Heartbreaking.

This is what happens: A voice is born inside you. It lies to you –and it is so persuasive–and it never, ever lets up: it tells you that you are no good, that you are weak, that you are a failure, and you go through life the way I have been the last few weeks after minor surgery, as if you’re on crutches, like I was, when sometimes anything you do demands the greatest effort to achieve the smallest of results.

It’s a drumbeat in the background every waking moment of your life, and you use alcohol or work, and I’ve used both, to mute the sound of that voice. It’s not a surprise to me that he is dead. What he lived with in the murmur of that insistent voice for 63 years was a burden that would crush anyone else in a matter of weeks.

The fact that he fought this for so long–and gave so much joy in the process–speaks to me of a man with courage beyond understanding.

That voice has spoken to me. It took my mother’s life. We are not weaklings, we are not failures, we are not cowards. (Those ads for suicide hotlines? The voice tells you that making that phone call is confirmation that you are a coward.)

Finally, we are not “selfish.”

We have a disease that turns every day into combat and the trick isn’t to win, because you never will. The trick is to fight that lying, seductive voice inside to a draw. The next day you begin again. Robin was simply exhausted from fighting not one, but two, diseases. Civil War soldiers remembered that the comrades who finally, finally broke and ran were the bravest soldiers they’d ever seen.