I Helped Her Cry

Just recently I read a lovely story in a book called “Healing After Loss,” (daily meditations for people who are grieving), which made me think of the film ‘Inside Out.’ It perfectly describes what Sadness did in the film. (see my blog post on the film.)

A little girl got home from visiting her friend later than her mother had expected. When her mother asked the reason for the delay, the child said, ‘I was helping Jane. Her doll broke.” 

The mother asked, “Did you help her fix it?” 

The child said, “No. I helped her cry.”

Sometimes that’s what we need more than anything else: someone to sit with us and feel our sorrow. That is my experience with grief: no one can end my sorrow, no one can ‘fix’ it, but when others share it the pain lessens just a little. I don’t feel so alone. If/when you know someone who is grieving, don't be afraid of their tears. Cry with them. 

Making Friends with my Emotions

‘Inside Out’ is a remarkable film that animates a model of the human mind in a very entertaining fashion.

The main human character is an 11-year-old girl named Riley, but the majority of the action in the film takes place in her mind. The conscious mind is portrayed as a control room staffed by five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. The emotions interpret and react to events in Riley’s life, and the emotional response puts a stamp on experiences as they are saved to long-term memory. (The filmmaker acknowledges that he had to simplify the emotional composition of the human mind to keep the film from being overwhelmed with characters. I think he did a good job at picking the most important ones.)

In the beginning of the film, Joy rules the control room. The other emotions have their place, but most of Riley’s memories have Joy’s emotional imprint.

A catastrophe knocks Joy and Sadness out of the control room and they are forced to find their way back. They traverse the vast maze of Long-Term Memory; the cavernous, scary Unconscious; the funny Dream Factory and Imagination Playhouse; and the abyss of the Memory Dump.

If you haven’t seen the film, I’d encourage you to stop now and read this after you’ve seen it.

What the film illustrates beautifully is that all of our emotions have their place. We may dream of a life with no sadness, no anger, no fear. Many of our spiritual pursuits are about getting to a place where there is no suffering; where only joy—bliss—remains. But I have found myself increasingly wondering: is that pursuit compatible with the nature of existence? Is the pursuit of ‘no suffering’ in fact anti-life?

The Phone Call

One of the consequences of having suffered the death of a loved one (my husband of 34 years died three months ago) is the people around you get a little nervous. They are afraid of reminding you of your loss (as if there’s any chance you’ll forget), or of exposing you to something that will make your broken heart bleed anew.

This happened to me this weekend, when I was at a friend’s house. For some time she has wanted to share some of this years’ Oscar-nominated short films with me, and this night we settled in to watch her favorite, ‘The Phone Call.’ It quickly became apparent that the film is about a man who is in despair over his wife’s death, and my friend hit the pause button, horrified, and apologized for her thoughtlessness. I replied that not only do I not want people to censor themselves around me, I also have to get past any reluctance to see or read about people encountering death, because that is one of the great themes of art and literature.

In fact, I have found that art provides one of the best solaces for grief (being outdoors is another). And I am not alone in this. I’ve read a few ‘grief memoirs’ recently and every person has said that poetry helped them cope.

If you haven’t seen ‘The Phone Call,’ I’m going to give some spoilers so you might want to stop reading now until you’ve seen this beautiful film. Here's the trailer:

Following Point of View to Understanding

In 2007 my family gathered to celebrate my 50^th birthday. My nieces were aged 4 and 5. I bought them some inexpensive digital cameras thinking it would be fun to see what kind of images they would create.

Unfortunately the cameras didn’t take very good photos and it looks like we deleted most of them. But it was really interesting looking at their photos at the time, and I did save a couple:  

I was reminded of these photos by an article in The New Yorker about the GoPro camera, “We Are a Camera,” by Nick Paumgarten. The GoPro is a small HD video camera with different mounts that can be affixed to all kinds of sporting equipment. Mr. Paumgarten says an interesting feature of this camera is that

because it primarily points outward it’s a record of what an experience looks like…The result is not so much a selfie as a worldie. It’s more like the story you’d tell about an adventure than the photo that would accompany it.

The author’s son won a GoPro in a school raffle, and

On a ski vacation that spring, he affixed it to the top of his helmet…Even though the camera was turned outward, filled mainly by the sight of the terrain sliding past, it provided, more than anything, a glimpse into the mind of a dreamy and quiet boy…I didn’t need a camera to show me what he looked like to the world, but was delighted to find one that could show me what the world looked like to him. It captured him better than any camera pointed at him could. This was a proxy, of sorts.

