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The instant high that you get from when, you know,
10,000 people are laughing their heads off.
What's your brain doing? What are your neuro transmitters doing?
The human brain is, you know, an extraordinary three and a half pound gland,
that is like quantum... it's quantum neurology, it's quantum physiology,
that the moment you think you understand that it,
it comes up with something else.
Because I don't have an act per se, but more a cesspool of consciousness,
just, you know, ideas.
Moments when I'll be on a roll or something will happen that I'll fire off,
and you can't have... it's like being possessed. It's like channeling.
When it works it's great, and when it doesn't, it's painful.
But when it's working,
it's that, it's that weird thing about you're surfing,
and kind of like you're in, you know, that thing athletes describe it
as the same thing of being, "Oh, it's working."
My name is Susan Schneider Williams,
my husband Robin Williams...
Two sentences, Leonard.
It all happens in two sentences.
We had unknowingly been battling a deadly disease.
A disease for which there is no cure.
Robin's... The devastation on Robin's brain from Lewy Bodies
was one of the worst cases medical professionals have ever seen.
Yet throughout all of this, his heart remained strong.
Unchosen path.
When Robin started acting out of character,
nearly every region of his brain was under attack by Lewy Bodies.
Can you imagine the pain he felt as he experienced himself disintegrating,
and not from something he would ever know the name of or understand.
So, um, I hate to have to report this.
The breaking news just in to CNN
is that actor Robin Williams is dead at the age of 63.
We have just received word from the West Coast.
Tragic, devastating word.
Robin Williams has been confirmed dead.
They believe that the Bay area resident committed suicide.
We do know that at 11:55 this morning,
Marin County communications received a 911 telephone call,
reporting that a male adult had been located unconscious,
and not breathing inside his residence,
in unincorporated Tiburon, California.
I felt... tremendous remorse,
and guilt that, "Gosh, I could have done more. I should have done more."
I know that something must've been terribly wrong
for someone as brilliant as Robin to just, you know, jump ship like that.
In the immediate aftermath of Robin's death,
the confusion and information was constantly changing.
Robin Williams' battle with addiction
and mental illness was no secret.
Before the coroner's report came out,
there was a lot of media speculation.
People who are assuming the worst,
that he's broke, or he's depressed, or is just given up.
The highs are highs and the lows are lows,
and there's nothing sadder than when a comedian is by himself.
They painted him as the sad clown.
Those close to Williams believe he had bipolar disorder.
They thought he just committed suicide
for something related to unhappiness, drugs or depression.
And of course, none of that is true.
...on Robin Williams' mind before his death, money.
- While it may seem strange... - People fill in the blanks,
um, so a lot of that was going on.
That last evening I spent with him, he was...
he was completely sober and not on drugs,
but just most, uh, troubled by what he was going through.
I think it's important that the truth comes out
because there were so many affirmative things that Robin stood for,
and we want to believe in all of them.
We want to believe in him.
And there's a danger that his suicide could occasion people to think,
"Oh, well he wasn't what we thought he was.
"We didn't know him after all."
Um, but we did.
I felt like I was somehow being loyal to him
by not speaking about the struggles that we saw.
I think we felt that wasn't anyone's business.
And so the story is one of Robin being at the mercy
of something that you could not control.
And even worse than not being able to control it, not even knowing about it.
It was not till October,
I was called in to sit down to go over the coroner's report.
There were no surprises about what was in his toxicology,
I knew my honey was clean and sober.
They sat me down and said,
"Essentially Robin died of diffuse Lewy Body Dementia."
"What is that?"
They started to talk about the neuro degeneration.
He wasn't in his right mind.
He described how these were these Lewy Bodies
that were in nearly every region of his brain.
It makes sense why he was experiencing what he was experiencing.
Cognitive moods, movement, they were all affected.
Depression, a fear, anxiety, hallucinations,
delusional thinking, major sleep disorders, insomnia, paranoia.
I remember walking out of that facility,
down the steps outside and feeling,
"Now I have the name of it."
It was the beginning of understanding what had really gone on.
I was talking to someone I'd met at UCSF,
and she said, "Send me the last two years of the medical records,
"I'll get them to Dr. Miller and I know he'll be happy to see you."
Lewy Body Dementia is a devastating illness.
It's a killer. It is fast. It's progressive.
I'm looking at how Robin's brain had been affected.
I realized that this was about as devastating form
of Lewy Body Dementia as I had ever seen.
Almost no area was left unaffected.
It really amazed me that Robin could walk or move at all.
The disease is devastating,
but even more so when you realize that
Robin did not have a diagnosis.
He did not know where these new symptoms were coming from.
The disease becomes progressively irreversible,
unstoppable, uh, and always fatal, always fatal.
But cures, we're far away from those.
It affects many people and sadly one of the outcomes is suicide.
If we'd had the accurate diagnosis of Lewy Body Dementia,
that alone would have given him...
some peace.
His soul thrived here.
He grew up here. His roots were here.
I mean, he... he started in Detroit,
but he went to school here in Redwood.
Robin could live anywhere he wanted and chose to live in a neighborhood.
Living in Marin, which is kind of like, you know,
north of San Francisco
it's like, it's the idea of, "This is it. I don't need to live...
"I can't. I mean, I don't do well in LA, if I was living in a gated community."
And he said, "I want to live with people. I love people."
He liked Marin, it's a wonderful, beautiful place to live.
He would ride his bikes every day.
You ran into him walking his dog outside
and you're like, "Oh, he's a totally normal guy."
You know, really not that different, people walking dogs, saying hello.
He's just trying to be normal.
But then on the flip side, like, he's lived a crazy life.
You would never know he was a superstar.
The Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley
started doing the Tuesday Night comedy nights.
It was just comedy.
Yet it exploded and partly because Robin Williams lived down the street.
So all of a sudden,
you've got an open mic more or less on Tuesday
that's drawing 250 people, on Tuesday. Every Tuesday.
