A Movie Review and More Meditation About Children and Their Loss
Posted January 6, 2009

http://radnichole.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/a-movie-review-and-more-meditation-about-children-and-their-loss/

The Hours emotionally lingered in me for days. The film's characters spoke to my heart, and my experience. Loss, contemplation and even performance of suicide, death by AIDS. Watching a loved one wither and die in pain. It was never the emotion within the film that disturbed me. It was the emotions the film recalled to me from my own experiences.

As someone who's worked for a lot of her adult life in inner-city addictions recovery and trauma recovery situations I have watched very dear and grand people slip away in great pain through suicide or overdoses. I have imagined them alone and cooling in empty apartments or park benches or alleyways with needles still fastened in their veins. I have remembered them alive and vibrant with a few weeks or months of sobriety, attempting to find their way through the seemingly everlasting internal pains that they could find a bit of surcease from through the agency of the drugs that would eventually strangle them.

Yes, one must decompress that. One must visit it before it totally overwhelms her. But, doing so through a movie is very likely not the best fashion to decompress, to revisit the haunting memories of people she will never again smile with or talk earnestly with or hug and appreciate. Decompression is often better done with a supervisor and a staff gathered around you. Sometimes, it's just too much and a Moulin Rouge is better for the heart than a tour de force like The Hours or Changeling.