Fans were devastated in 2014 when beloved actor Robin Williams committed suicide. Now, the agonizing details of the suffering he went through in his final months thanks to an undiagnosed brain disease have been revealed.

Williams was filming “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” earlier in 2014 when he found himself struggling to remember his lines, which was very out of character for him.

“He was sobbing in my arms at the end of every day. It was horrible. Horrible,” makeup artist Cheri Minns recalled. “I said to his people, ‘I’m a makeup artist. I don’t have the capacity to deal with what’s happening to him.’”

When Minns suggested that Williams return to his roots in stand-up comedy to get back on track, he refused.

“He just cried and said, ‘I can’t, Cheri. I don’t know how anymore. I don’t know how to be funny,'” he said.

Williams had no idea that he was actually suffering from a pernicious neurodegenerative disease that was robbing him of his talents as well as his entire brain. In the year before his death, Williams began complaining of numerous symptoms, including indigestion, trouble urinating, insomnia, loss of his sense of smell and heartburn. He developed a tremor in his left hand that doctors believed was the result of a shoulder injury.

“It was like playing whack-a-mole,” his wife Susan Schneider recalled. “Which symptom is it this month? I thought, is my husband a hypochondriac? We’re chasing it and there’s no answers, and by now we’d tried everything.”

He began losing weight rapidly, and his once booming voice got very small.

In March of 2014, Williams was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but he actually had something far worse than that: an incurable brain disease that occurs when proteins build up in the brain’s nerve cells, impairing its function. This disease starts with memory problems and physical stiffness and graduates to extreme personality changes, psychiatric symptoms and eventually death.

Though nobody can understand the torment Williams was going through in his final days thanks to the disease, his longtime friend Billy Crystal tried to put it into words.

“I put myself in his place. Think of it this way: The speed at which the comedy came is the speed at which the terrors came,” Crystal said. “And all that they described that can happen with this psychosis, if that’s the right word — the hallucinations, the images, the terror — coming at the speed his comedy came at, maybe even faster, I can’t imagine living like that.”

While we still miss Robin Williams dearly, we are glad he is at peace now!

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