The audience would go crazy.
And Robin would come up after I already had a show,
and we would do another two hours of improv.
And this would happen all the time.
And he literally would just get up at the end of the night,
and he would just crush it with no content.
Nothing got him off as much as being in front of a live audience,
and getting to just free float and let his brain take him
where he's going and react with the audience.
If someone throws something in from there,
or just take what he's saying and do 300 rifts on that.
His mind was just so fast.
Look out there, there's a little kid out there.
I saw a three-year-old kid who could barely use a fork or spoon.
He's eating, he's eating blueberries with his hands,
and all of a sudden someone handed him an iPhone, he was like...
When you're playing with Robin Williams,
you're not known for how you neck and neck with him.
You're not known for how you beat him.
You're known for how you just barely keep up with him.
Look up here Rick, there's people on the Hills.
Hi, everybody on the Hills.
Screaming on the mount.
- Did Jesus have comedy day? - Jesus had comedy day.
I'll be back.
There'd be improvs where I'm on stage with Robin,
and we would sync up,
and to see that in his eyes, that twinkle that means we made it.
It's impossible to describe genius or comedy really. You can analyze it.
But I went with him to two days of Aladdin recording sessions on the Disney lot,
and watching him go back and forth,
and do all of these characters.
Let's blow this popsicle stand!
A doorstop would be a fabulous career.
Not bad, goodnight, Alex.
Out of all of every pore of his being,
and he was so happy and joyous.
Hey. Go get him here, you little crazy guy.
I don't care what I am, I'm free.
Offer void or prohibited by law.
He goes, "Let's do that again, I could do that better."
And they go, "What do you mean you can do it better?"
He goes, "No, just let me, just run it again. I think I have an idea, you know."
"You think you have an idea, good Lord. Oh my God."
I think the man has to flow.
He has to be able to come in there and go against the magic.
He's got his own magic, and he just hasn't found it in himself yet.
Unnecessary use of reptile, 500 year penalty.
Watching these technicians desperately laughing and crying,
trying to keep up with him and not screw up the dials
while they're witnessing true brilliance.
Enough about you. Talk about her. She's a honey.
Come on. Talk about the features.
Her hair, her eyes, her shoes,
bee-guiling, bee-witching, bee-utiful.
When you're in the room with Robin, it is full go.
- Um, thank you. - Not at all.
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of these United States of America,
at your service.
He was a constant spark,
comedic spark, idea spark, throwing in lines,
improvising a ton.
Some of the biggest laughs are things that Robin invented on the fly.
I remember many, many days where Ben Stiller and I would look at each other
because we're just watching Robin Williams off the top of his head just go off.
And that kind of manic,
wildly creative, bottomless pit of ideas.
Um, that mojo, that ability,
which was like a superpower.
I'd never seen anything like it.
Let go.
The thing to know about the brain is that it's not static.
The connections are always changing.
We call it neuroplasticity.
So you have someone who has a stroke,
a part of the brain is damaged, it's not coming back.
Some of those patients get completely better
because the brain rewires, it has this resilience.
And the determinants of resilience, we don't quite understand.
But high intellectual abilities to begin with,
seem to go along with that kind of resilience.
People who have great brains,
who are incredibly brilliant, can tolerate degenerative diseases
better than someone who is average.
The concept of reserve, Robin Williams was a genius.
Robin was brilliant, he just knew things.
But besides that, his... his extrasensory perception
of life and of people and of me,
he was a master at that.
You could track it back to two years before he left.
We'd go to the Throckmorton all the time.
He always had an open invitation to go on.
And what started to happen at around two years
is he started to feel, um, like he didn't want to go on.
He just wasn't as eager
to, uh, meet with people backstage,
or hang out too long in the green room.
It was getting a little bit briefer and he didn't, um,
he just... there were more insecurities cropping up for him about going onstage.
There were a couple of shows where I was expecting Robin to be there,
and he didn't make it for one reason or another.
So that... that confidence that he had,
and the ability to go on and play...
He just wasn't willing to go there as much anymore, it was starting to lessen.
That was concerning. Something's off.
Someone is seemingly performing
just as they had, you know, for years and years,
and then all of a sudden there's some very strange thing that happens,
uh, and that raises concern,
but then the next day they're okay again.
And then over time those dips become deeper and deeper,
and we have these fluctuations, especially in the beginning.
The last thing they probably think of is that it's a degenerative brain disease.
After that, things were... just, life was busy, you know.
He was working so hard on The Crazy Ones at that time,
and it was getting more and more difficult for him
to remember his lines,
and he was getting more and more insecure about his performance.
Mark!
I know that he was sometimes having trouble with his lines,
and stuff up front,
but he was really always able to power through and be that guy.
And once you hit editorial,
you'd find the Robin Williams that you know and love was always there.
I proposed we redo that 1972 spot,
and take a chance of making people feel.
For my projects, we... we really stick to the script,
but when you have Robin Williams,
it would be folly not to let him do whatever he wants to do.
- And take. - Boss.
Secret sauce.
♪ Drive through lovin'
♪ Drive Drive through lovin' ♪
Booty shake, booty shake, booty shake, booty shake.
You didn't give me enough ketchup...
- Packets. - Oh, my God.
So every take would be different.
Uh, ad libs and these comic nuggets
would come from Mars or somewhere in Robin's head.
But a lot of them were gold.
So, I think that he was maybe a little slower out of the gate,
but he finished strong.
He'd managed to, kind of, power through it.
He'd get up and he'd become this guy
that you knew, remembered and loved.
- Can you be serious? - Well, maybe for a second.
No, see... Sorry.
It's not easy to do a network television show,
on top of that he had Night at the Museum,
and you know, he's, he's doing double duty.
The third movie, the last movie,
I would say, a month into the shoot,
it was clear to me, it was clear to all of us on that set
that something was going on with Robin.
That's an experience that I've not spoken about,
um, publicly ever.
