‘They said, in their lame ways, he had dark thoughts, he spoke a lot about death, he went to the funerals of people he did not know to see the faces of the newly dead and draw their portraits. Friends insisted that he must have had a deep secret grief though he never showed any signs. Behind the light on his face there must have been an ordinary sorrow. Find his sorrow and you would find his reason, that was what they implied…Because that is what they want his death to be about. The tragic defeat of the unusual, and so the triumph of the normal. This is how people resolve suicides – by considering it a consequence of unbearable grief or by manufacturing motives. Or through the inordinate importance given to the final note of the dead, which is usually only a confused half-truth. There is something about a suicide note, the only known penultimate act of a living thing…He has always marveled at the confidence of people in their final moments, leaving a note behind in the complete faith that it would be found by the intended recipient. But the truth is that every suicide remains a mystery forever because the only person who really knows all the fragments of the motive is gone.’ - An extract from The Illicit Happiness of Other People. I loved, and because of that perhaps, was often infuriated by Robin Williams. It is the duty of the funny to outlive the bores, but then it never works out that way sadly.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 03:55:10 +0000
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