Normal?

I don't normally post on Tuesday's but the world lost Robin Williams yesterday.  That merits a post.

I spent last night in my hotel room watching YouTube clips of Robin.  With Craig Ferguson (my favorite), with Whoopie Goldberg.  Doing stand up.  I went to sleep feeling self-conscious about being so affected by the loss of someone I had never met.  I felt rather alone in whatever sense of loss I was feeling, feeling sort of silly about feeling sort of punched in the gut about the loss of a complete stranger.

This morning, I read the newspaper articles.  I started to feel reconnected. I'm terribly disconnected from pop culture, so I was relieved to see that I was not alone in...I guess grief, to give it a name. Sense of loss.

After work, I popped open Facebook and the blogsphere and I was amazed.  Among my circles and my circles' circles, folks had been processing all day.  People I love owning their own battles with depression, supporting each other, being real.  It was cathartic.  I'm still ringing like a bell.

But for me, the reality is a little more detatched than his and our "stuff".  Its  more about the sense of loss I have over the vacancy in the role he played.  It's the vacancy for me that is the punch in the gut.  

All I can say is that I get it.  Not so much the suicide part, but the unbearableness of it.  I can't touch it like he could.  I wish I could.  I so, so, wish I could.

Just off the top of my head: Mitch Hedberg, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, Richard Jeni, Brad Delp (from the band Boston), Freddie Prinze, Ray Combs, Janis Joplin, Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Cobain join the list of loved ones remembered in the posts of today.

Maybe they were the "normal" ones and we are the ones who are throwing our lives away?