Nothing brings a family together quite like a birth or a death. The enmity between my parents after their divorce only began to soften once my nephew was born. And when my grandfather died in 2005, our family, already close, came together as families do to mourn the ember of his memory through a screaming haze of whiskey.
He died shortly before Thanksgiving and myself, my mom and my uncles made lots of trips out to the house to keep grandma company as the holidays have a way of underlining a person’s absence after they’ve been snatched from the world. This was a pretty terrible year in our lives, in general. It was the start of my final year at UCLA, which was not an enjoyable experience for me for a number of reasons. It was also the year my parents began to realize they no longer loved one another. If indeed the universe was designed by a Creator with a morbid sense of humor, as I have come to suspect, then it was only fitting that grandpa’s death happened in such a monumentally shitty year.
In the weeks immediately following his death there was a flurry of activity. We had to go to the funeral home and make the arrangements for his burial, a process that was made significantly harder when my grandmother kept stopping to point out interesting leaves on the ground. Well, everyone has their own way of coping and I don’t begrudge her the old “Look at this leaf” approach. We had to plan a memorial and invite all the sundry characters from decades of an eclectic life. We had to do little things too, stuff you never think about, like changing the information on the cable bill. But most of all, the thing to do was just be there and be present so that the sadness of loss would be subsumed in the pulse of the lives that go on.
Being present is a small thing. We do it every day by the simple accident of our existence. But it can can also take a lot out of you when someone has just died, because the glory and the privilege and the burden of your very existence is thrown into sharp relief. It was a day in late fall, early winter in Los Angeles - some bite in the air, with clear blue skies after the rain had washed away the smog - and we made plans to meet at grandma’s house.
I promised everyone I’d be there, then drove from Westwood straight to the AMC in the strip mall near my grandma’s house and bought a ticket to see the film Jarhead starring Jake Gyllenhaal. I remember getting out of my car and walking through the parking lot thinking to myself that this is a gift. I can’t really explain it. That parking lot seemed to contain, for the briefest of moments, the secret to the bigness.
It was the first time I watched a movie in the theater by myself, and it was revelatory. For one, it was a very good (and still underrated) film. For another, the last time I had been in that theater I was a kid watching Stargate with my grandma and she got a bunch of rowdy teens who snuck in kicked out which mortified pre-teen me but now I think is both hilarious and awesome. It was also just a chance to sit with myself, with my thoughts, and escape from the crush of it all. For two hours I sat there in this little oasis of cinema and nobody knew where I was while the magic of film washed over me and it was glory in the true sense of the word.
When I finally showed up at the house two hours late, nobody even asked me where I had been. I had discovered something secret. Something pure. And it made me indescribably happy. Every year thereafter, we would spend Christmas Eve at grandma’s and on Christmas morning while my mom and grandma were having their coffee, I would sneak off and walk to the AMC and watch a movie by myself. The Day the Earth Stood Still. Beowulf. The Golden Compass. Those were all, sadly, quite terrible movies, but it wasn’t really about the film. It was about the momentary interlude from the avalanche of life.
We love movies because the screen acts as an intermediary. It shows us versions of the world that we wish we lived in or versions of ourselves that we wished we could be. But reality is never far away. In fact, it is just right outside those swinging doors. Eventually, my grandmother couldn’t live on her own any more and we sold her house. The days of sneaking away on Christmas morning to sit in gentle solitude and watch a terrible movie at the AMC on the other side of the freeway were over.
My grandmother is gone now and I live many thousands of miles away on another continent. But sometimes, when I can, I still sneak away to watch a movie in the theater by myself. And the same rush of discovery and joy - it hasn’t changed. The feeling that, like an ancient clock, everything has snapped into place one more precarious time, that will probably never fade. I hope it never does. Because what is life really if not those small moments where we capture the ineffable, ghostly impression of something that we don’t really understand but which brings us great joy?
