Lifetime movies, swings, and Death's healing touch.
Fall backwards,
Reach out your hands.
Breathe in deep.
See the white sky above you
And close your eyes,
As dizzying heights descend upon you.
Drink of clarity,
Guiltless, meaningless,
Emotionless, senseless,
Wishless, timeless
Clarity.
Die remembering nothing;
Leave the disease behind,
Lifetime Movies generally suck. I think we can all accept this and move on without too much debate. But they certainly are emotional experiences sometimes. I guess that's part of targetting a movie toward women; making it more emotional than logical or rational. That's not to say that guy's movies are emotionless or dry, but they do tend to present more exciting and jaw-dropping, edge-of-your-seat type scenes than slow, tender, heartrending scenes. For instance, The Matrix is the ultimate guy movie, and Titanic is the ultimate girl movie. Girls can, of course, enjoy The Matrix, and guys can enjoy Titanic (well, they could a few years ago...) but both have their masculine and feminine qualities that make them what they are.
Anyway, I was talking about this movie... I watched this movie tonight that was extremely emotional, and engaging (at least the first half). It was about this new mother and her husband and baby daughter. The mother turns out to have cancer, and dies a slow and painful (but luckily not overdone) death after a very short time. Actually, this isn't even the main point of the film, but the way the director painted death and this woman's relationship to it just kind of triggered some feelings deep inside me. I know someday I'll have to face pain like this when someone close to me dies, as most of us will, but I wonder what I'll do or how I'll handle it. My beliefs about death and the afterlife are pretty basic and I'm comfortable with them, but the pain of watching someone die who everyone loves and is close to, especially a slow and painful death... who can really contemplate that? If I knew I was going to die and leave behind a baby boy or girl, it would make it so much harder. It is probably impossible to hinder death with something as trivial as regret. Still, it would make leaving that much more painful if you had someone to leave behind. Could you do it? Can anyone even imagine it, the lack of choices Death builds in a corner like that?
In one of the film's scenes, when the woman dies, she remembers the way her mother used to push her on this swing in a park and she would try to touch the clouds with her toes. It brought me back to my childhood. Once, when I was very young, I was swinging at a playground with those flat wooden swings (the ones that you sit ON rather than IN) and my dad kept pushing me higher and higher, until I became almost vertical to the ground. I was so elated, so relaxed, surrounded by this euphoria of emptiness and dizzying spectacularity, feeling myself flying up to the clouds... suddenly I slipped backwards out of the swing, and straight down onto my dad. Luckily, we were both okay... my dad bruised his leg really bad and I got a few scratches, but it was a lucky case. Somehow, I figure death would be like that... falling backwards out of that swing, a sudden feeling of fear and anxiety and regret... but you're so euphoric being surrounded by the emptiness and the sky and the dizzying new height that nothing can bring you back. In my case I hit a bottom, but I figure when you die, you feel like you're trapped falling from that swing forever, in that moment just as you slip away... but you never do slip away. Or do you?
Reach out your hands.
Breathe in deep.
See the white sky above you
And close your eyes,
As dizzying heights descend upon you.
Drink of clarity,
Guiltless, meaningless,
Emotionless, senseless,
Wishless, timeless
Clarity.
Die remembering nothing;
Leave the disease behind,
Lifetime Movies generally suck. I think we can all accept this and move on without too much debate. But they certainly are emotional experiences sometimes. I guess that's part of targetting a movie toward women; making it more emotional than logical or rational. That's not to say that guy's movies are emotionless or dry, but they do tend to present more exciting and jaw-dropping, edge-of-your-seat type scenes than slow, tender, heartrending scenes. For instance, The Matrix is the ultimate guy movie, and Titanic is the ultimate girl movie. Girls can, of course, enjoy The Matrix, and guys can enjoy Titanic (well, they could a few years ago...) but both have their masculine and feminine qualities that make them what they are.
Anyway, I was talking about this movie... I watched this movie tonight that was extremely emotional, and engaging (at least the first half). It was about this new mother and her husband and baby daughter. The mother turns out to have cancer, and dies a slow and painful (but luckily not overdone) death after a very short time. Actually, this isn't even the main point of the film, but the way the director painted death and this woman's relationship to it just kind of triggered some feelings deep inside me. I know someday I'll have to face pain like this when someone close to me dies, as most of us will, but I wonder what I'll do or how I'll handle it. My beliefs about death and the afterlife are pretty basic and I'm comfortable with them, but the pain of watching someone die who everyone loves and is close to, especially a slow and painful death... who can really contemplate that? If I knew I was going to die and leave behind a baby boy or girl, it would make it so much harder. It is probably impossible to hinder death with something as trivial as regret. Still, it would make leaving that much more painful if you had someone to leave behind. Could you do it? Can anyone even imagine it, the lack of choices Death builds in a corner like that?
In one of the film's scenes, when the woman dies, she remembers the way her mother used to push her on this swing in a park and she would try to touch the clouds with her toes. It brought me back to my childhood. Once, when I was very young, I was swinging at a playground with those flat wooden swings (the ones that you sit ON rather than IN) and my dad kept pushing me higher and higher, until I became almost vertical to the ground. I was so elated, so relaxed, surrounded by this euphoria of emptiness and dizzying spectacularity, feeling myself flying up to the clouds... suddenly I slipped backwards out of the swing, and straight down onto my dad. Luckily, we were both okay... my dad bruised his leg really bad and I got a few scratches, but it was a lucky case. Somehow, I figure death would be like that... falling backwards out of that swing, a sudden feeling of fear and anxiety and regret... but you're so euphoric being surrounded by the emptiness and the sky and the dizzying new height that nothing can bring you back. In my case I hit a bottom, but I figure when you die, you feel like you're trapped falling from that swing forever, in that moment just as you slip away... but you never do slip away. Or do you?