As I listened to Tom Paxton’s “Phil,” a paean song for his friend and colleague Phil Ochs, I immediately thought of Robin Williams. “I opened the paper, there was your picture/Gone, gone, gone with your own hand/I couldn’t believe it, the paper was shakin’/Gone, gone, gone by your hand. I know I’m gonna spend the rest of my lifetime wondering why/You found yourself so badly hurt you had to die.” Phil Ochs, one of the true singer-songwriters of the 1960s, hanged himself at his sister’s Far Rockaway home on April 9, 1976. Robin Williams, the comic genius and accomplished actor and humanitarian, also committed suicide 38 years later on August 11, 2014, at his home in Paradise Cay, California. These two men shared the oft-times lonely and melancholic roles of lifting up the human condition through their art, even if it meant sacrificing their own lives.
Read more at….Robin Williams and Phil Ochs: Two Tragic Artists Shaped By Pathos and Optimism
Celebrating Phil Ochs 
Why do people continue to say, “committed suicide” as though it is still a crime (which it never should have been)? It is gentler to say, “he ended his life” or “he took his life”. As a suicide survivor and attempt survivor, I know how painful it feels to hear this repeatedly.
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