My Perestroika

In 1979 I spent six weeks in the Soviet Union. I had taken Russian for three years and could speak the language passably. I was with a group that was unique for the time: instead of traveling in enormous tour buses, staying in tourist-only hotels and eating at tourist-only restaurants, with every waking moment completely controlled by official “Intourist” guides, my group drove ourselves in VW buses, camped in campsites outside of the major cities, and spent the days on our own in the cities (in my case, Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa).

It was a phenomenal experience. I was 21 and the Cold War was raging. I spoke to hundreds of ordinary Soviet citizens, and not one of them had ever had the opportunity to meet an American, much less an American who spoke Russian.

The most common question asked of me was, “Why does your country want to have war with us?” I was floored by this, because of course I was certain the Cold War was entirely the Soviet Union’s fault. I would reply, “My country tells me you want to have war with us!” This exchange, that happened multiple times, is one of my strongest memories from that summer. It would always end with the two of us, Russian and American, reassuring each other that the last thing in the world we wanted was war.

As I traveled around the country it was shocking to me to see the wounds of World War II still evident. Some beautiful palaces, bombed by the Germans, were still in the process of being rebuilt. There was a name for an entire generation that had no fathers—so many men had been killed in WWII. It was easy to believe that the Russian people had no appetite for war.

This trip opened my eyes to the propaganda of my own country. It was a defining moment in my life: I realized I had been lied to by my own government. I started questioning everything I had been told.

Just recently I watched a documentary called “My Perestroika,” that to my delight is partly about Soviet life in exactly the time I was there. The film is made up of interviews with five Muscovites (filmed in 2009 or so, film was released in 2010); they were students in the same Moscow middle school in 1977. Their interviews are intercut with one man’s home movies of his childhood, Soviet propaganda films from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and news clips of the changes that perestroika brought.

The people interviewed in the film were in college during the collapse of the Soviet system, so they are old enough to have strong memories of the Soviet system; they were young enough to participate in the demonstrations and activities of the early 1990s; and now as adults they are dealing with the changing economic circumstances of post-Soviet Russia. One has become a successful businessman and is the most American-like of the five, but the other four all mourn what they see as a loss: the increasing Americanization of their culture where the only thing that matters is money.

After watching it, my husband Arthur said, “I never could understand what you meant when you said that some Russians want to go back to the Soviet system. But after watching this I could see why.”

There’s also a chilling warning about Vladimir Putin. Two of the interviewees are history teachers (they’re also married). They both talk about how challenging it is to teach the last seven decades of their country’s history. At the end of the film they are watching Putin talk at a conference about releasing new history textbooks, and you realize he’s talking about a 1984-type scrubbing of the past. You can see on the teachers’ faces the horror that they’ll be the ones required to carry this mission out, mixed with the disappointment at realizing that their experience of (relative) political freedom is maybe about to be snuffed out; authoritarianism is not only their past, it’s also their future.

If you’d like to learn more about Russia, in particular the events of the last twenty-five years, this film is an excellent place to start.

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

I saw the film “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” on HBO recently. What an amazing film about the power of humans to transcend tragedy, as well as the resilience of nature. The filmmaker, Lucy Walker, was going to make a short film about the Japanese fascination with the cherry blossom, which is evidently a very important part of their culture. Then the tsunami hit, and she integrated the two stories in a fabulously beautiful way.

Some of the Japanese interviewed say the cherry blossom is revered because of its ephemeral nature—it blooms for just a few days and then is gone. They even love it when the petals fall from the trees; among their many names for the blossoms is one for “fallen petals in water.” A man who raises cherry trees, who is descended from a long line of cherry-tree growers, said, “perceiving transience heightens appreciation.” This is the message of the film: life is short and when we think it’s going to go on forever we take things for granted. When we are in touch with the truth that life can be taken from us at any moment, we appreciate every moment. That may sound trite, but this film says it in such a graceful way it feels fresh and powerful.

The film begins with a stunning video of the tsunami coming towards the camera, taken from a hillside above a town, with residents of the town all around exclaiming as they watch the destruction unfold. At first you can’t really see anything happening, the wave is so far away, and then you can’t believe your eyes as it comes towards you and it becomes clear how vast the devastation is. The wave ends up almost reaching the hillside and the sense of panic is communicated through the voices of the people all around; it’s an emotionally gripping experience.

The beauty of Japanese culture comes across in the second half of the film as the cherry blossoms begin to open among the destroyed houses: the reverence across age groups and gender for the beauty of a flower. There’s the sense of a poetic nature that seems to me to be totally missing from American culture, and when I see a depiction of a culture that has it, I really feel the lack.