Original subtitles

It's the instant high that you get from

when 10,000 people are laughing their heads off.

What's your brain doing?

What are your neurotransmitters doing?

The human brain an extraordinary

three and a half pound gland that

is like quantum neurology, quantum physiology.

That the moment you think you understand it,

it comes up with something else.

Because I don't have an act per se,

but more kind of a cesspool of consciousness, just ideas.

Moments when I'll be on a roll, or something will happen

that I'll fire off, and you can't help,

it's like being possessed, it's like channeling.

When it works it's great, and what doesn't it's painful.

But when it's working it's, it's that weird thing

about your surfing and kind of like you're in,

athletes described 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 Robins 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 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, could have done more, I should have done more.

I know something must have been terribly wrong for someone

as brilliant as Robin to justjump 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 were assuming the worst.

He's broke, or he's depressed, or he's 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 hejust 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, so a lot of that was going on.

That last evening I spent with him,

he was completely sober, and not on drugs.

Butjust most troubled by what he was going through.

I think it's important that the truth comes out because

there was 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, 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 like 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 neurodegeneration.

He wasn't in his right mind.

He described how this, with these lewy bodies

that were in nearly every region of his brain.

It makes sense why he was experiencing

what he was experiencing, cognitive 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 had 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 Robins 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.

A disease becomes progressively irreversible,

unstoppable, 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 had 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 started in Detroit but

he went to school here at redwood.

Robin could live anywhere he wanted,

and chose to live in a neighborhood.

Living in marin, which is kind of like

north of San Francisco, it's like, it's the idea.

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.

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 run into him walking his dog outside.

And you're like oh, he's a totally normal guy.

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 theater 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 will 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 alive 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 riffs on that.

His mind was just so fast.

I look out there, there's a little kid out there.

I saw a three year old kid

who could barely use a fork or a spoon.

He's eating blueberries with his hands.

And all of a sudden someone hands 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 hill.

Hi everybody on the hill.

Sermon on the mount.

Jesus at comedy day?

Jesus at comedy day.

I'll be back.

There'd be improvs wear 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 the two days

and landed in 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, good night Alice!

Out of all of every pore of his being.

And he was so happy and joyous.

Hey, go get them you little crazy guy.

I don't care what I am, I'm free.

Offer void where prohibited bylaw.

He'd go let's do that again, I could do that better.

And they'd go what do you mean you can do better?

He goes no just, let me just run it again.

I think I have an idea, you know.

And they'd go, 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 hejust 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, let's talk about her.

She's a honey, huh?

Come on, talk about the features,

her hair, her eyes, her shoes.

Be darling, be witching, beautiful.

When you're in the room with Robin, it is full go.

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, that mojo,

that ability, which was like a superpower.

I'd never seen anything like it.

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 new things.

But besides that, 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 like he didn't want to go on.

He just wasn't as eager to meet with people backstage,

or hang out too long in the green room.

It was getting a little bit briefer.

And he didn't, hejust, there were more insecurities

cropping up for him about going on stage.

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 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 performingjust as they had

for years and years, and then all of a sudden

there's some very strange thing that happens.

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.

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.

Silence.

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 propose 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.

M sauce secret sauce m

m sauce you love it sauce sauce you love it b

m Booty shake Booty shake Booty shake Booty shake m

b you didn't give me enough ketchup packets m

oh my god.

Every take would be different.

Ad-iibs, and these comic nuggets would

come from Mars, or somewhere, Robin's head.

But a lot of them were gold.

So I think that he may be 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 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

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.

When Robin would call me at 10 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?

What will you become?

We met on the day he arrived in New York City.

Robin really was different, I could see in the beginning.

Robin and Christopher reeve came into my

third year class atjulliard as advanced students.

Christopher was my roommate, and Robin became

very quickly my very best friend that I ever had.

Yeah, we were hippies from space,

and he's an Ivy league preppy.

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 tojulliard which was

classical training, but very much to be a thespian.

For me it was a wonderful thing,

number one to be in New York, but 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 as 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 on

my liege, thou cough on 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 atjulliard 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,

'cause I couldn't find acting work.

Holy city 200 was

the clubhouse 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.

But when he did that crazy stuff he did on stage,

I think it let everybody else say, well heck,

told everybody else yes, crazy stuff is acceptable.

Robin is doing this in the '70s.

I mean 10, 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 land mine had come in,

I'm not a tuna, I'm not a tuna.

Is anyone here tonight on drugs?

Okay, a quick test right now.

If you are, it's okay.

Let me ask you for a sip here, dear brother.

The reverend likes this stuff here.

He was performed at the comedy store and he was hilarious.

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 distant 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," three.

And he was he was having a panic attack.

And he could not calm himself down.

He's having such a struggle rememberingjust one line.

If you're life depended on it...

Say that, say that, believe it or not you took a town?

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.

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.

The last time I was with him I was on set,

we were doing, shooting a 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

go between takes, and I went into that room.

