Robin Williams in 1987 – Credit: Bonnie Schiffman/Getty Images
Robin Williams’ son, Zachary Pym Williams, marked what would have been his late father’s 74th with a post celebrating Williams’ singular ability to give people “permission to feel deeply and to laugh through the pain.”
On Instagram, Zachary wrote about the ups-and-downs of grief, especially during the annual 60-day period that encompasses Father’s Day, Williams’ birthday (July 21), and the anniversary of his death (Aug. 11). “It’s a tender and complicated stretch of time. One that asks a lot of the heart,” Zachary wrote.
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He added: “For me, grief isn’t linear. It loops and echoes. It softens, then crescendos. But alongside it lives a legacy, the kind built not from fame or recognition, but from generosity and relentless kindness.”
Zachary went on to say that his father “lived to make people feel seen,” and that he hopes to carry on his dad’s mission of encouraging deep feeling and laughter, even in the face of pain and sorrow.
“So today, I hold close the idea that the best way to honor those we love is to live the values they stood for,” he wrote. “To lead with service and compassion. To lift others when they’re down. And to find paths of light, even in the dark corners. To anyone carrying loss right now: you’re not alone. You are part of a passage of love and connection that never really ends.”
Zachary is the oldest of Williams’ three children, born in 1983 to Williams’ first wife, the actress Valerie Velardi. In a 1988 interview with Rolling Stone, Williams spoke about watching his then five-year-old son get older while answering a question about an Albert Einstein quote he cited at the end of one of his specials: “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe.”
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Asked what those words meant to him, Williams replied, “It’s like Mel Brooks’s great line as the 2000-year-old man [in a Yiddish accent]: ‘There’s something bigger than Phil.’ You can’t help but see it when you deal with nature in the extreme. Like when you’re body surfing on Maui and a storm suddenly makes a ten-foot wave come at you. It gives you a sense of your mortality. Or it’s when you see something incredibly beautiful. I get it when I see Zachary changing. Here’s this being who is you but not you slowly growing and forming opinions of his own.”
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