Robin Williams' Son Raising Awareness for Suicide Nearly 5 Years After Father's Death
If you’ve ever known someone who has taken his or her own life, you understand that suicide isn’t an isolated experience. It ripples out, washing over everyone in close proximity — and often reaching people far away.
According to Entertainment Weekly, that was why Mariangela Abeo started the Faces of Fortitude project, a social media campaign to draw attention to both survivors of suicide and people impacted by suicide.
Abeo’s brother died by suicide, and Abeo herself attempted to take her own life after a sexual assault. To cope, she posted a self-portrait with her thoughts online.
Her vulnerability found a welcoming audience, and soon Abeo found herself posting pictures of numerous people in similar situations. Recently, she shared images of her most famous guest yet: the 36-year-old son of late comedian Robin Williams.
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According to the New York Daily News, Zachary Williams appeared as part of her Faces of Fortitude project. Through text accompanying three separate black-and-white portrait sets, he discussed the loss of his father.
Abeo found herself cowed by the thought of having such a high-profile contributor in Zachary Williams. “I prepared for days before,” she wrote on Instagram, “even venting to a dear friend moments before Zak arrived, ‘Would I make a fool of myself?'”
She needn’t have worried. After the shoot, she stated that “for 90 min, we were just two people who had lost someone and found a common ground in our pain.”
Indeed, calling it pain is the best way to describe the aftermath of death by suicide. Williams admitted that he struggled to find a way to process his father’s passing.
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“There’s no education in place to tell you how to deal with this,” he said. “To balance how to grieve privately with your family and then also to have to grieve publicly.”
Due to his father’s public profile, Williams said that he found himself “spending time on the outer layer instead of on the inside.” He ultimately discovered that external inputs didn’t help him.
He explained on Instagram, “When you’re grieving and going out into the public to seek validations, it’s very fleeting. I was seeking support outwardly and not from my family.”
Why did it prove so unsatisfying? Williams concluded that grieving for a public figure quickly fades because it’s linked to the news cycle, which flows and ebbs as new stories quickly spring up.
“Be able to differentiate what public versus private processing looks like,” he urged others who find themselves in a similar situation. “It’s something I wish I had realized for myself.”
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Williams also discovered that it was incredibly easy to turn to external inputs to numb the pain. However, he learned that he couldn’t heal until he weaned himself off of them and truly began to feel once more.
“Once I took out all the inputs and elements of self medications, it all became really raw,” he confessed on Instagram. “I had to stop thinking big and expansive to heal everyone and look inward. …
“I realized I wasn’t broken. There was a lot of strength I didn’t know was in there.”
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