Friday, May 6, 2011

Hereafter

Can't sleep. We just watched Hereafter...definitely one of those movies designed to make you think. Spoilers follow if you don't know the general gist of the movie.

One of the main characters is a kid, maybe 9 or 10 years old, who loses his twin brother in an accident. He becomes convinced after his brother's death that if he can just talk to him one more time he'll feel better. I remember that feeling. Rebecca died when I was about that age. She was 6 months old. I spent many years coming to terms with the fact that the time we had with her when she was alive was all I was going to get. There's no going back, no redoing things, no final conversation once someone is gone. The experience is over and all you have left are the memories, whether good, bad, regretful, joyful...some endings are final. The choices you make day to day have to be the choices you would be comfortable with if your loved one died tomorrow.

Another thing on my mind triggered by movie-watching...if you know where things end, you can use that to make the present a better place. As the Flaming Lips say "Realize the sun doesn't go down / it's just an illusion caused be the world / spinning round." Life is cyclical. Some cycles last a lifetime and end when you pass the world on to your kids. Others last only a day, starting over when you wake up tomorrow. Embrace where you've been, and use it to inform where you're going, but don't dwell on something which has ended. You've moved on to a new cycle. Who knows how long this one will last? "Realize that life goes fast / It's hard to make the good things last."

No comments: