Mine is Graveyard of the Fireflies, what’s yours? Movies, books, etc., have mad me sad, no doubt. I’m man geek man enough to admit I cried when Lorien returned for Sheridan or when Billy dies mid-trial on Ally MacBeal (what?). But neither of those things inspired grief.
I don’t know what causes it, but Graveyard haunts me.
I hadn’t seen it since college, but it recently appeared on a list of “Great Films Too Painful to Watch Twice” from The Onion’s A/V Club. I remembered it as a sad, depressing film, but it never inspired grief. So, maybe it is the fact that I’m a father of a child who could, from a distance, pass for Setsuko – or the fact that I was reading the article at 3:30 in the morning — but it really affected me. So much so that I’m blogging about a day and a half later.
I just had to watch a bit of the video like the clip linked to above, but I am not sure why. Is it a form of catharsis to some grief I never knew I had. Or is it possible to have a…for lack of a better word…pre-cathartic moment in response to the fear of loss, which kind of fits the fatherhood notion above.
Now, I’m ever the reductionist, so now I’ll have to take a look into the root causes of grief, evolutionary advantages, etc.