It’s December, and I was recently re-admitted to the Vancouver Film Critics Circle, so there were a lot of movies to see last week — movies that the studios hope we will remember fondly when it comes time to vote on the best films of the year.
I can’t really talk about most of these films yet, since they have not yet been released — at least one of them won’t be coming to Vancouver theatres until the end of January! — but I must say that, if the majority of these films had anything in common, it was a pronounced thematic emphasis on death, aging, and the loss of opportunities in life as one gets older.
Sometimes these themes were put to a redemptive purpose, sometimes they were given a more negative slant, and sometimes they just kind of sat there and invited us to think about them in any way that we saw fit.
And while I can’t name the film in question, I would be lying if I said that at least one of these films didn’t have me crying like a baby by the end, albeit a very quiet baby. Like, seriously, these were sinus-clearing sobs that came from a deeper place than any tears that I have cried in a while, certainly at a movie.
Suffice it to say that, by the end of the week, I was zonked, so my wife took the twins to the Feast of St. Nicholas festivities at our church by herself on Saturday morning while I stayed home and looked after the baby — whose name, as it happens, is Nicholas. And as I fed him and played with him, I wondered.
I wondered what he would be like at 80. I realized I would not be there to see him at that age myself (unless I live to be 117, which is, uh, unlikely). I wondered how old he will be when I die. I wondered how I will die. I wondered if I will remember wondering about Nicholas’s old age, as I die. I wondered if I will remember anything, period. I wondered what he will remember.
Sounds morbid, I know. But every now and then I am reminded of the passing of time and how what once seemed like the future has already become the past, and is now lost to us. Having a baby like Nicholas around, wearing his older siblings’ hand-me-downs, I am frequently reminded of what it used to be like to look after the twins two years ago — and how different the twins have become since then, and how I will never be able to hold them in quite the same way, even as I find new ways to love and care for them.
So even as there is growth, there is also loss, of a sort. And that’s before we get to the really big loss that awaits us all.
The title of this post, incidentally, comes from ‘The Wood Between the Worlds‘, a song by my favorite singer-songwriter Terry Scott Taylor. He wrote it for his solo album A Briefing for the Ascent, which he recorded after the death of his grandmother.
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