We talked a little bit about the scene.

And he asked a few times how's it going, is it working?

But the subtext of it was how am I doing, am I working?

His sense of security and confidence in who he was

and what he was, there was something eroding within him.

We didn't know what.

Yeah, you got to kill a little.

Because we knew he was getting tested,

he was feeling 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, time out.

I'm gonna 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.

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, his mental acumen were or 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...

She hadn't finished the question yet, Robin.

But I knew where she was going.

The new 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 swept across the entire brain stem.

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

kind of shocked that someone showed up.

Like why are you here, man?

Afghanistan's 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 have, I've got a ton of them.

A young man who 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 despair,

and how afraid that he was in going forward

that he would never have another girlfriend,

about what his life was going to be like.

And Robin pulled up the 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 we walked out, and 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 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

Robin couldn't, he couldn't get out of bed.

It was becoming more of a normal that

Robin's 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,

our dear dear friend mort sahl.

That night Robin was up.

And he started talking about he was so afraid

that mort was not gonna make it through the night.

And 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.

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 t-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 where's Robin?

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 the ticket's on me.

He goes no I don't think I can leave the house.

And that kind of scared me a little bit,

because he was serious, like yeah well 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.

But I don't, it's hard for me to talk about.

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.

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 started 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 say hi.

I had camo pants on, and she said

how's that camo working for you?

I went, really good obviously, you thought.

We just started talking and

we had the connection of 12 step stuff.

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, at 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 there he was in the back of the room.

Then I turn around real quick

and thought oh my god, he's here.

But it was kind of sweet, and then I was

like off and running, it was kind of wonderful.

He told me met this girl and she knocked him out.

He told me it was his love.

You know men don't usually say that to each other.

Yo, most beautiful.

Good morning, good morning, good morning.

I'm just sending you gigantic love.

And I hope you're wonderful.

I imaging right now your hands are covered in paint.

Oh, lucky hands.

Paint on, paint on my little Picasso.

Paint paint, paint paint.

Louisville signing off, bye.

My partner in crime, who we've been walking sober,

clean sober together and enjoying

all the rawness and authenticity of life together.

Like, this is Susan and Robin, and it was great.

They were like 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,

almost like through each other's eyes.

That was like having a best friend,

where you could really explore life together.

Yeah, we dated for about four years.

We'd had promised 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 22, 2011.

It was storybook.

Wow, I'm just picturing him.

He sure looked good.

Part of my wedding vows was really all about

loving him as he is, I have no desire to change this man.

And you had your honeymoon in Paris.

It was wonderful.

The great thing is in Paris, see,

all the paparazzi like wildlife photographers.

All of a sudden you look over they're like, Robin kiss her.

Kiss her first good, 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, "night at the museum."

He was basically home for a week.

He was exhausted, absolutely exhausted.

We were looking at like a week of testing.

The calendar was just booked.

So we had this day at the beginning of it all.

I said why don't we go out to Tennessee valley,

go on a walk out 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

it was so nice to have space around us in nature.

We went over to the rocks and 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 drumbeat was getting more and more.

And he was depleted, he was so so depleted.

And hejust put his head down in my lap.

And I just stroked his hair.

He just laid in my lap for like a couple hours.

Oh that guy was tired.

So the first time the Robin came into my shop,

it was in 1983, and it was shortly afterjohn belushi died.

Whenjohn belushi passed away,

it devastated Robin.

John was crazier than anybody.

And but man, did he pay the price.

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?

He goes just because I have to.

He didn't want to die.

And of course he'd always been really physical.

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 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 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 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, you're looking.

I'd be going, talking to flowers?

And how you doing, please cough.

When you're playing like that, you're going out.

But by stopping that it forces the energy to implode,

and you find you explore yourself,

either memories or different emotions.

Captain, my captain.

Sit down, mister Anderson.

"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 shortlist.

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.

When he's looking at the yearbook

from when he was a student.

Gentlemen.

We were just looking your old annual.

Then the kids show him this yearbook.

He gets down on his knees, and just.

No, it's not me.

Stanley, the tool, Wilson.

Stanley, the tool, Wilson.

Which was his nickname for me.

What's the dead poets society?

So I'm sitting with him at the premiere,

next to the heads of Disney and he's 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 developmentally disabled adults.

His neurologist, who also attends that,

had not seen him since December.

When the suspicion about his, the shaking of his hand,

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, that doctor made

a visual diagnosis from way across court.

All he knew is that we were gonna 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 that's great, so okay we get on medications.

We'll figure this out, you'll get it adjusted.

They were saying 10 good years.

I could see he wasn't buying it.

Robin got to ask these questions,

which at the time seemed like,

he asked am I, do I have an 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

atjulliard school in New York, Robin Williams.

I'd like to give you that.

Look at that.

Boy, somebody's fantasy.

Robin and Christopher were very good friends.

