Remembering Robin Williams (1951 - 2014)(Charles E.J. Moulton) REMEMBERING ROBIN WILLIAMS (1951 – 2014)

A dedication to a wonderful soul
& a reminder of the lessons we have to learn

By Charles E.J. Moulton


Something happened to me when Robin Williams committed suicide on Monday, the 11th of August, 2014. I was in my car on the way to Zülpich’s National Garden Festival in mid Germany. My wife and daughter were looking forward to some fine days in a beautiful theme park, walking through a green place filled with shows displaying flying eagles and owls (one of which my daughter got to feed), enjoying themed garden sections, using sport attractions and looking across fabulous views of gorgeous lakes.

The radio announcer on the hourly news show told us in a neutral tone that the Oscar- winning, wealthy witty genius of a man had hung himself in his bedroom. I felt like dying. A bit of me withered away. No, it was more than that. I immediately contacted him.
Yes, I contacted him.
My soul reached out and tried to find him.

It is just my personality, my style, my intuition, my gut feeling. Sending the text messages of the soul to someone, asking him if he is okay. I must have an inborn quality or character trait, maybe from an earlier life, that tells me that when a person dies I can speak to them, regardless of where I am or where they are in creation. Something of what I send out always arrives. They are always there and what draws them to me are my thoughts.

Now you might think: “There are millions of people who love or think of Robin Williams. Why would he want to be with me?” The question is: “Why not?”
The thing we have to understand is that a soul that has left the body is capable of being in many places at once. That becomes clear in the book “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsch. That is also the reason why so many people talk to Jesus and why he can listen to so many people’s prayers.

Now, we can really trust that. When we talk to these souls, we feel their energy. That is more than just endorphins and hormones and genes. We notice that because it changes us. We really gather a special strength from the soul that we are thinking of. We notice that by the fact that we make decisions that this person would make in his best moments.

A car doesn’t work without a gasoline. In this case, the gasoline is the soul.
The heart might be the motor, folks, but what actually makes it drive is the soul: the gasoline of the body is the soul. The soul weighs something, guys, and it has an aura, radiance and magnetism. It is also much bigger than the part of you that is here in this existence.

I cried when Robin died. At least, inside me I cried. My good buddy from my childhood days. Me, little Charlie, eating pop-corn in front of “Mork & Mindy” and laughing my socks off over his “Nanoo-Nanoo:” those were the days. My professional role model while studying music and acting and performing was Robin Williams. His brilliant talent of mixing comedy with serious drama inspired me. He would make you cry one moment, only to make you laugh the next. Robin moved me, inspired me. His love of life made me dream big dreams of making it as an actor.

Robin is a part of my life.

Now, my instinct is to speak to the soul that just has departed. I deliberately say that, because I don’t believe the deceased are dead. They are just somewhere else. I know that once they enter this new reality they are indeed capable of following the train of thought that lead them to people who are thinking of them.

Do these thoughts resemble the boy's thoughts in the movie “The Sixth Sense” who said he could see dead people?
I don’t know.

I just know that I have psychic abilities and that it is wonderful to be able to relate to departed souls. The souls of the departed also answer me in their own special way. Is that my imagination? Well, again I mention the book “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsch. Neale asked God if his conversation actually was a dialogue with God or just a figment of his own imagination. God answered him: “Does it matter?”

The fact is that speaking to Robin gives me strength and that definite results come out of my conversations with him or with any departed soul for that matter: results like this article. Something inspires me to write this. I don’t know who or what does. Clear is that I am writing with someone actually sitting behind me a breathing inspiration into my soul.

My experience tells me that it indeed is a part of Robin that is here and helping me. After all, I take the desperation he felt seriously; I try to feel his pain. I know what pain feels like, I have suffered myself, I have been lonely myself. So I reach out with my mind and ask him, like I would ask any friend: “Robin, how did this happen?”

Most of the time, he answers me: “Well, I was in a lot of spiritual pain. I was incredibly lonely and afraid. I felt misunderstood and battled with all kinds of things and I thought there was no way out.”

Is it him saying these things or just me?
I don’t know.
I have read a lot about what had happened to him: his Parkinson’s Disease, his divorce, his addictions, his battles with fear, his heart attack. I invited his soul, a soul that joined me after I heard the sad news on the radio, to the National Garden Festival.

Funny thing, though. Shortly before I arrived at the Festival, I again heard in the radio that Lauren Bacall had died. Two Hollywood legends dying within the same week, one from natural causes, the other one from non-natural causes. That reminded me of Princess Diana dying in 1997 and Mother Teresa passing a week later. Two advocates of world peace dying within the same week. Now, two actors had died, also within the same week. Coincidence? I don’t know. Maybe they were spiritually related. They did have the same profession and I am sure they socialized or even worked together in some form.

