Every so often, the phrase attributed to him circulates again: people do not fake depression; they fake being okay.
And with the phrase comes the myth again: the sad clown, the man who made the world laugh while inside he was fading away from sadness.
His widow has spent years trying to correct that story. Because that is not what happened.
The autopsy revealed that Robin Williams had Lewy body dementia, a degenerative brain disease that was never diagnosed during his lifetime. Susan Schneider Williams, his wife, described it with a chilling phrase: the terrorist in my husband’s brain.
His final year was a medical mystery. Symptoms appeared that no specialist could explain: insomnia, extreme anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, movements he could not control, memory slipping through his fingers.
And something happened that must have been terrifying for him. On a film set, the man who improvised like no one else in the world, who filled entire scenes with ideas no one had written, began to forget his lines. For the first time in his life, he could not.
His widow said that he knew something was wrong. That he was aware he was losing his own mind and could do nothing to stop it.
It was not sadness. It was a disease silently devouring his brain, without a name, without a diagnosis, while doctors were looking in the wrong place.
She decided to tell it for one specific reason: so that other families who are seeing similar symptoms today know what to look for. So that the myth does not obscure the disease.
It is worth repeating, then, in no uncertain terms.
He did not fade away because life weighed on him. His light went out from within, and none of his smiles were a lie.
Thank you for all of them, Robin.