Grieving at the Cinema

How does cinema shape our understanding of grief? Let's reflect on how the resolution of the film, "Tuesday", which focuses on the mother learning to be emotionally present for her dying daughter, parallels our own experiences of mourning and gives us a blueprint for navigating our grief.

Cinematic portrayals of loss and grief can help us find solace and understanding in our own grief journeys. This episode is a heartfelt exploration of how film can mirror and shape our deepest emotions, providing a source of comfort and connection.

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Transcript

Candee: 0:19

Welcome to this week's episode of Solace: Soul + Grief. I'm Candee Lucas. We're glad you're here. This podcast is sponsored by Catholic Cemeteries and the Diocese of San Jose. The death of a loved one is a very difficult life transition and we hope we can answer some of your questions, help you find where God is moving in your life as you continue your grief journey, and remind you of the power of your faith and love for God. You're always welcome in our circle of healing, love and care. Today I want to spend a little time talking about how grief is portrayed in cinema, how these movies over time become part of our social record of what grief looks like or should look like, and how oftentimes the only practice we have at grieving is through these portrayals that we see on screen, read about in books, in plays and various representations in paintings, photographs etc. I recently saw a film called " T", and the longer I've taken to ruminate on the themes of the film, the more moving I thought the story was. Essentially, it's a teenager dying of cancer, but more importantly it's about how her mother a single mother is coping with, or not coping with, the soon death of her child. The mother's grief is so overwhelming that she is not emotionally available to her child, grieving her own death and grieving the emotional distance the mother has created. Now, as most films on this topic, it doesn't really have a happy ending, so to speak, but it does have a resolution that speaks to me, in that the daughter makes it possible for the mother to accept her death. Not accept her death, but to be both present for her death and present for her daughter. Many of you have heard me talk before about hospice, my time with hospice patients and how most of the time the family's not available in those last hours or days for one reason or another. Oftentimes they're far away and oftentimes they choose not to be there. The manner of death, as we've discussed before, has a very profound effect on the grief afterwards, the grieving process, the public mourning, the rituals, the creation of a new relationship with that now dead person. A film you might be more familiar with on the topic of grieving and coming to terms, as it were, with death is " Terms of Endearment. That starred Deborah Winger and Shirley MacLaine. I think it's at least 20 years old, maybe 30 by now, but most of you have probably seen it and I revisit it from time to time, although the emotions that movie brings forth for me are too close to the emotions I felt losing my own mother to cancer, so I don't watch it often. Not like " Wonderful Life" or something like that. We watch it often not like Wonderful Life or something like that, but these films can give us an insight to our feelings and I liked most about this current film, " fridTay, starring Julia Louis- Dreyfus, is it's all given in the perspective of the survivor and how she will learn to cope with the death of her only child. In the film there's also a representation of death itself by a bird, the kind of bird that speaks by a bird, the kind of bird that speaks. And death speaks when it's necessary to clarify things for both the mother and the daughter who's dying. At first this sounds like so much of a device and I heard an interview with Julia Louis- Dreyfus who talked about the very idea that this bird was part of the film gave her pause when she first agreed to do it, and I can't say that it works entirely dramatically. But I do appreciate the filmmaker and storyteller found a device like this to represent death. At one point, after the daughter has died and the mother is alone with the bird, the mother asks the bird if there's a heaven, if there's an afterlife and if there's a God. The bird tells her that there's no God as humans perceive it, but the most important thing he tells the mom is that the afterlife, the daughter's afterlife, is in her. The mother carries all the love and memories that the daughter made in her life. She carries all her hopes and dreams, all her smiles and tears in her heart. I like to think that's what we do here. We make places for those memories, we create ground that seeds of love can be planted in. We ask God to strengthen us and carry us through the difficult days, and when we are at our lowest, we are reminded of that healing love that is ever a resource to us. That concludes another episode of Solace. A new one drops every Friday. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, amazon, or find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, amazon, or find us on Google. I'm Candee Lucas, your host, aftercare Coordinator, Chaplain and Spiritual Director at Catholic Cemeteries at Gate of Heaven in Los Altos, California. At Gate of Heaven in Los Altos, california. Please contact us If you have questions or seek spiritual direction. Our contact information is in the show notes. Be gentle with yourselves, travel with God. Vaya con Dios.