We saw that Robin was struggling in a way that he hadn't before.
To remember lines, and to combine
the right words with the performance.
You know, when Robin would call me at ten at night, at two in the morning,
at four in the morning saying,
"Is it usable? Is any of this usable? Do I suck? What's going on?"
I would reassure him.
And so I said, "You are still you.
"I know it, the world knows it. You just need to remember that."
My faith in him never left.
But I saw his morale crumbling.
I saw a guy who wasn't himself and he thought that was unforgivable.
Lewy Body Dementia is particularly tragic
in the way that it increases anxiety,
increases self-doubt, causes delusions,
misbeliefs that have never been present in someone.
And imagine how hard that is for someone
who doesn't even realize that they're suffering
from a degenerative disease,
something that is slowly taking away
the function of neurons across the brain.
I think the thing that made Robin most special
about this spectrum of abilities he had,
was the solid guy in the middle.
That's who you are in the middle of all that other stuff.
These things come and go, who are you?
Do you stay you?
You know, what will you become?
We met on the day he arrived in New York City.
I remember really he was different. I could see the beginnings.
Robin and Christopher Reeve came into my third year class
at Julliard as advanced students.
Christopher was my roommate and Robin became very quickly,
my very best friend that I ever had.
Yeah, we're hippies from space and he's an Ivy League preppy.
But I'm telling you, the three of us had some good times.
He wasn't a comedian back then, he was a very serious actor.
I went to New York, and went to Julliard,
which was, you know, classical training, but very much to be a thespian.
For me it was a wonderful thing, number one to be in New York,
the training and also to get that type of training
where you get the combination of classical and the hardcore.
And he was so believable, visually,
but it's the way he used his voice, man, he was amazing.
And it blew the faculty's mind as well as the students.
But he was always funny.
We'd be rehearsing lines, and he would go off,
"My liege, thou a coxcomb, thou knowest not."
And he would make up lines in iambic pentameter,
but of course, you know, R rated lines, X-rated lines. It was hilarious.
It was hard for him
because there was a lot of politics going on at Julliard in that time.
He left at the two-thirds of the way through that year.
I would go back to San Francisco,
and try and find acting work,
and then took up stand-up comedy as a...
- Right. - 'Cause I couldn't find acting work.
The Holy City Zoo was the club house for all the comedians.
If you could get on a set,
when Robin was promising to be there that night,
you were gold. They packed the place.
Ladies and gentlemen, Robin Williams.
He drained every scintilla of laughter out of that crowd.
When he did that crazy stuff he did on stage,
I think it let everybody else say, "Well, heck!" you know.
Told everybody else, "Yes. Crazy stuff is acceptable."
Robin is doing this in the '70s.
I mean ten, 15, 20 years in some cases
before some of this is happening elsewhere.
He even came down to Hollywood and got up on stage
at The Comedy Store and the Improv
and it was like a landmine hit them, yeah.
I am not a tuna.
Is anyone here tonight on drugs?
- Yeah! - Okay.
A quick test right now if you are it's okay.
Come here just a sec, dear brother.
The Reverend likes this stuff here.
He was performing at the Comedy Store,
and he was hilarious.
And I just watched him and I walked backstage,
and he was sitting on the steps behind the stage.
I saw him sitting alone.
It seemed so extraordinary to watch a guy
completely demolish an audience,
and then seem so distanced from what he had just done.
No celebration, just, like, exhausted
from pouring out so much energy.
I got a phone call.
It was Robin.
He was up in Vancouver and he was working on Night at the Museum 3,
and he was... he was having a panic attack,
and he could not calm himself down.
He's having such a struggle...
remembering just one line.
- Your life depended on me. - Say that. It wasn't enough that you took a...
He got very frustrated.
I remember him saying to me, "I'm not me anymore.
"I don't know what's going on. I'm not me anymore."
His mind was not firing at the same speed.
That spark was diminished.
Uh, the joy was sometimes not there.
I had to work harder editorially,
to create it on screen
because it wasn't always there in the same way on set.
And I didn't resent that,
it was more taxing, it took a lot more time and energy,
but if that's what my guy needed,
then that's what I was gonna give my guy.
The one thing that did bother me was the arm.
I'd frequently see him clutching his hand close to his chest a little bit,
or he'd put it in his pocket and kind of mask certain things.
We knew that he was fragile,
and the deal was sometimes we had to let Robin be alone,
take a minute, catch his breath,
particularly at the end of shooting.
Uh, the last time I was with him, I was on set.
We were doing, shooting a, uh, scene in a church,
it was called Glory of Love.
Thought I saw the box move!
And we had a room for him where he could, uh, go between takes,
and I went into that room,
we talked a little bit about the scene,
and, um, he asked a few times, um,
"How's it going? Is it working?"
Um, but the subtext of it was, "How am I doing? Am I working?"
His sense of security and confidence,
and who he was and what he was,
it was something eroding within him.
We didn't know why.
- You know, you got to give a little. - Yeah.
'Cause we knew he was getting tested.
He was feeling, um, infirm, or not himself,
and he was getting tested, and I think
that those tests included brain scans and nothing was showing up.
It wasn't like he's my son, and I can say,
"All right, timeout.
"I'm going to pull you out of this because you're getting sick,
"and you need some rest. And I don't care what the teachers say."
No, no, no.
He's signed up. These are contracts you don't break.
This is this, this and the other thing. There's...
What can I do?
And Robin, he aimed to please every day,
every minute, he aimed to please.
If the studio or the network came begging
for more interviews and more publicity, he would always give it his all.
His intellect and his mental acumen were so beyond ours
that it could be compromised a great deal probably,
and he would still be playing a step ahead of the rest of us.
- How much of the script in the show is you... - 23.5% improv.
- Good. That's exactly what I wanted... - 23.5.
- She hasn't finished the question here, Robin. - But I knew where she was going.
- Oh, okay. - You dancing? There's one dance number and it's a ballet.
