Bangarang Robin Williams. You Were Our Genie, But Now You’re Free In Neverland

I'm sitting down to write this blog and as I do I'm aware that I'm writing about a man, an actor whom I've never met and really know absolutely nothing about, apart from what I've seen onscreen all of my life. Yet, like you I'm shocked and devastated at the news of Robin Williams' passing. I almost swerved off of the road when I read it. He was so good at both making us laugh and cry effortlessly, and in that moment I was stunned. An emotion I wasn't used to feeling when considering him. I have no idea what I'm going to say that hasn't been said in the last few hours, but I feel the need to type.

When I told my kids last night that the Genie from Aladdin was gone, it was apparent that he'd touched their young lives too from a distance. In shock one of them was like, "Dad, do you want to cry about it?" They started rattling off movies that they remembered him in from Peter Pan to Flubber to Jumanji and Mrs. Doubtfire and of course that's just one small fraction of his huge body of work. My oldest asked how he died and she was floored even more when I told her, a conversation that was happening all over the world, but most of all in Robin's own home. I used to wonder what it was like for Robin's kids to have a witty dad like that and now all I can think of is how they must feel now. It's bad enough that he's gone but to lose him like that just compounds our grief and confusion and in some cases anger. It made for a good teaching moment with my young ones and after the discussion I could think of nothing better to do than to turn on one of his movies as we prepared for bed.

We popped in Aladdin, which I've seen a thousand times the first of which was in the theater in 1992. I had no idea who Robin even was at the time, but I immediately loved that blue genie who stole the show, and I wasn't alone. Last night though, I watched with different eyes, sadder ones, and it occurs to me that the life of the genie wasn't all that unlike what Robin might've been feeling for real. A genie's job is to make everyone smile by magically granting their heart's desires in grand fashion, but at the same time he feels confined by that very same charm. Such is the life of a celebrity whom we put on pedestals so naturally. But when they fall off, we're reminded: oh yeah, they're human too. We think we known people (even celebrities), but we only see what people want us to see and have no idea what's going on behind the closed  doors of their homes, hearts or minds.

My Facebook feed has been FILLED with memorials, most of which are glowing, but there are a couple of blemishes of a few disavowing him and calling him a coward. I'd like to remind them and even myself as I write this, that we all have cowardice in us and all's it takes is a little push until we find we find ourselves in unfamiliar or seemingly impassible territory and things that we think we'd never do, we trip into. The fact of the matter is that he's gone and while we lost a beloved movie icon, Robin's kids lost their dad and his wife lost her husband. Like my little ones, let us grownups learn from this too and may our huge problems that we had yesterday seem a little more insignificant in light of what Robin was facing.

And to Robin, I'd like to echo a sentiment that I saw in a tweet by Evan Rachel Wood this morning that inspired me to even say anything in the first place today... "Genie, You're free."