Christopher is a preppy for viewing,

although that was our slightly younger brother.

The three of us were brother Williams,

brother Wilson, and brother reeve.

Christopher, we went to see him when

he first had this accident.

He'd just had the accident and

there were people making decisions

whether or not to keep him 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 went, oh no.

And he looked up, and he kind of

went hey brother, what's up?

And I said would you mind?

I'm just gonna do a brief exam.

Like what you said, if you feel two fingers it's your luck.

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'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 seat belt in his chair,

because I would have fallen out laughing.

When Christopher, we went to see him

when he first had his accident.

We both talked and said I never knew he was this strong.

And Robin didn't either, and he says I don't think

I could go through that, and I wouldn't want to.

He looked very frail when he

came back from the museum picture.

He used to come over like every afternoon.

He'd sit in that chair in the corner.

He mumbled about it but,

he never described this 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'tjump off the roof because

you can't leave Susan alone.

And as soon as I got anywhere near saying her name

he'd 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 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,

he just wasn't laughing a lot.

People believe that there is psychology,

and then there is 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 understand 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 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 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, 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, was loud.

No one was getting sleep, it was just

impossible because of 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 free will?

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 they often don't have a good logical

conclusion about it, so it's very hard.

Robin is not getting enough sleep.

The therapists are like,

not getting sleep can be really dangerous.

When we were told to sleep apart

because he needed to get sleep,

he came to me and he said, does this mean more separated?

For someone so brilliant to say something like that

is 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

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 sunroom.

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 therapist 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'd be sitting there

doing this thing, and it was part of

the deal to like hypnotize yourself.

It 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.

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 looked

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 gonna 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 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 play bill.

And I learned Patience, and I learned compassion.

He's everything you want from a fellow artist.

I'm hot in the green room at mill valley.

He'd go in and extend these mercy calls

to the comedian's 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 dude, no, it's nothing.

Dude, you hit my rental car, man.

No dude, I did but nothing happened.

It's like we've been here before but nothing happened.

Do you have insurance, maybe?

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.

A 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.

Turn around and he'd say stuff like, what time you got boss?

Never asked me that on a ride ever before.

I'd day I don't know, we left at one,

we're halfway through, 1:30?

Thanks boss.

30 seconds later, what time you got boss?

45 seconds later, the same question again.

There were several other questions he asks

that were sort of odd, and didn't make sense,

something along the lines I think

we should maybe be getting back.

Yeah, 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, and then 100.

This has never happened on a ride.

And all of a sudden he was 100 and some yards,

and I couldn't catch him.

I busted butt to catch up, I couldn't do it.

I mean he pedaled all the way to the house.

And we got 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.

Sol put my arm around his shoulder.

And then I asked him Robin, Robin, are you okay?

Is anything wrong that I could help?

Are you in pain?

He said, 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 gonna try to 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, it was time for sleep and he,

he went into his office, which is right by our room.

And he went back there a couple 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 anything in along time.

We just said goodnight to each other, you know.

Good night my love.

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 still closed, he's sleeping.

He's sleeping, this is really good.

His assistant showed up,

'cause I had some work stuff to go over.

And I had to take off, and I just told her,

I said text me when he's awake.

Apparently he had slept in.

And they couldn't figure out why he was sleeping in,

because it kind of 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.

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, oh my god you don't know.

And then she told me.

I was upset 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 said do you have any comments about

the death of your friend, Robin Williams, by suicide?

And I threw my goddamn 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.

Whole bay area felt like a sledgehammer

had hit it in the head that day, and New York too,

and Hollywood, and everywhere.

It was like a war zone, helicopters circling,

news vans pulling up, there are 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,

like the global media descended on this little cul-de-sac.

How everybodyjust wanted their peace.

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 Robins 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.

It's like really having

a limb or something ripped from you,

and you can't heal it right away.

I just, 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 the everything.

But I think hejust probably,

somewhere in his brain 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 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 gonna go where this is taking me.

But he's just so joyous, and then

there would have been nojoy 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.

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 brainstem.

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 in brain circuits.

When your brain is not functioning

to allow you to be a fulfilled human being.

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 comedians tragic...

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 are you doing?

I'm doing okay.

It's been a year of grieving, 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 thejournal, "neurology."

For her first TV interview

since writing about Robins health struggle.

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 lives.

Having a diagnosis would have 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'd 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

when I missed him, andjust wanted him to tell me something.

I opened up that book, and I was like wow.

I remembered that when we were talking

about what we wanted to,

what we wanted to be able to leave as our legacy.

And for Robin it was 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 gonna 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 gonna do tomorrow.

How exciting.

Bye, Teddy.

Farewell, Lawrence.

If you saw his movies, Robbins 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 around him 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, I mean truly.

It was just the, 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, there's also hope.

Sadness is 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, a lot of

amazing people out there to be grateful for,

and a loving god, and that, other than that, good luck.

That's what life is about.