28 November 2010

tomorrow something silly, I promise.

There's a film professor at my uni who's first wife died of cancer. I've had very little person to person interaction with him but as part of one of my jobs I've seen a lot of his home movies.

He made a documentary about her which seems a mindblowing thing. How to face that horror? What benefit to hope for? Three children without a mother, a husband without a wife. The gaping holes. 
The incongruity of existence, or might I say eternity, is that watching her die in this film, I felt nudged to hope. It is not that she was Eisenstein or Mother Theresa or even Michael J. Fox-like championing for a cure. She was alive and then she died.

What blunt words.

That few years ago when I watched that documentary I was in a serious funk. It was that point in life when you are twenty and you're trying to remember why we repeat all of the same actions everyday. I was not spurred to find greater meaning in teeth-brushing because I now knew the opposite: death. (For I posit that I did not and still do not quite know what is this thing called death.) I had felt a strange warmth enter my heart, what I can only call charity.

By charity, I mean that connotation given by LDS theology: the pure love of Christ. Or, if you be not a believer in Christ, perhaps you know what I mean with the simple: pure love.

By charity, I mean I was reminded that I needed people. I above all believe that in life we are meant to love and have relationships. Without this, we fail.

I always wonder why I felt this when I watched the film.


Now go look up some jokes or silly limericks because our faces have become way too long and pious. 

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for this post - I think we all need to be reminded that charity means we need to love and be loved.

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  2. There once was a girl named Marge.
    She traveled far away on a barge.
    She was very very pretty
    and didn't like to live in the city.
    She loved all because her heart, is was large.

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