So, I invited Lauren in for the ride. She told me many things, speaking to me in her mind with her fantastic husky voice, many of which I really cannot say if they were true: her house in Vermont, her rose garden, her marriage, that she had been associated with a man who owned an eagle once. All of that might’ve been my own imagination, sure. But it sure was nice to talk to her.

Mind you, I don’t blabber to myself aloud during these conversations. The conversations are internal. They all happens inside me, while I am paying for tickets, buying my daughter ice-cream, discussing with my wife, saying hello to bus drivers and accountants and waiters. Hell, I am crazy, but I still manage to maintain and manage an organized and successful lifestyle. By the way, I really don’t know what crazy is. Maybe being crazy is pretty cool. To come to think of it, crazy is hot.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Robin in his bedroom and I saw him laying that belt around his neck and pulling it and it broke my heart. Really, writing it now breaks my heart. But I know that he is okay somewhere. I know it.
I saw a picture of him by his dining room table and his dog Leonard that he posted on Twitter in my mind’s eye. I heard that he had been alone in his bedroom for a very long time before anyone noticed he was there or even sat there dead.

A fantastic man like that, one of the finest people that ever lived, comic genius, giving happiness to millions, respected, beloved, wealthy – and incredibly lonely and battling depression. How is that possible?

Then, after many sleepless nights, that sad image of my dear pal Robin alone in his bedroom repeating in my mind on an insane loop, it hit me. The incredible thing is that I have seen it before. Humans have unusually high respect for famous people. So much so that the famous people sometimes end up lonely, because nobody dares to speak to them. How do you approach a famous person like that? Just like you would approach anyone: with respect.

The German entertainment icon Helge Schneider performed at the theater I work in, in a city called Gelsenkirchen in Germany. During the show, he was caught standing by himself with absolutely no one speaking to him.
“It seems that they are afraid of you,” my stage-hand colleague Timo finally told him, daring to start a conversation with the celebrity.

Helge smiled knowingly and answered him: “Yes, it seems that way.”

The myth is that celebrities are so happy, so rich, so successful, so adored, so Twittered, Facebooked, Linked-In and About Me’d that they have reached absolute happiness. But as Per Gessle of the band Roxette once said: “You work all your life to become famous, but when you are famous it is always different than you think.”

Robin brought his daughter Zelda to bed just like I brought my daughter to bed just now. I am sure of it. Robin cooked Spaghetti with his family on Saturday afternoons just like I do with my family. I am sure of it. Robin was a struggling artist once, living on minimal wage, just like I was a struggling artist once, living on minimal wage.

Souls are souls. People are people.

The image of Robin sitting by his dining room table in his house, eating dinner with his dog Leonard is daunting, mainly because it is so normal. Here is just a guy playing tricks with his dog and posting the picture on Twitter.

The huge difference, though, is that Robin had millions of followers on Twitter. I have 1021. Other than that, it is basically the same thing.

There is a picture in a coffee-table-book dedicated to Michael Jackson on my bookshelf. In the photo, Michael is waiting to go on stage and has no idea that a camera is pointed at him. There are no big smiles, no storm of paparazzi photographers. He is just another guy concentrating on his show, thinking of his dance moves, remembering his text, waiting to go on the stage. In the background, I repeat: background, we see 70 000 people cheering. The soul is always present, private, personal, individual. Big star? In your soul, no.

I have heard big stars tell me that there is nothing lonelier than coming to an empty hotel room after a successful show. Somehow, that kind of success is virtual: fans screaming your name, asking for your autograph. It is wonderful and wonderfully insane. All you want to do is share that with someone or go home and hug your wife. But if your wife is not there? Perhaps you share it with the bottle.

When Robin filmed in Alaska, he was lonely and he began drinking again. He battled with loneliness. Of course it got worse when he divorced his wife of 19 years. His heart attack was another blow. Still, he was forced to keep his spirits up and produce amazing results for a million dollar audience. When his recent TV-show didn’t reach the level of popularity he had hoped for, things must’ve gotten out of hand. I know how it feels to play a show when all you actually want to do is cry. Somehow, you get through it. But it ain’t funny.

