What Did Robin Williams Do When Christopher Reeve Was Thinking About Dying?

They had met at Juilliard in 1973. Christopher Reeve was the serious, classically trained actor. Robin Williams was the one who made everyone lose it in class.

John Houseman — their teacher — told Reeve privately that of all his students, only two had the talent to make it: Reeve and Williams. They stayed close for twenty years.

In May 1995, Reeve was thrown from a horse during a competition. He broke his first and second cervical vertebrae. He was paralyzed from the neck down. In the ICU at the University of Virginia, connected to a ventilator, he was quietly considering whether to ask his doctors to remove it.

Then the door opened.

A man in a surgical mask burst in with a thick Russian accent, announcing that he was there to perform a proctological examination and demanding everyone clear the room.

It was Robin Williams.

Reeve started laughing. And the moment he laughed, he knew he was going to be okay. He wrote later: 'My old friend had helped me know that life was still worth living.'

Williams also quietly paid for medical expenses that insurance wouldn't cover. He never said a word about it publicly.

Laughter isn't a distraction from the serious things. Sometimes it is the serious thing. The rope someone throws you when you're deciding whether to swim.