So Lewy Body Dementia, like all degenerative diseases
is a problem of plumbing and circuitry.
These degenerative diseases are caused
by misfolding of proteins within neurons,
or the parts of the brain that allow us to move, think and feel.
We have 70 billion neurons.
They slowly disintegrate.
This bad protein alpha-synuclein relentlessly picks off neurons
in a specific neighborhood, spreading through that neighborhood,
and then moves into different neighborhoods in the brain.
And then finally it's swept across the entire brainstem,
almost every neuron in that circuit
with sleep, mood, anxiety, cognition has been affected,
and that is really the late stage of dementia with Lewy Bodies.
The stage that no one can get out of.
Soldiers have very refined bull detectors,
and to see that instantaneous connection
that Robin was able to make.
Good evening, Baghdad!
Thank you.
What he understood about the American soldier
was where they came from.
Some of these kids are dying, they're getting wounded.
He had a way of connecting with them
that just made them feel so good.
He was there for them,
and they understood that.
There's combat, hardcore stuff and then it's a lot of waiting around,
and it's that stuff where people need
things just to fight the boredom, and that is most important.
And I think most people are just shocked that someone showed up. Like, "Why are you here man?"
Afghanistan, six times, Iraq, five. Yeah, it's crazy.
And you haven't fixed it yet. That's disappointing
You know, from going there, that's the best audiences in the world.
I do have a story.
I've... I've got a ton of them.
A young man was very seriously injured,
and his girlfriend had decided it was just a little bit
too much for her to handle,
and she had just left and she was not coming back.
She was on her way to the airport.
So we walked in and you could tell that he was in, um, in despair.
And how afraid that he was, in going forward,
that he would never have another girlfriend,
you know, about what his life was going to be like.
And, um, Robin pulled up his chair right beside his bed
and started talking about fear.
He went into some very personal things.
I think we probably stayed an hour and a half.
And, you know, we walked out,
and, um, Robin actually said,
"Boy, that was a tough one."
He said, "Because for all of us, confronting our fears
"is a very difficult thing to do."
And he said, "I'm sure nobody ever thinks I'm afraid of anything."
That was a big topic of conversation.
Was their spouse going to stay with them?
Were people going to be looking at them differently?
He actually talked about those kinds of things.
He was willing to sit and talk about some of his own fears.
And, um, I'll never forget one day and he said,
"Oh, Elaine, that was a tough one."
And he said, "He doesn't know that,
"but I have been so close to what he was talking about myself."
It was early May and he came home,
and it was like a plane coming in with no landing gear.
His resources were just... spent.
We were supposed to go to some friends and, um,
Robin couldn't, he couldn't get out of bed.
It was becoming more of a normal that,
"Robin is not feeling well.
"And I can't tell you why.
"We're just gonna stay home."
His delusional looping
would just kick in at night.
We'd gone to a birthday party, um, our dear, dear friend, Mort Sahl.
That night,
Robin was up, and he started talking about,
he was so afraid that Mort was not going to make it through the night.
You know, so we started to have this discussion again.
It's like 12, one o'clock at night,
and it goes to like 3:30 in the morning.
And I mean, it goes, we're covering all the bases
because he's convinced that he should go to Mort's house right now,
and make sure he's okay.
That night he was texting Mort, like,
"Are you okay? Are you okay?" And Mort's asleep, most likely, you know.
And so because he wasn't getting a response from Mort
at two o'clock in the morning, he wanted to go there.
So this was a typical night for us.
There is something wrong.
There is something not right here.
And he said, "I just want to reboot my brain.
"I just want to reboot my brain."
We started to see some physical things happening to him,
and he was trying to hide it with his arm and things like that.
So we started to see it.
One point, he came up and he was in a tee shirt.
His ribs were actually showing.
I grabbed his skin. "Robin, you're really getting thin."
He said, "Yeah, boss, I've gone to the doctor,
"but I don't know what it is."
When he came to a party, and we were all there,
the comedians were, they were flummoxed,
they were overwhelmed.
And he was off lurking in the corners alone.
I mean, can you imagine, you're at a party and you're, "Where's Robin?"
And you look and he's over in the corner fiddling around with a bush,
or something like, well, this is not good.
He was suffering and you could tell it.
I tried to get him to go to a James Taylor concert with us,
and he says, "I don't think I can."
I go, "I mean, I know you're tired, but I'll drive and I'll come get you.
"And we have the tickets and it's on me."
And he goes, "No, I don't think I can leave the house."
And that kind of, scared me a little bit, you know,
'cause he was serious and I go, "Okay."
And I didn't really press him on it, but I mean, he was leveling with me
that "I don't think I could leave my house right now."
And his speech patterns changed a little bit
that I don't know how to... It's hard for me to talk about it.
I knew there was something going on.
I spoke with Robin almost every day or text and stuff,
I witnessed his processing reality
completely different than the way everybody else.
And it just, the only reason I talk about that
is his brain was giving him misinformation.
Complete misinformation.
Going from where Robin and I had our world together,
that was our sanctuary.
Oh, it's so lovely to see that you're so happy and everything.
How did the two of you meet?
Seriously, outside an Apple store.
It was a busy Saturday.
I had to go to the Apple store, and I start heading to the back,
and I see this man dressed in camo.
He was just smiling at me and I thought, "I think that's Robin Williams."
And I thought, "All right, I'm just gonna go and say hi."
I had camo pants on and she said, "How's that camo working for you?"
"Really good, obviously, you saw it."
We just started talking and we had the connection of 12 step stuff.
You know, we both had crazy drug and alcohol days earlier in our lives.
He knew enough information to be able to find me,
if he wanted to, you know, I'm one of the regular 12 step meetings.
The next Tuesday night,
I was at my regular thing.
I looked around the room, I didn't see him. I thought, "Oh, well."
Midway through the meeting I turned around,
and, uh, there he... there he was in the back of the room.
