Deathlexia

So everyone has heard. Robin Williams, dead by apparent suicide. Facebook has endless posts and reposts of the news. People commenting "I'm crying...". And I am angry.

You see, I suffer from deathlexia. I do not react to death the way other people do. When someone dies, they're gone. Pffft, like that. It is rare that I react emotionally even to a family member's demise. It took fifty years for me to finally grieve over my mother's death. I have instructed the family that it is OK to continue business as usual should I kick the ink bucket. Don't leave the convention just because, unless you REALLY can't handle it. In a perverse twist, I want to keep doing cons, my ashes enshrined in an aardvark-shaped jar. No explanation needed, lest we squeam our customers away....

So I am angry. Angry at all the tears and grief shed for a man none of them knew. A man with a history of alcohol and cocaine abuse and rehab, a history of depression; a walking target for the Reaper. (I am not judg-ing his struggles, merely reporting them.) All the tears for a man with everything: talent, fame, adoring fans...a man who couldn't take it. A man who gave up. I am furious.

I think it likely that if he was medicated for his depression, that Big Pharma may well have some culpability. Angry about that, too, and that he left his family with a bundle of questions like "What more could we have done...?". I've battled Depression, as has the Dread Dormomoo, at the same period of time. Oh, it was a jolly romp! We didn't give in. We didn't off ourselves. We didn't have fame, talent. money, fans....

I'm angry at the fuss. I'm angry that he did it. I'm angry that people did not effectively share the Good News with him...only enough apparently to provide him comedy-fodder (Williams did a dead-on Ernest Angley). I'm angry that religious freaks like Angley exist at all, turning the Faith Once Delivered into a side show. I'm angry that Williams still (perhaps) had good years left, and robbed us of his talent.

So, weep for Robin Williams. Perhaps it is what he would want. Perhaps he would not care at all. Me, I'll be over here, seething.

And thinking about Christian children being beheaded in Iraq by Muslim liberators. Someone needs to remember them.