The boys are back

A week or so ago I watched the film 'The boys are back' on DVD. Starring Clive Owen, it's the story of a man and his two children and how they cope after his wife dies of bowel cancer. You might wonder why I don't stick with light and happy fare, and instead keep looking into the void. I find that accounts of death, cancer and grief - even fictional ones - are reports of a world in which I live, and they help me understand my own experiences. It's curious that there is not much good writing about grief, when it's nearly guaranteed for all of us.

The movie was uncannily close to the bone, and it will take me a while to write about my responses. One issue that struck me was what I call the isolation of grief. The one death provokes completely different responses because of the difference in relationship, so even in our loss we are alone, experiencing it in a unique way. The film contrasts the responses of the father and his mother-in-law. His wife dies at home, stopping breathing in the early morning, just as Jen did. When the mother-in-law walks in and sees her daughter's body in bed, she exclaims 'My baby!'. It's a painful insight into how agonizing it is to have your child die, and how wrong that seems. It's an experience I'd rather not imagine.

In subsequent scenes there is an ongoing tussle over how to care for his youngest son (about 5 years old). The mother-in-law believes that order and routine will be best, and tries to exert some control. Implicitly, the child is her daughter's legacy. The father asserts that he needs to be the one to look after his child, and takes him off on a spontaneous road trip. Yet when he later has a desperate need for child care, he finds that his mother-in-law has her own life and is not always available. In the end the two adults do come to see the commonality of their grief and reconcile.

In my life I've been so grateful for how accommodating Jen's parents have been to me in every way, whether in keeping in touch, or coming to visit when I needed to travel, or having us all stay with them in holidays. In the black hole of grief, it's hard to notice what's happening to other people. In the middle of last year when we visited Jen's parents, I realised that after a year they had only just started to put framed photos of Jen up, whereas I'd always had such photos. Yet even through these differences the commonality has remained. There are a handful of people - Jen's parents, her sister and brother-in-law, her best friend -- who have loved Jen as much as I did and for a longer time. In their company I feel deeply linked to Jen - even to the strong echoes of Jen in the sound of her sister's voice - and know that we are united by love.