Then I turned around real quick and thought, "Oh my God, he's here."
Well, it was, kind of sweet and then I was like off and running.
It was wonderful.
He told me he met this girl, and she knocked him out.
Well, he told me he was in love.
You know, men don't usually say that to each other.
My partner in crime who we've been walking clean and sober together,
and enjoying all the rawness and authenticity of life together.
Like here. This is Susan and Robin and it was great you know.
It was like a, "I'm going to raise up. Let me lift myself up to love."
We just had a theme, a way of approaching life that was so in sync.
We just were like two little kids.
We were looking at the world together,
you know, almost like through each other's eyes.
That was like having a best friend, you know,
where you could really explore life together.
Yeah, we dated for about four years.
We'd had promise rings that we'd worn for a year already.
Doesn't everybody do promise rings? I don't know.
We knew we wanted to get married.
October 22nd, 2011,
it was storybook.
Wow. I'm just picturing him. Um...
He sure looked good.
A part of my wedding vows was really all about...
loving him as he is.
I've no desire to change this man.
And you had your honeymoon in Paris?
- Oh, it was wonderful. - Yeah?
The great thing is in Paris, all the paparazzi
are like wildlife photographers.
Obviously you look over there like, Robin, kiss her.
Lift up her skirt. No, get away from me.
Kiss her, kiss her, do it now.
The comedian will now attempt to kiss the tall woman.
He had come home from
A Night at the Museum.
He was basically home for a week.
He was absolutely exhausted.
We were looking at a week of testing.
The calendar was just booked.
So, we had this day at the beginning of it all.
I said, you know, "Why don't we go out
"to Tennessee Valley, go on a walkabout there,"
which we loved. We just loved our walks.
This is when I realized
my honey had never ever been on a picnic.
It was a pretty windy day.
But as we got out there, there weren't a lot of people
and, um,
it was so nice
to have space around us
in nature.
We went over to the rocks and, um,
ate our sandwiches and it was just us
and it was peaceful.
It was one of those moments in the midst of this
frenzy of trying to find out what's going on.
Like the drum beat was getting more and more.
And he was depleted.
He was so...
so depleted.
And, uh...
he just put his head down in my lap,
you know, and I just, I just stroked his hair and...
He just laid in my lap for like,
couple hours.
Well, the guy was tired.
So, the first time that Robin came into my shop,
it was in 1983
and it was shortly after John Belushi died.
When John Belushi passed away...
it devastated Robin.
John was crazier than anybody,
and, but man, did he pay the price
and, and, you know,
it hit him like a sheet of cold ice.
He pulled out of a dive.
He stopped everything,
but white wine for one year
and he didn't go to AA.
And I mean, "Wow how are you doing this?"
And he goes, "Just because I have to," you know.
He didn't want to die.
Then of course, he'd always been
really physical, you know, he was an athlete,
he was a good athlete.
He took up cycling.
And he started riding more and more
and we started seeing him more and more.
You are a keen cyclist?
Yes, sir. I am a bike sexual.
Yes, sir. I like to ride the bike.
I mean for me, it's my meditation.
It's what I do. I can, uh,
get on my bike and ride about,
sometimes 20 miles, sometimes 40, or 50 miles
and it's great. It's beautiful.
He said that,
you know, cycling was the closest thing to flying
and it allowed him
to free himself
from all the things that went on in his mind
because his mind was so active, right?
Robin and running and biking
was always in struggle.
You know, you have to push yourself,
you have to challenge yourself.
And Robin as an artist,
challenged himself to do roles
that were like,
stretching himself.
He wanted to prove that he wasn't just a comedic actor,
he was an actor.
When you're improvising, you're going out looking.
I'd be going and talking to flowers and how are you doing? Please cough.
You know, when you're playing like that, you're going out.
But by stopping that, you force the energy to implode
and you find, you can explore yourself.
Either memories or different emotions.
Oh, Captain, my captain.
Sit down, Mister...
Dead Poets Society almost didn't happen
because they really just wanted him to do it.
The writer asked me...
"How could we get Robin
"to reconsider this and maybe do this?"
I said, "Well, you need to involve him
"in the creative process
"and at least give him a voice
"in choosing the director."
I said, "Make him a short list."
But Peter Weir was at the top of it
and he said, "I'm in, if you can get Peter Weir."
And it happened.
Thank you, boys.
Yeah, he gave me a sweet gift and, um,
and I mean...
When he's looking at the yearbook
from when he was a student.
Gentlemen.
We were just looking in your old annual.
Oh, my God.
- Then the kids... - No, it's not...
...show him this yearbook.
He gets down on his knees and just...
No, it's not me.
Stanley "the toll" Wilson.
Stanley "the tool" Wilson.
Which was his nickname for me.
What was the dead poets society?
So, I'm sitting with him at the premiere
next to the heads of Disney
and he was smiling and he wouldn't look at me.
But I started crying when this came on
and that was his thank you to me for helping.
And he was brilliant.
Invincible just like you feel.
The world is their oyster.
He always wanted to push himself. He did.
And I think that's incredibly admirable
because you don't have to do that.
When you're wealthy and famous
and people, the world over love you
and want you to make them laugh.
We liked to go play basketball
with a local group
that helps develop mentally disabled adults.
His neurologist, who also attends that,
had, um, not seen him since December,
when the suspicion about his, uh...
the shaking of his hand was, you know it was...
keep an eye on it, but at that point
it was so minimal maybe it's because of this previous shoulder injury.
Well, basically that night, um,
that doctor made a visual diagnosis
from way across court.
All he knew was that we were going to be going in to see the GP.
When he was told he had Parkinson's...
and they're saying it's early to mild
and, you know, that's great.
So, okay, we get on medications,
we'll figure this out, you know, you'll get it adjusted.
They were saying ten good years.
I could see he wasn't buying it.
Robin got to ask
these questions, um,
which at the time seems like...
you know...
He asked, "Am I, um...
"Do I have Alzheimer's?
"Do I have dementia?
"Am I schizophrenic?"
And the answers were, no, no and no.
The real depth of these symptoms,
he only knew,
the rest of us were working with what we could.
In Robin's case, there was a focus on his movement.
But I think internally for Robin,
this was only a tiny part
of the symptoms that he was experiencing.
Another very early feature of dementia
with Lewy Bodies is visual hallucinations.
They often believe that these
hallucinations are real.
So, for Robin learning that he had Parkinson's disease
was not enough.
He's an old friend of mine
and a former classmate at Julliard School in New York,
Robin Williams.
- You gotta keep that. Here you go. - Looky there!
Or is somebody's fantasy.
Robin and Christopher were very good friends.
Christopher was a preppy from New England, and that was our
slightly younger brother.
And the three of us were, you know, brother Williams,
brother Wilson and brother Reeve.
Christopher, we went to see him when he first had this accident.
He just had the accident and...
there were people making decisions whether or not to keep him,
you know, on life support.
Robin went in disguised as a doctor
in the emergency room.
I said, I was a Russian proctologist
and most of the other doctors, "Oh, no."
and he looked up at me going, "Hey, brother, what's up?"
And I said, "Would you mind, I'm just going to do a brief exam,
"like what you said if you feel two fingers, it's your luck."
You know, and he laughed
and he said, "Hey, brother, what's happening?"
And it was that idea of even in the face of that.
And it helped. I mean, he,
you know, he's an extraordinary guy.
First one to show up down in Virginia when I was really in trouble.
He came here to Kessler one afternoon and just...
Thank God I wear a seatbelt on this chair
because I would have fallen out laughing.
When Christopher, we went to see him when he first had this accident,
we both talked and said, "I never knew he was strong,"
and Robin didn't either. And he says,
"I don't think I could go through that"
"and I wouldn't want to," you know.
He looked very frail
when he came back from the museum picture.
He used to come over like, every afternoon.
He'd sit in the chair right at the corner.
He'd mumble along
about it but...
he never described the severity to me
of losing everything.
I'd trick him even when he got depressed,
I'd say, "Well, a lot of times
"I want to jump off the roof."
"Really?" He'd say.
But I said, "Yeah."
I said, "You can't jump off the roof because...
"you can't leave Susan alone."
And as soon as I got anywhere near saying that and he would go,
"Ooh. Ooh."
Admiration all the time,
that's the thing he kept getting
over to me all the time and saying,
"Now, I finally got it right."
So, he saw a tremendous irony...
in getting sick.
He had these introspective moments.
And a lot of depression
as it approached,
but he didn't verbalize that to me
and, uh...
he just wasn't laughing a lot.
People believe that there is psychology
and then there's neuroscience
and they're not the same.
But in fact it's all related
to how our brain circuits are working.
This is very hard for our society to understanding and grapple with
because we have a different way of thinking
about psychiatric disease.
There's not a realization
that the chemical changes in the brain
are responsible for the psychiatric symptoms.
Lewy Body Disease, it is brain circuits
that cause troubles
that people assume are, you know, behavioral,
not potentially related to a disease.
Someone has Parkinson's disease and they have shaking
and they can't walk.
Then, oh, that's clearly a disease.
But in fact it's pure semantics.
There's no difference.
It's just different circuits are being affected.
It flows over someone like a massive wave,
no matter how moral,
ethical, good,
brilliant someone is.
When they get, you know, disease
of the magnitude of dementia with Lewy Bodies,
they get very sick
and they change enormously in a psychiatric way.
It affects sleep very early.
This is another very hard part of Lewy Body Disease.
When they're asleep, they suddenly act out their dreams,
we call REM behavior.
They can strike out during a dream
and actually hit people at night.
The lack of sleep had been building
very intensely since December.
He's thrashing at night now,
which is a Parkinsonian type symptom.
So, now,
what was happening, you know when you first fall asleep,
like, you start to go deep pretty quick if you're tired?
He would go,
"Honey, what did you think about..."
Like in a daytime voice, he was loud.
No one was getting sleep.
It was impossible because the delusional looping.
And then the degree to which the paranoia
came in, it was so drastic.
He's just going from room to room,
literally watching me,
he's making a lot of phone calls
and texting people and questioning.
I'm sure. I know it was a lot about questioning
my loyalty to him.
And then I'm like back in the studio
and he's watching me
and he's standing there in a frozen stance.
And he wasn't moving.
And then he'd come out of it
and he was so upset with himself.
There were other scenes going on for him.
There were other ideas about us.
What part of this is...
is freewill?
He had this awareness
of what he was doing and that pained him
because he knew it wasn't us, it wasn't right.
There's that core of that person
that is still completely maintained
and they struggle with this
and they struggle with how they're changing
and, you know, they often don't
have a good logical conclusion about it.
So, it's very hard.
Robin is, um, not getting enough sleep.
The therapists are like, "Not getting sleep can be really dangerous."
When we were told to, um,
to sleep apart because he needed to get sleep
he came to me and he said...
"Does this mean we're separated?"
For someone so brilliant to say something like that.
Such a mismatch of reality.
Five minutes later...
he was back
and he realized,
no, we're in love and we're married.
There's no...
I'm not leaving him.
Robin was in the house visiting and...
he wanted me to look out the back window,
look at our boat dock and our boats
and get a different view.
And so, he looked out the back window,
here, out of our sun room,
he stood there and stood there,
and stood there
for about 10-12 minutes motionless.
Didn't say a word. Just stood there and looked.
For the longest period of time. Way too long.
I finally said, "Robin, let's go back outside."
In the middle of the storm,
we kept trying to stay in the center.
By now though, we were seeing the therapists every day,
it's bike rides, it's 12 step work.
Meditating together helped a little bit.
We went to a hypnotist at Stanford.
And God bless the man, he did everything.
