I miss my childhood.

Every day after kindergarten, my older brother and I would belly flop onto the couch where my mom would deliver us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and flip through TV channels until we’d agree on something suitable. Sometimes “Spongebob Squarepants.” But most of the time, “Flubber” or “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Hours would pass, and it was all meaningless back then, when we had nothing to do and relaxing wasn’t a waste of time.

But now, instead of vegetating for hours in front of my old boxy TV, I spend hours sleeping on pillows made of textbooks and mountains of work surrounding me. I value my past for reasons other than envy of 6-year-old Jade’s free time and laziness.

I don’t come home just to belly flop into boredom anymore. Instead, I have to come home to the news that my childhood hero has passed away, and suddenly those hours of watching Robin Williams aren’t so meaningless anymore.

My mom informed me just an hour after it happened. Before any news articles surfaced, before local news was reciting the information for hours on end. She had no sources — just a bewildered text from her coworker; I didn’t believe it and I brushed it off.

Then, as most news spreads these days, the Facebook posts started to flood in even faster than my CNN app could inform me: Robin Williams, dead, at age 64 in his home in Tiburon. Just like that. My childhood idol hanged himself due to unknown reasons.

It’s implausible, and nothing more. Robin Williams, of all people, is dead. Mrs. Doubtfire, America’s ideal nanny; Teddy Roosevelt, the perfect image of the president; Alan Parrish, a flamboyantly charismatic club owner; Sean Maguire, an inspiring psychologist; a brilliant English teacher in “Dead Poet’s Society,” and Robin Williams, the mastermind behind them all, was dead.

It’s uncanny that such a clever and talented man could have been so unhappy with his life. He was more than just talented. There is something so unmatchably raw about his performances, from his speedwalking entrance to the way he can’t contain his excitement until his first joke trips over his introduction. Then some self-deprecating sidenote, and then another joke accompanied with four different accents. He was unstoppably brilliant, an icon who revolutionized standup comedy.

The basis of my sadness over his death is that I miss the simplicity of my youth. Robin Williams was a goofy, hilarious soul who energized me after an exhausting day at elementary school, and middle school, and even some days throughout high school.

I was 5 when he brought light into my life. Now I’m 16, and I have to accept that loved ones die and suicide happens. I don’t want him to be gone, but I have to grow up and accept this absence. Robin Williams was undeniably the best of the best actors to exist because no one expected him to be depressed; how can I, when he’s cracking jokes 24/7?

Robin Williams took away America’s breath with his comedy, and completely suffocated America with his suicide. As his nanny pseudonym, Mrs. Doubtfire, once asked, “Ever wish you could freeze frame a moment in your day, and look at it and say, ‘This is not my life?’”

How many times had he thought something along these lines before he committed suicide? Is he actually dead? Is the world’s funniest man really gone? There’s a sort of emptiness resounding across the nation, and no one can fill it.

Maybe I’ll watch “Mrs. Doubtfire” today or “Aladdin” as I used to. Back then, it was to avoid boredom. Twelve years later, three feet taller, and T-minus 13 months to becoming an adult, it’s to avoid acceptance. He may be gone, but his spirit and humor will forever live on.