Movie Night

Sometimes I get really worked up about movies. I get too emotionally involved and too agitated - too attached to the characters. For days I'm upside down emotionally over their fates...

I watched The Namesake last night. A friend had recommended it a while back. I can't remember if it was before or after Karl's death - the movie was released in 2007, but who knows when my friend saw it and thought I'd like it. The title had bounced around in my head for a few years, anyway.

It's one of those movies that sweeps through time, encompassing multiple generations as they grow and mature. There's only time to show snapshots - small moments that are formative to the characters as they learn who they are.

It's also a movie filled with themes that resonate with me, but most poignant was Ashima's last conversation with her husband, because it so closely mirrored my own. It was eerie and a little disconcerting to witness the shock and grief of another woman, fictional tho she may have been, living the same nightmare I had lived.

Oddly, tho, I had no trouble sleeping last night. I liked the film and believed the characters - they were charmingly human in their imperfections. I cried for their suffering as I watched, but it just didn't seem to carry into my dreams, which were no worse or better than they have been of late.

Of course, that's not saying anything, really, because they have been a little overwhelming. Last week a particularly painful dream, one where Karl and I were sitting in bed together, excited about the baby girl growing in my belly, watching Elliot play, all of us so happy... and all the while I knew he was gone, knew it was a dream, kept telling my dream self that I would have to wake up. And he would not be there, and my belly would hold nothing but the remains of last night's burritos, and perhaps a little too much gas.

I'd worried about opening myself up to this story, but I enjoyed the movie, which had a generally optimistic message. We survive broken hearts, just as we sometimes survive broken bodies... right up until the moment we no longer can. And every one of those moments is, in fact, a gift.