I would come in the room, and he would be sitting there
doing this thing and it was part of the deal
to like, hypnotize yourself.
Kind of worked, a little bit.
But it would always be temporary.
But he would keep trying.
He was a freaking warrior.
The way that he was able
to battle the inner turmoils, the inner fears.
He was blessed with what his heart was capable of,
in the midst of fear.
You go your whole life never knowing how you look
and then, there you are.
You get hungry, you get stupid,
you get shot and die.
Then you get this quick glimpse of how you look to others,
to the world around you. It's never what you thought.
He could do what nobody else could do.
He'd do what very few artists have ever been able to do.
He was just... he was beautiful.
I remember, the day I found out I was thrilled.
Robin Williams is going to come do
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.
He's the tiger.
The fact is, tigers are atheists.
All of us unabashed.
Heaven and Hell, these are just metaphorical constructs
which represent hungry and not hungry.
I would see him waiting after the play,
after we'd come out from a two hour and 20 minute show
and he's waiting for every single person
to get their picture and to sign their playbill.
And I learned patience, and I learned compassion.
He's everything you want from a fellow artist.
- Hey, Kellen. - Looking hot in the green room.
He'd go in and extend these mercy calls
to the comedians in the green room.
They all looked upon him as a hero,
and he's more than generous.
Wait, can we get you doing the guy who hit our car today?
- Please? - No! Dude! No.
- Nothing. - Dude, you hit my rental car, man.
No, dude. I did but nothing happened.
- That was like before and nothing happened. - That's so silly.
Do you have insurance, maybe?
Oh, not at all, thanks.
That last bike ride with Robin,
I asked him at the beginning of the ride, "You look beat."
"Are you sure you're okay for a ride? You look exhausted"
He said no, he needed it. He really needed it
and was ready to do it.
But it was clear he was off,
off in a way he had not ever been off before.
Much slimmer, just sort of not there.
Couple of times he was over in the lane way more than
he should have been. Way more toward the center of the lane.
He asked a lot of weird questions,
seemed oddly distracted.
Turned around and he'd say stuff like, "What time you got, boss?"
Never asked me that on a ride ever before.
I'd say, "I don't know, we left it one, we're halfway through 1:30?"
"Thanks, boss."
Thirty seconds later. "What time do you got, boss?"
Forty-five seconds later. The same question again.
There were several other questions he asked that were odd and didn't make sense.
Um, something along the lines, I think we should maybe getting back and we took
one loop, we're getting back, that kind of stuff.
Before you notice it, he started to leave me,
he just was 20 yards and then 40 then 100.
This has never happened in the ride.
And all of a sudden he was a hundred and some yards and I couldn't catch him.
I busted butt to catch up.
I couldn't do it. But he pedaled all the way to the house,
and we get to the house and he said,
"Hope you don't mind, boss, but I got to get in today.
"I got stuff to do." And I said, "Fine." And he hustled in the house.
Uncharacteristically, around 9:30 in the evening,
Carol noticed Robin and Leonard standing out front,
I went outside and I asked if everything was okay.
And he said, "Yes, I'm okay."
Just sort of a pat answer.
And then he said, "Boss, I really need a hug."
And so I gave him a hug.
And he started to cry at that point, put his head down.
So I put my arm around his shoulder, but then
I asked him, "Robin, Robin, are you okay?
"Is anything wrong that I could help?
"Are you in pain?"
He said, uh, "No, boss."
He talked about family and what was going on
in his life and some things that
I think he felt I would keep private.
It took about 15 minutes. He said, "Bye, boss."
I said, "I'll see you tomorrow."
And he walked home.
We were going to try and get to bed at a decent hour.
And we stayed up for a little while, which is what we did that week.
When sleeping apart it's like, well,
we'd stay in our bed together until it was time to go to sleep.
Again, I'd read to him, then it was just time for sleep
and he, uh... he went into his office,
which is right by our room and he went back there a couple of times to get things,
and I saw he had his iPad and I thought,
"This is really good because he hasn't wanted to read
"or do any, you know, anything in a long time."
We just said good night to each other. "Good night, my love."
We'd been meditating every morning together.
So, when I got up and he wasn't up yet,
I thought, "Oh my God, the door's still closed.
"He's sleeping, he's sleeping, this is really good."
His assistant showed up because they had some work stuff to go over
and I had to take off and I just told her, I said,
you know, "Just text me when he's awake."
Apparently he had slept in.
And they couldn't figure out why he was sleeping in because it wasn't him. Right?
And they tried to go in the room and it was locked.
Then I got a text saying...
"He's not up, what should I do?"
I knew... I just knew there was something terribly, terribly wrong,
that wasn't right, and I just texted,
"Wake him up immediately and call me back."
She called me back.
Susan had just come back.
Dan and Rebecca were outside the house.
The police were showing up and they didn't know what was going on.
Sister came in the kitchen and said, "How are you?"
And I said, "I'm fine." She goes, "Oh, so you... Oh my God, you don't know?"
And then she told me, you know.
I was just sitting with a tsunami of grief.
I'm driving back, on this day three years ago. And a reporter
from a tabloid called me on my phone.
I don't even know how they got my number.
And they said, "Do you have any comments about the death
"of your friend, Robin Williams, by suicide?"
And I threw my goddamned phone across the car and kept driving.
I remember very distinctly, we were standing out front
and you could hear a helicopter coming.
He said, "Okay, here they come."
The whole Bay Area felt like a sledge hammer
hit it in the head that day and New York too and Hollywood and everywhere.
It was like a war zone, helicopter circling,
news vans pulling up their big satellite dishes
and they're all setting up cameras.
They're knocking on our door asking for comment.
It got pretty crazy around here.
The global media descended on this little cul-de-sac.
How everybody just wanted their piece.
We felt that it was a huge invasion of privacy.
This was a horrifically tragic event to happen
to normal people that are our neighbors.