On the night before he died, he really spent the night alone. His wife was apparently in the house, but slept in another room. It must’ve been daunting. I really feel for his family and what they have to go through. Now, I am not here to act like paparazzi reporters act and analyze someone’s private life. I am an actor myself and I know that being a public personality means giving a part of yourself away. The misunderstanding of what fame is or what the so called famous people are – those are the relevant problems we should discuss. Success is basically, or should be, a reward for hard work, regular professionals with astounding adamancy to reach their goals.

Everyone is unique. Everyone eats, sleeps, cooks, cleans up, chats, writes, and telephones, has doubts and worries, laughs, cries, yawns and sneezes. To think that celebrities or even kings and pharaohs are exempt from these normal human and actually spiritual mechanisms is like thinking that a photo model does not need love just because she is beautiful.

People are souls, human beings. The soul is happy about being successful, but also concerned with normal things, like taking the kids to school and making dinner. Meryl Streep once said that she was so happy to come home from the film set after work, just because there were normal things to take care of.

We should care for each other. We should ask each other, whether we are celebrities or not, if we can help each other in any way. We should respect each other as unique individuals who all need love. All of us do. Are we kings? Stage-hands? Plumbers? Doctors? Does it matter? No, we are all unique and we all have feelings. Artists inspire. Our sociological and spiritual functions cannot be overestimated. We breathe hope into the world. In actual fact, we are all basically artists and we all need each other.

Robin was known all across the globe as a friendly man, one who never uttered a bad word to anyone. He was warm hearted, funny and extremely vibrant. He was loved and respected in the Bay Area, socializing easily and casually with normal day-to-day citizens as a part of the community.

The wonderful stories that are told about the chance meetings with him warm the heart: kids bumping in to him and Robin reacting with a smile, someone in a supermarket asking himself if that really was Robin Williams over there and Robin reacting with a humorous: “Heavens, no! Not him!” The members of an Alcoholics Anonymous group watching “The Godfather” with him and Robin knowing every line and telling them others insider stories throughout the movie: memories like these outlast his worldly existence and have become a part of his legacy.

On set, between takes, he would apparently entertain his colleagues to such a degree that the director occasionally forgot to summon everyone for the next set-up.

In the end, Robin felt lonely and sad, he battled too many fears and too many personal issues and it just got out of hand.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it - and it really is a mission, folks - is to care for each other and make sure that less people have to endure a similar fate. I am sure we are capable of reaching a new level of spirituality and that this awareness can lead to a new era in the history of mankind. More and more people are finding new paths to finding God within themselves, building bridges between each other, filling gaps and finding trust in one another.

We have a huge task on our hands as a species: we have to start respecting and loving our individual differences and stop being afraid of how different we are. We have to realize that people are not different just because they are famous or not famous, rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight. They are unique because they are unique souls.

If you see anyone, famous or anonymous, who is suffering: please show them you care. If you are suffering: please talk to someone about or talk to God or talk to yourself or talk to Jesus or talk to Robin. He will listen. He has been there. Your departed Grandmother will listen. She has also been there. Talk to the souls that have gone before you to the next life. Don’t forget them. They are still around.

Kings are no different than artists or architects or CEOs or janitors. They are just as special as you and don’t you forget it. But, boy, is it exciting that we are so different. That means that we never stop learning, no matter how many lives we have had or will have.

If Robin’s death teaches us anything at all, then it is that we have to care for each other much more than we do and stop pretending that we are so far apart. In spite of everything, we are all one in God. Bono formulated it so well in an interview in Irish TV. He said that a tree exists perfectly in God and through God without actually having to have a stamp on it saying: “Made by God.” Of course it is. God is not a franchise. God is a part of us. He is and he always will be. God does not need taxes or fees. God is. The tree is a natural part of God just as we are natural parts of God.

Stop complaining about life and start repairing the stuff that you are complaining about.

There is hope. You just have to know how to change what you don’t like and sew something into the quilt that is your life.

Now Robin is a part of God and I hope that he sticks around for a bit before he goes on to bigger and better things. I think I heard just now that Robin is going to start a Comedy Central Show in Heaven. Jesus has apparently applied to hold the inaugural speech.

I love Jesus.

I love Robin.

I think they’ll make a great team.

They’re the kind of guys I like to hang out with.

Robin, you were and are and will always remain my everlasting professional hero.

I have learned more from you than from any acting teacher I have ever had the pleasure to have studied with. Watching one of your movies is an acting lesson in itself.

Want to know something about comic timing? Watch Robin. Want to know how to use “Sense Memory” and “Emotional Memory” in your stage work? Watch Robin.

For that I will be eternally thankful.

Now, take care of your family, big guy.

They need you.

I will be remembering Robin.

Forever.

Even in my next life.

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