for a future invasion.
You’re trying to rationalize an irrational act. I hope you don’t give many eulogies.
This was not intended to be a eulogy.
All I was saying is that I could understand where he might be coming from, and why suicide might have seemed attractive, even if I think he ultimately made the wrong decision. It’s a statement of empathy with someone who suffered.
It’s better than saying, well, the guy was irrational, and so he ended it. As if being rational is the only justification for living. That sounds like the sort of eulogy you’re advocating.
I feel you, bchad.
I think a lot of people do or will go through this at some point during their professional lives. Take any professional athlete for example, like Kobe Bryant. It’s clear that his prime days are behind him, and he’s still hanging onto past glory. (TO and Chad Johnson definitely come to mind here.)
And if you’re a partner/owner/manager of a professional firm, you’ll find someday that there are younger, smarter people who can do it better than you. The tools that you used just aren’t quite up to speed (like my old boss who refused to use Excel because he didn’t understand it).
And some people handle this kind of stuff better than others. RW was obviously “past his prime” and didn’t handle it well. (That’s what I think, anyway. Who knows what actually happened?)
Explainable is not the same as rational. Let’s say you don’t eat some food due to religious reasons. This behavior is explainable (god said so) but not rational (faith is by definition not rational).
Celebrity deaths don’t usually affect me, but this one hurt a little.
@bchad If a child gets killed by a stray bullet, then that would be an irrational act. But it being irrational doesn’t make it any less tragic. I wasn’t intending to be as glib as your last paragraph. I was more calling out how insensitive I found your post. No one on my facebook feed yesterday said anything like “Sad, but I get it”. Seriously, you basically said Jackie Mason should just kill himself.
^I didn’t get that sense at all from bchad.
But it brings up a good point. Who wants to be Jackie Mason? Or Dick Clark? Did you hear him try to do his NYE special the last few years? I know he had a stroke, but c’mon dude. Nobody can understand a word you’re saying. You need to give it up. Fade graciously out of the limelight like Sean Connery or Gene Hackman.
Some people are able to do that. Others aren’t.
Perfect example would be Muhammed Ali. Once the greatest fighter ever, now he can’t use the john on his own.
jmh, I can see why you might have read it as insensitive, but that was not the intent.
I added the bit about Jackie Mason at the end and it did break the empathetic tone a bit. I never said Jackie Mason should kill himself. Not everything I write is a syllogism, particularly when discussing emotions. Emotions may have a logic to them, but that doesn’t mean they are logical. Regarding the Jackie Mason story, I would probably say that aging is full of indignities that will likely affect most of us if we live long enough, and when we get there, each of us may have a different set of decisions on that, and they may seem more rational when we get there than they seem when we are young. At some level, we need to respect people’s autonomous decisions to go one way or another, even if we ourselves would make different ones, or prefered that they had made different ones.
Robin Williams’ life was tragic, in that he contributed so much that made other people’s lives better, yet he himself seemed unable to find a secure foothold on happiness, despite the outward trappings of success. That was his tragedy, it has been going on a long long time, invisible to most of us, and it ended yesterday. For him, it’s not clear to me that his death was tragic; his life was. I don’t feel I have the right to insist he live in mental anguish because I, bchad, prefer a state of the world where he can make brand new jokes whenever I feel like clicking the remote control.
As long as you don’t believe in Christian or Muslim eternal damnation for suicides (I don’t), I think he has a peace now that he may never have had in his life, and certainly not in recent years. Like a cancer patient who has died, I think his invisible (to us) decline was tragic, but now that he’s gone, there is some relief that he is no longer suffering.
His death is still a tragedy, but it is a tragedy is for those of us who are still here and who will miss him, and especially so for his immediate family and close friends. Some of us may feel that we failed him by not making him feel the love and support that would have made him want to embrace life longer. Maybe that really was a failing of ours, or maybe there was nothing one could do. It’s hard to know for sure, especially for those of us that weren’t in his personal circle. But that is really our tragedy now, not his, even if he is the center element that ties those tragedies together.
Our lesson, once we have finished mourning, or even before, is to ask ourselves if there are people around us who are suffering the way he did, and if there are ways we can help them meaningfully so that the endpoint of their tragic life is a renewed sense of joy, not another death that we mourn as tragic.
I vaguly remember reading/seeing something about his ex-wives taking him to the cleaners. I think he openly admitted he did the TV show “The Crazy Ones” just for the paycheck.
I never saw Star Wars. I’m not into sci fi movies.
Pagliaccio was suffering from severe depression and decided to seek professional help. Upon explaining his condition to his therapist the doctor responds, “you should go see the sad clown. He’s performing tonight and he never fails to please the audience.”
Pagliaccio looks to the therapist with tears running down his face, “but doctor, I am the sad clown.”
RIP Mork
Looking at this, he didn’t seem like someone that believed what he said, even though he was playing a character in this scene.
Lost £50m in total from 2 divorces.
I’ve never understood why people are entitled to half of someone’s fortune just because they were married.
never seen star wars or star trek movies either
There’s an ex nanny that was given a quarter of a billion dollars.
no one wants to admit it, but it’s generally because a woman’s looks typically don’t last very long, and her chances collapse pretty rapidly when she gets older, so it’s like “payment” for her good years.
I don’t buy it personally, but that’s society for you.