Tuesday Movie: A Single Man

A Single Man came out in 2009.  I just saw it last week, alone without popcorn or any sort of candy, which is maybe why I feel so on the fence about this film.  This is a movie you need to see with someone and then discuss it.  My husband fell asleep about twenty minutes in. So, this film is Tom Ford's directorial debut.  Tom Ford is a clothing designer and he has made a very artistic film.  I may even go so far as to say it's artsy fartsy.  In my opinion, it tries just a tad too much to be art instead of just telling the story of George, a gay man in the 60's whose partner of 16 years was killed in a car accident. This film is the day in the life of George, a British college professor who is contemplating suicide. What I found particularly sad is that George wasn't invited to his partner's funeral.  I can't imagine this and I wanted him to fight for that, but that's not what this movie was about. Colin Firth plays George and he is terrific in the film, but everyone else just seemed like set dressing. Okay, Julianne Moore was good too, but she's good in everything.  She's like the poor man's Meryl Streep.  I'm lying.  I just said that because it sounded funny.  She was miscast in the Jurassic Park film that my son is enamored with.

This film is book-ended by death, although it's not graphic.  It's stylized death.

Have you seen it?  What did you think?

Monday Mournings: The Death of a Brother

My name is Jim Wright, but most people just call me... erm... Jim. I'm a native of northeast Alabama, Navy veteran and retired from a large Pathology laboratory in Birmingham, Alabama. I now live in Amman, Jordan with my Companion, Zeek and our psychotic cat, Umm Khalil. These days I spend most of my time writing, blogging, and Tweeting and just self-published my first book, New Yesterdays at Create Space.
I spent about twenty or so years, on and off, in the funeral industry. Those years were some of the most rewarding of my life and certainly helped to make me the man I am today. (You can read my interviews with Jim here and here.)

DW: Who was the person that died?
JW: My younger brother, Tony.

DW: How old were you at the time?
JW: I was 17 years old.

DW: How old was Tony?
JW: 16.

DW: Was it a sudden death or did you know it was going to happen?
JW: It was "suddenly expected." He came down with cold and flu symptoms about three weeks before he died. His condition progressed fairly rapidly from "nothing to be concerned about" to a comatose state. We were advised not to hope for recovery about a week before he died. We finally disconnected the life support systems and allowed him to die, still without a firm diagnosis. The autopsy revealed that he had died of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. It was the first recorded case of that condition east of the Mississippi River. RMSF attacks the body universally which led the doctors on a merry chase after pneumonia, renal failure, respiratory failure and so many others. They even debated whether Tony had contracted some kind of viral encephalitis or meningitis.

DW: Did you and Tony ever talk about their death?
JW: Death wasn't a subject of conversation with teenage boys in those days.

DW: Had you experienced any other deaths in your personal life before your brother died?
JW: Yes. My sister died from SIDS when I was about 4 and my maternal Grandmother and an uncle when I was ten.

DW: Were people supportive of your grief or did they shy away when you were grieving?
JW: Quite supportive actually. I come from a very large and, in those days, close-knit family. From the time Tony's condition became serious we were never left alone. My Father's sisters and brothers, as well as my cousins were all there on a daily and nightly basis offering support, kind words and just being there. After the funeral, they didn't desert us. I'd have to say that my extended family helped me to get through that very difficult grieving process in a way that no professional counselor could ever have done.



DW: Is there anything you wish you'd done differently with this person?
JW: I don't think so. I only regret we didn't have more time together. We were fourteen months apart in age and naturally very close. I added him as a character in my recently published book. The months I spent writing that story, I felt he was right there beside me helping flesh out the story. After thirty-nine years, he is still with me and I think about him surprisingly often.

DW: Was he buried or cremated?
JW: He is buried out in the countryside, in our family cemetery, under a tall cedar tree.

DW: Did you learn anything about the grieving process that you'd like to share?
JW: I think I learned that having a support system in place is critical to the grieving process. That being said, I also think that grieving is a very private affair that you ultimately have to face alone, in the dark. All the support, kind words, and warm gestures are necessary to get through the initial stages but finally it has to be faced and accepted alone.

