Singer Carly Simon has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and was recently treated for skin cancer, the singer shared in a statement provided to The Associated Press.

In 2014, Robin Williams was 63 and living in Marin County, California, when a strange medical mystery began tightening around him. Parkinson’s had a name, but his fear, confusion, sleepless nights, and mental fog still did not. At home, Susan Schneider Williams was watching the man the world knew for laughter slowly become trapped inside symptoms nobody could fully explain. The comic genius was still there, but something hidden kept changing the rules. The clues did not arrive like one clear warning. They came scattered. Stomach pain. Insomnia. A poor sense of smell. Anxiety that felt too sharp. Then came moments that scared Susan because they did not match the Robin she knew. He could be present one minute, then caught in fear the next. Susan later wrote, “By wintertime, problems with paranoia, delusions and looping, insomnia, memory, and high cortisol levels, just to name a few, were settling in hard.” That sentence became one of the most painful pieces of the puzzle. Robin Williams had spent decades turning speed, memory, emotion, and chaos into art. His mind was part of his magic. On stage, he could jump between voices like flipping channels inside his own brain. In “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), he made families laugh through pain. In “Good Will Hunting” (1997), he made silence feel heavy. But inside his own body, something was now stealing the very tools that made him Robin. The fear was not normal stress. Susan had lived beside him. She knew the difference between worry and something deeper. Later, she said, “But Robin would remain in a heightened state of fear and anxiety that led to irrational paranoia. It was painful to watch.” That was the nightmare. He was not simply sad. He was frightened by changes he could feel but could not name. By May 2014, doctors gave him a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis. It explained some things. His left hand had a tremor. His body had slowed. His face sometimes looked less expressive. His movement was changing. A diagnosis should have brought comfort, but for Robin it felt incomplete. He asked whether he had Alzheimer’s. He asked about dementia. He asked about schizophrenia. The answer was no, but the questions themselves were clues. That is where the mystery becomes darker. The diagnosis was not fake, but it was not the full picture. Parkinson’s explained the movement symptoms. It did not fully explain the paranoia, confusion, insomnia, panic, and strange mental changes. Robin was being treated for what doctors could see clearly. The real enemy was still hiding behind overlapping symptoms. Susan watched him struggle with things that once came naturally. Lines became harder. Confidence cracked. Sleep disappeared. Some days carried flashes of the old Robin, then the fog would return. He knew something was wrong, and that knowledge hurt him. It was like a brilliant machine was short-circuiting from the inside while everyone outside kept searching for the right switch. On August 11, 2014, Robin Williams died by suicide at his home in Tiburon, California. He was 63. The public story quickly became simple. People said depression. People remembered his past battles. But Susan kept trying to explain that the truth was not that simple. Later, the autopsy revealed diffuse Lewy body disease. The hidden disease had spread through his brain and brain stem. That discovery changed the whole file. Lewy body dementia can affect thinking, movement, sleep, mood, behavior, and perception. It can look like Parkinson’s. It can look like psychiatric illness. It can make a person seem anxious, paranoid, forgetful, or unlike himself. In Robin’s case, it had been quietly attacking the center of who he was. Susan later said, “Depression is a symptom of LBD and it’s not about psychology, it’s rooted in neurology. His brain was falling apart.” Those words did not erase the grief, but they gave the mystery its missing name. Robin had not simply lost a private emotional battle. He had been fighting a brain disease that was almost impossible to fully identify while he was alive. Later, Susan described him with heartbreaking clarity. “Robin is and will always be a larger-than-life spirit who was inside the body of a normal man with a human brain.” That human brain was under attack before anyone could see the whole map. The mystery was what no one could name in time.