The Note

   One year ago today, Robin Williams killed himself. Two days later, I was in a tiny cube of a doctor’s office at the Fort Meade VA Hospital being told by our oncologist that my partner’s brain tumor was growing rapidly out of control, and there was nothing left to be done. In that instant, we went from comparing treatment options to discussing “comfort.”

   I take a rather odd sense of pride in resisting celebrity worship. I try to remember that celebrities are humans, too, and most of the time I feel I’m rather successful at that, but Robin’s death hit me hard. He was my favorite actor, my favorite comedian.  Stand-up comedy had become such a central part of Randy’s and my coping mechanism. I can remember long, so very long, drives back home after a disappointing oncology visit when all we could do was turn on XM and listen. We laughed at the cancer that slowly ate away his soul with a sense of morbid inevitability – two pawns in the most depraved game of chess.

   What struck me the deepest after Robin’s death was not, I think, the truly devastating loss of a talented actor and comedian – he was much more, of course, but these were the only roles in which I’d ever get to know him – but it was the overwhelmingly uneducated reactions to depression and suicide as a whole I read on social media from people I thought knew better. Every little dig at Robin was, in my mind, a dig at me.

   I was diagnosed with chronic depression at the age of nineteen. Looking back, I realize up to that point I couldn’t remember not struggling with this black sea of hopelessness, even as a small child. The psychiatrist told me that this type of depression is typically manageable without medication, although some traumatic events in life may tilt the scale far enough that the chemicals in my brain are off and I need help balancing everything back out.

   This doesn’t mean I walk around moping all the time. Depression isn’t quite so transparent or easily defined. It has become much more of a daily check-in of my mental health, a sliding scale of “Am I more happy than sad today?” Right now I am; however, I knew last year when Randy died I would need help coping and took the precaution of adding medication to the counseling I was already receiving.

   The days before Randy died, he struggled to breathe. It’s known as the death rattle, an agonizing sound that becomes background noise while you wait for someone to die. The doctor will sit down with you and explain that, while it’s disturbing for some to hear it, the patient isn’t in any pain from the struggle. It is simply the body shutting down. They will offer to give the patient medication to soften the noise for your benefit, but that it potentially creates discomfort for them. I refused the medication.

   I wish I could say I’m really as brave as I pretended to be at that moment.

   Sitting by his bed and watching him gasp for air, the thought passed through my mind that I could end this for him. I could take a pillow and press it to his face and in a few moments it would be over and he would be at peace. So help me, I considered it. But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. Instead I swabbed his mouth with the oil the nurses provide and read to him from the spot he’d marked in the last book he’d ever read, and I held vigil until he breathed his last.

   I’m in no place to judge anyone who makes that decision for themselves. It’s a discussion that Randy and I had, and I told him that no matter what he chose, I would stand by him. In the end he decided to go naturally, and I kept my promise.

   I know how it feels to want to check out. I know what it is like to get to that place, over and over, that is so deep and dark you’re not sure you’ll come back this time. I know what it is like to plan my death; I have written the note.

   I have also torn it up.