DW: Were any songs played at the memorial that were important to your brother?
JW: I have to honestly say that I can't remember what music was played. The thing I remember most is my Dad saying that he didn't want a "traditional" funeral. He explained that, in his opinion, funerals were torture, in those days, with a person or group getting up and singing a song about joyous, heavenly reunions and then a preacher getting up and wringing the tears out of the family and friends. Back then, funerals in my area of the South had a minimum of three preachers who usually took the opportunity to give a modified revival-type sermon warning that the deceased had barely scraped by and managed to miss Hell, but a lot of us might not be so lucky. Gawd, how I hated those funerals! So, Dad selected a couple of hymns and one preacher who was a good friend of his. He promised to limit his remarks to no more than 15 minutes, and he kept that promise.

Sorry for that tangent. Back to the question at hand, Elton John had just come out with his Yellow Brick Road album. I can remember Tony and me both saying that "Funeral For a Friend" and "Candle in the Wind" would be perfect funeral music. But of course, we knew when we said it that we both would be living for many, many years before we had to think about such things...


This one goes out to Tony.

Special Guest Post by Tex Thompson

Today is Friday and I normally don't post anything on Friday, but when I did my "call for help" post last week, this lady was kind enough to write something up and I loved it so much, I'm bending the rules and tweaking the format of my blog.  Tex is in my writer's group and she is not only a very talented writer, but she is also excellent at giving thoughtful/helpful critique.  Please go show her some blog love.  Seriously.

So, who is she?

Tex Thompson is a lifelong resident of Irving, the fetid and friendly armpit of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Born into an Addams family of overachievers, she struggles valiantly against success and independence by writing "rural fantasy" and waxing pedantic about the fiction-crafting arts. You can find her online at www.tex-books.com.

Like a lot of people, I was issued two grandfathers.

One, as he got up there in years, started having odd tremors. He went to the doctor, and returned with his wife to hear the results: Parkinson's. (Or as we've since renamed it, Michael J Fox Disease.) The doctor explained the progression of symptoms - increasing tremor/shakiness, loss of muscle coordination, all the rest. When he was finished, Grandma arched a salacious eyebrow at Grandpa and said, "Well, I guess we won't need to buy that vibrating bed after all." Even years later, when he was in a nursing home and hooked up to all manner of IVs and equipment, I can remember her threatening to put tequila in his feeding tube if he didn't behave. (He once got mightily sick on tequila during shore leave and never could stomach it afterwards.) His illness and death were every bit as hard as you'd expect, but that thread of humor ran throughout.

My other grandfather was just the opposite: an immensely hale and hearty fellow, he went to work every day until he was 88; renewed his pilot's license at 90. He was still in excellent health when his wife, who'd experienced serious physical and mental decline in the last few years, reached her end. All three children were there on the night she passed away. They asked if he'd like to stay over at my aunt's house; he said no thank you, and they arranged to come back the next morning to take him out to breakfast. They were on their way when my aunt got the call from the retirement community. "Don't go to the apartment," they said; "come to the front desk." As it turned out, after the kids had left the night before, my granddad had apparently written a couple of checks, shut the dog in the apartment, gone out to the patio and shot himself.

I came to find out afterwards that he'd once watched a friend deteriorate - cancer, I think, with a series of strokes near the end - and had decided that he wasn't going to risk that: he never wanted to reach a point where he was no longer in control of his life, or no longer had the ability to end it on his own terms. As soon as he was finished taking care of Grandma, he saw himself out after her.

It's hard to imagine two more different endings. If gallows humor often strikes us as sinful, suicide is far more so. But what I see on both sides of my family tree is an effort to take something as enormous and inevitable as death and control it somehow - to wrest back some of its power and say, "fine - but we're going to do this my way."

Sometimes, people who know me or read my blog tell me I'm funny. Usually I scuff my metaphorical toe in the dirt and say "aw, shucks." What I really mean to say is, "thanks so much for saying so; I'm practicing like the dickens for my final performance, and humor beats hell out of the alternative."