This movie is one of my all time favorites (top 3). But I couldn’t watch it for years. Exactly 8 years.
Last time I watched this film it was 2014, I was sitting next to my mom who passed away one year later. We cried side by side and shared treasured moments around movies and songs that I wasn’t able to revisit since.
At the time we were both extremely depressed and facing low points in our lives. We both saw it in each other’s eyes but couldn’t bare to inquire, nor to burden each other with the stories behind our pain. We just resigned to make the best of the moments we had. We did.
I have so many memories of us cry laughing and singing out loud, many photographs of those days spent cooking and cleaning together. Memories laced with a stinging pain and guilt.
Those moments that make me feel my humanity to it’s depths and make me cry and smile at the same time.
There is so much I would’ve said or done. But I didn’t know then how to fix her brokenness because I was experiencing the same thing and she didn’t know how to fix it either. We just mirrored the pain to one another and realized words would’ve opened wounds neither of us knew how to heal.
I saw the human in her, so I couldn’t burden her with my sorrow.
she saw the mother in me, she let me put up the strength facade and didn’t dare take it down.
How perfect that the film was about the love for family. Just like a bow, these artistic expressions come together to tie up the memories and scattered flashbacks.
I don’t know why with me a song is never just a song nor a movie is just a movie or a painting ….
But I am grateful to have been blessed with the kind of heart that isn’t afraid to sink in emotions.
Today I watch my grief frame by frame, listen to it in each melody knowing fully it is a blessing to have gotten to a safe place where I can finally allow myself to open these flood gates and be swept away by whatever comes up, not afraid to be shattered by the force of it. Because if there is something I know from all the heartbreak I’ve gone through is that I always come out stronger on the other side.