The disease, he says, “becomes progressively irreversible, unstoppable, and always fatal.” Susan Williams says that “If we’d had the accurate diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, that alone would have given him some peace.” But watching the documentary, you may wonder if that’s the case. Bruce Miller, Director of the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF, explains how Lewy body dementia works, using phrases like “the misfolding of proteins with neurons.” Essentially, the neurons degenerate, a syndrome that builds until it sweeps across the brain stem, affecting every aspect of experience: sleep, mood, cognition. It was only during an autopsy that doctors learned he’d been suffering from Lewy body dementia, a degenerative condition with many similarities to Alzheimer’s, though it takes hold more quickly. And when he took his life, he still didn’t know what it was. He asked his doctor, “Do I have Alzheimer’s? Do I have dementia? Am I schizophrenic?” He could sense the center wasn’t holding, but he scarcely had words to describe that feeling. That was surely a devastating thing to hear, but Williams knew that something else was wrong. The one diagnosis he’d received during this time was a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. His symptoms had gotten gradually worse - the cognitive decline, the impairment of movement in his left hand – but he’d had brain scans that turned up nothing. 11, 2014, it was only about six months into his ordeal. It’s also a diary of Robin Williams slowly losing his mind. It’s a portrait of the artist as a brave, joyous, wounded soul. “Robin’s Wish,” which deals with the slow creep of Williams’ deterioration during the final months of his life, is a documentary that’s honest and scary, wrenching and moving. She remembers that Williams, in the midst of his paranoia, said, “I just want to reboot my brain.”
“This was a typical night for us,” says Susan. He started sending him text messages, and since they weren’t returned (Mort, in all likelihood, was asleep), he took that as evidence that things were not okay. Susan also tells a story about how the night before they were planning to visit Mort Sahl, the classic comic who was a pal of Robin’s, Williams became obsessed, in the middle of the night, with the fear that Mort wasn’t okay.
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