We also had fans of Robin's
that just wanted to come and pay tribute
and they would stand peacefully in front of his house and lay
flowers down and just pay their respects.
You know, it's like really having...
a limb or something ripped from you and you can't heal it right away.
I remember walking out of that facility down the steps outside
and feeling the last year and a half
of really hard work that my husband and I went through.
I had the beginning of an answer.
I started digging in for about the next year.
You can't come back from Lewy Body Dementia.
There is no cure. Depression, you can come back from.
He had come back from that earlier in life.
Clumsy as it was, not in the right state of mind due to the tricks
that the disease plays on you and the lack of sleep and everything.
But I think he just probably somewhere in his brain has decided,
"I don't want to bring everybody down with me.
"I don't want to spend a year or two going down this path."
Maybe he didn't have quite that level of consciousness. But knowing Robin,
"I want to ride my bike. I want to be with my beautiful wife. I want to do comedy."
These things will probably all be off the books in a very short time.
I just know that he finally one day said,
"I'm not going to go where this is taking me."
But he's just so joyous. And then there would've been no joy in his life.
No, he wasn't ready to go. He wasn't ready to go at all.
And he stuck around longer than he felt like it. I mean, I just know him
because he wasn't ready to say goodbye to Susan or to life.
You know, when someone gets sick like that because it's so confusing.
It's not their heart that's sick.
It's the mainframe, it's the computer,
and that's very different,
very different.
Lewy body gives nobody a chance to prepare.
The psychiatry is the disease. It's the manifestation of the disease in the brain stem.
I think in this country, this is a big problem, that mental health
and neurology are seen as separate.
In fact, it's all abnormalities of brain circuits
when your brain is not functioning to allow you to be a fulfilled human being.
So there's a tendency to blame people for their behaviors
and their illness, and a certain mindset around disease
that people are responsible for their own disease. They aren't.
I think there's a blame-free world, just like when someone has cancer,
no blame.
Robin Williams' widow is speaking out about the beloved comedian's...
Speaking out for the first time since he took his life...
Susan Williams is breaking her silence.
It's been a year since his death. I see you're still wearing your wedding ring.
- How're you doing? - I'm doing okay.
It's been a year of grieving.
Uh, and it's been a year of
really trying to get to the bottom of what killed my husband.
Susan Schneider Williams wrote an editorial for the journal Neurology...
For her first TV interview since writing about Robin's health struggles.
People think your husband killed himself because he was depressed.
Everyone thought that he died from suicide,
from depression. But that wasn't the case?
No, Robin did not die from depression.
Robin had a deadly disease and it's called Lewy Body Dementia.
Everybody deals with grief in their own way.
The part that needs the focus and attention is,
let's cure this disease. No one should have to go through that.
No one should have to feel the level of pain that Robin felt.
And he's one of millions.
But what she's done, is educating
everyone that cares to know what really happened,
the real story about his last year.
Autopsy reports diagnosed Williams with diffuse Lewy Body Dementia.
Lewy Body Dementia.
To a form of dementia, he had what's known as Lewy Body Dementia.
Which was discovered only after his death.
When you don't have a diagnosis and you're going down
these trails of trying to find out what's going on, that is scary.
The terror of where's this coming from?
Robin asked, "Do I have dementia,
"am I schizophrenic?"
And okay now, right? Is that clear or not?
This is what other families are going through.
An example of what's going on in many of these lives.
Having a diagnosis...
would've meant everything.
Doing the press for that last movie was really,
I mean, it was very complicated emotionally
and to be really blunt, I'm really proud of the fact that
there were 200 people on that set every day,
and not one of them
spoke to anyone ever about the struggles we saw Robin enduring.
But it no longer feels loyal to be silent about it,
but maybe more loyal to share without shame,
without secrecy that, yeah, this guy was hurting.
He was going through something that he didn't have a name for yet.
And it doesn't bring Robin back, but it does give clarity.
Because a completely new variable was entered
late into the equation of Robin Williams' life, which ended his life.
The Robin that we watched all those years,
the man who put himself out there,
the man who went overseas to entertain troops,
the man who would entertain the crews on the sets,
the man who would hug and hold on to his friends.
That was very real.
After he left, in his bedside table there was a few items,
just a few things. And every once in a while, I would pull that drawer open,
um...
when I missed him, and just wanted him to tell me something.
I opened up that book and I was like, "Wow."
And I remember that when we were talking about what we wanted to
be able to leave as our legacy.
And for Robin, it was that, that he wanted to help people be less afraid.
When you get to know Robin, just as our friend and our neighbor,
like all of us knew him.
That's one thing. But when you actually, there's a realization
about the impact that he had on a global basis.
The last scene for the Night at the Museum franchise
is Robin and Ben Stiller saying goodbye,
and knowing that they are probably not going to see each other again.
That was the scene.
We didn't realize that that was real life.
It's time for your next adventure.
I have no idea what I'm going to do tomorrow.
How exciting.
Goodbye, Teddy.
Farewell, Lawrence.
If you saw his movies,
Robin's movies, you saw one side of Robin.
But the biggest blessing is who he was as a human being.
He was a loving soul and that was who he was.
He was totally open, you know.
And he understood the bigness of love.
Oh, man. This guy, I mean, I feel him around all the time.
There'll be a moment when I just burst out laughing.
I hear his voice in my ear.
It's just one of the joys of my life, if not the,
I mean, that was the best friend I ever had.
You know what I mean? Truly, it was just the time.
It was the ride of a life, man
I just love him so much.
Yeah, there's a sadness and then you have to go.
Then there's also hope. Sadness, it's always like
you wish they hadn't happened, but they did.
And the purpose is to make you different.
It's what they call the Buddhist gift.
It's that idea of
you're back and you realize the thing that matters are others,
way beyond yourself.
Self goes away, ego bye-bye.
You realize there are a lot of amazing people out there
to be grateful for, and a loving God.
Other than that, good luck.
That's what life is about.
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