3B
Wednesday, October 11, 2017 // The Statement
The picture stays in the kid: Ghosts
I
n retrospect, it was a bad
decision to review “A
Ghost Story” for the Daily
this past summer.
But in my defense, how
was I supposed to know that the film
— in which a 30- or 40-something
dies in a car crash and morosely
yet patiently haunts his widow and
home, where successive tenants
cycle through until a developer
buildings a large tower in its place —
would be released in theaters when
my grandmother stopped eating,
when I learned we would have to
put our dog down and when my
family sold our house?
That
one-two-three
punch
wrecked
me.
None
of
these
developments were unforeseeable,
but their combined effect was
devastating. Each represented a
peripheral, yet still critical, aspect
of my youth.
I spent nearly every Sunday for
a large chunk of my life driving
down to Chicago to visit my
grandmother
in
her
Michigan
Avenue
condominium.
When
Nancy was diagnosed with primary
progressive aphasia about 2009,
for which she paid with her ability
to use language, our visits became
more frequent, and more important.
We got Wrigley, our Tibetan
terrier, when I was in preschool, 16
years ago, and his lifespan defied
his own health. Once excessively
fat and lazy, surviving off only
cookies as my mother relented to
his incessant begging, he began to
lose weight a few years ago until his
ribcage was showing. I called him
“Noodle” as a joke, but the reality
wasn’t too far off.
I moved into my house on
Kingsport Court in the middle
of the first day of second grade,
boarding the A bus in the morning
and returning to a new home on the
E bus. It was only about a half-mile
away, if that, but the neighborhood
felt different. Our neighbors on Ivy
Lane were social and amiable; the
folks on Kingsport were quiet and
private. And yet it was home, behind
the police station, with a partially
collapsing wooden fence in the back.
The tertiary elements of my
childhood — they are perhaps less
formative
and
important
than
myself and my immediate family
— nonetheless felt important, and
while I might have been able to
handle the loss of one after the other
successively over a number of years,
the combination at once hurt.
I didn’t feel the effects until a
little later. I flew into Chicago in the
middle of the summer to attend the
funeral and, incidentally, help my
mom move into her new apartment.
But once back in Washington,
with most of my friends soon to be
leaving for a break before school
started, I felt alone and fell into a
depressive state.
I watched “A Ghost Story” about
a month earlier and it bummed me
out without deeply affecting me.
Still, I moped around the house,
eating dinner by myself, refraining
from speaking, contemplating its
messages, which may not have
been as deep as writer-director
David Lowery had imagined. In
fact, I still haven’t truly figured it
out, and I’m starting to think that
its philosophizing was simply a
façade.
But whatever I thought at the
time, “A Ghost Story” returned with
a vengeance a few weeks after the
funeral. I pondered the enormity of
time, the inevitability of death and
all that I was bound to encounter in
my forthcoming years. I needed a
friend, though, and in Washington,
most of mine had already left. It
was awful.
I thought back to the film, which
aside from its critical acclaim
became notable when it premiered
because of its five-minute-long,
uninterrupted scene of Rooney
Mara, in mourning, eating pie
through
tears.
That
scene
is
incredible not just because of how
it depicts grief, but because of how
it seemingly elongates time by
refraining from editing. The scene
feels so long, simply because we’re
used to the fast pace of other films.
It goes on forever, and yet it’s only
five minutes.
I felt her pain in those days. My
appetite disappeared. I lost interest
in my hobbies. I felt guilt over my
lack of emotional expression (I
still haven’t cried over any of these
events, for which I feel profound
shame).
I felt like so much had been
ripped from me.
And that lingered for a while. I
worried I would spend the rest of
my life in this emotional purgatory,
contemplating my own mortality,
the inevitability of change, of
moving on without an anchor. I
would recall that my father is about
the age when his father died. I
would remember I still have one
grandparent left, and spry as she is,
she is still in her eighties.
But at some point, the depression
— or whatever it should be called
— ebbed. Perhaps it’s because I
returned to school, where the
demands of work superseded my
ability to feel remorse over any other
facet of my life, and that I haven’t
returned home to see the carnage of
my parents’ divorce, of our move, of
the two deaths.
Still, the film hasn’t left me, and
like its titular ghost, it haunts me on
occasion and reminds me that some
other foundation will vanish, too,
maybe this time without a warning.
BY DANIEL HENSEL, DAILY FILM EDITOR
ILLUSTRATION BY ERIN TOLAR