or What I learned from watching The Iron Lady, The Way, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I am not someone who is well acquainted with grief. I have never lost a close family member or friend. I have only lost two of my grandparents (two are still alive) and both of those in my late thirties and not unexpectedly. It is not something I have any experience of up close.
And I can’t say I want to either. The thought of losing my wife or one of my children is sickening just to contemplate. I just don’t know how I’d cope. The three movies above all touch on that same thought – just how does someone cope with a death of a loved one?
“And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” Luke 2:35b
The Iron Lady begins by showing us an aged Margaret Thatcher struggling to come to terms with the recent death of her husband Denis. She refuses to clear out his wardrobe, sees Denis around the house repeatedly and has conversation with him. It is a;most like the way an amputee still fels the itch of a limb that has gone, she still feels Denis is around, even sees and hears him, although in her mind she knows he is dead, but in her heart she is not ready to accept that reality.
In The Way, Tom Avery is informed of his son’s sudden death in a storm on El Camino de Santiago, a pilgrim track in Spain. Tom had spent his life building up a successful business as an ophthalmologist, and had put his son, Daniel, through university only for his son to quit his studies just before completing his doctorate because he felt he needed to experience the world, not just learn about it in a classroom. Such a decision seemed foolish and wanton to Tom, and was evidence of a growing distance between the pair.
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, borderline Asperger’s Oskar has lost his father, the only person he felt ever understood him in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As the time passes he feels his father slipping further and further into the irretrievable past, and embarks on what he thinks is one of his father’s games to uncover a mystery about the city he lives in, as a method to still feel the fading light of his father’s presence in his life.
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Psalm 23:4a
Oskar finds a key in a vase in his father’s wardrobe. The key is in an envelope marked “Black” and Oskar reasons that if he can find the lock the key opens then he will find the link to his father that he so desperately craves. So begins a journey to find every “Black” in New York City to find out what this key unlocks that can give him one last connection with his father.
Margaret Thatcher reviews her life from the time in World War II when she first felt the call of politics upon her life, meeting and marrying Denis, her rising political career culminating in her being not only Britain’s first female Prime Minister, but the longest-serving one of the 20th century. Despite her political successes being what she dreamed of right from the beginning, there is still a sense of regret, of the happy family times being all too few, of her never having the time or attention her family desired from her.
Tom Avery travels to the Pyrenees on the Spain-France border to collect his son’s body. While in a hotel room in a small village on the border he makes the decision to take his son’s cremated remains on the journey he started off on. At the beginning this is all about his son. He is taking his son on the journey he set off on but was unable to complete.
When asked, he replies that he’s not doing the Camino for himself. Along the way he meets fellow pilgrims who are exactly unlike the people he is used to spending time with, exactly the sort of people he is used to avoiding, yet try as he might, they are walking the same path as him, and there is little he can do to get rid of them. Along the way he learns that these people – Joost the overweight Dutchman who never stops talking, or making friends; Sarah the Canadian escaping from an abusive relationship and the guilt of an abortion; and Jack the Irish travel writer with writer’s block – become real friends. Friends who give and receive help, who forgive and share each other’s burdens.
“But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away.” John 16:7a
Tom completes El Camino de Santiago and when he does he has his son Daniel’s name written on the certificate of completion instead of his own, and then he takes one more leg to the coast to scatter his son’s ashes into the sea. It is only at this point, having experienced the Camino, having learnt from experience and not from study, having truly broadened his horizons that he is ready to farewell his son. El Camino had allowed him that last taste of being with his son but more than that had allowed him to enter his son’s world, something that he had previously been unable to do when his son was alive. He would not be able to see his son again, but for the first time, he really knew him.
In the end Margaret Thatcher reluctantly but determinedly packs her husband’s belongings and tells him that it is time to go. She desperately wants him to stay because he has been her sole source of warmth, levity and fun in a demanding public life, but realizes that he does not belong in this next chapter of her life. This next chapter will require no less determination and bravery than the previous chapters of her life, not least because she will have to face them without the person who had been her rock amongst all the previous challenges.
Oskar finds out that the key belongs to William Black, the estranged husband of the first person he visited – Abby Black. It was given to William by his father before he died. At first Oskar is distraught that what he thought was the last link he had to his father is gone. Then he discovers that his mother, who he thought did not understand him at all had discovered the plans he had made and had visited each of the people he was planning to meet beforehand to prepare them for his visit. He is amazed that his mother was able to think the way he did – something he previously thought only his father could do, and begins to realize that life without his father need not be completely empty.
Each of these three people come to a place where they are finally ready to say goodbye to the ones they love. And that gives us an understanding of what grief is – having to say goodbye before we’re ready. And each of these people as they say goodbye realize that they have been on a journey they would never have embarked upon had they not been struck with that initial grief, and that that journey has allowed them to welcome something else into their lives.
Their lives will never be the same after this grief, but there is not only loss. They find themselves doing things they would never have done if the grief had not struck – washing a teacup, travelling the world, swinging high on a swing. Those treasures that only grief can bring.
