I am only one of countless millions who were shocked and saddened by the death, apparently by suicide, of Robin Williams. I grew up listening to his comedy albums (to the point where I can recite some of his bits verbatim) and watching him on television, and as an adult I enjoyed many of his movies. I was even fortunate enough to see him live a few years ago when he popped in unannounced for a quick set at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village. He was, as you’d expect, quick, manic, and hysterically funny.
I am also only one of many whose initial reaction was “why!?” He was a brilliant comic and a talented actor. He was loved by millions, respected by his peers, awash in awards and affirmation, and certainly very well to do. From the outside it’s natural to look at someone like Robin Williams and, even while acknowledging the stresses and the critics he certainly faced, and say “he had so much good, how could he kill himself? How could he possibly not be happy?”
The follow-up to these gut-level questions is a bit of fore-brain: we’ve seen this before. We have borne witness to celebrities, at the pinnacle of their art and careers, adored by millions, who nevertheless killed themselves. Kurt Cobain is an example that first comes to mind. Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway are on that list. In the same category fall those who died of (presumably accidental) drug overdoses: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, River Phoenix, Chris Farley, John Belushi, Janis Joplin. All brilliant talents, beloved all over the world, yet there was something within them that led to their self-destruction.
The television series Law and Order, in its first year, had a brief scene that fed me an indelible bit of life-wisdom. Detective Logan (a young Chris Noth) was commenting to Sergeant Greevey (played by George Dzundza and only appeared in Season 1) how he couldn’t understand the behavior and infidelity of one of the people involved in a crime. Greevey replied with something like “Me? I don’t judge. You never know someone else’s story.” While the exact words he uttered may be lost to memory, the sentiment stuck like glue.
It’s very easy, far too easy, to look at someone’s life or someone’s action from outside and pass a quick judgment. It’s so natural it seems instinctual, yet rationally it makes no sense to presume that we have enough information to warrant that quick judgment. Even the most overexposed celebrities cross our consciousness for only minutes at a time and only every so often (days, weeks, months may go by between the times we notice them), but they are themselves and live their lives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for decades. When considered so, it is incredibly presumptuous to look at Robin Williams’s suicide and denounce him for it because he was rich, famous, talented and beloved. We don’t know his story, we don’t know what’s been going on in his head for the past weeks or months or years, we don’t know what surrounded him every day of his recent life. How can we make any conclusion about him without any of that information?
We can extend this consideration to other judgments we are prone to making. In the celebrity world, we pass judgment and take sides on drug arrests, divorces, who’s dating who and the Kardashians. We presume that Paris Hilton is an airhead. Step outside that world, but remain with public figures, and we conclude that Dan Quayle’s an idiot, that Derek Jeter is a wonderful human being, that the Koch brothers are either liberty-loving philanthropists or evil-incarnate despoilers of the Earth. Day-to-day, we see a couple and wonder “what’s she doing with him” or “what’s he doing with her?” Friends and acquaintances get married and we might wonder “what in the world are they thinking?” Other friends or acquaintances get divorced and we might instantly take sides and proclaim “we saw that coming,” or have the opposite reaction and say “what happened, everything seemed perfect?”
We might even be right in everything we surmise. We might be absolutely correct in concluding that Mel Gibson is a bigot, or that Lindsay Lohan is a spoiled and self-indulged train wreck. We might have correctly predicted that our friend was dating someone who was going to break his or her heart. Being right, though, doesn’t validate a snap judgment based on incomplete information, nor does it necessarily offer an accurate portrayal of the person as a whole. More importantly, being right doesn’t justify the intrusion.
This isn’t to say that we should never judge. If we see a friend heading down a bad path, if his drinking is out of control, if her choice of boyfriend is a disaster in the making, it may be proper to say something, to speak of what we see and share what we’ve concluded. The message, the lesson behind Sergeant Greevey’s observation is that we should judge from a position of humility and with awareness of the incompleteness of our information.
Nor can we say that these judgments can be banished from our brains. Our guts will always send them unbidden into our consciousnesses, and only then can we decide if we want to deny them space in our gray matter. Sergeant Greevey’s words burned into my brain over two decades ago, but heeding them is a perpetual effort.
Matthew writes “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” This is an extension of the Golden Rule, that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself. Do we want others to pass judgment and draw conclusions about us without knowing the whole story? While I don’t care one whit what a stranger I’ll never see again thinks of me, this indifference doesn’t mean I welcome it, and as a basis for living a moral and peaceful life, “you never know someone else’s story” has a lot going for it.
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