I just saw 'The Body'
POSTED BY: reginaroadie
UPDATED: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 15:51
VIEWED: 5802
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The Body. Oi. It's tough to even talk about. See, I've dealt with a lot of death (A LOT). My cousin was murdered on Christmas Eve, my great aunt (who I was very close to), my grandma (who I was very close to), my great grandma (who I was very close to) and others. Death is the only time my mothers side of the family seems to get together, it's our own macabre family reunion.
My mother is the strong one. She is generally a mess, but when bad shit goes down she is all on top of things, so much so that you start to wonder if she even cared. I know she did, about every single one of these people, cos after they died she was a different person.
Like Joss, I don't believe in god. I can't believe in something that would take away all of these people from me for no reason. Don't give me make you stronger bullshit. Just when I needed my grandmother most she was stolen from me. These deaths left my mother with debilitating panic attacks (mind you all of these people died withing a 6 year time span), which only subsided when another family tragedy struck. So I take no comfort in the idea of them all hanging out in heaven. I think when you die, your body is absorbed into the earth, your energy is absorbed into the atmosphere and you are reborn as grasses and stuff like that. It's the whole circle of life thing. And I'm okay with it.
I was woken up at 4 am by my aunt bawling that her son was dead, someone spiked his drink with methadone to steal a pair of snakeskin boots and $2,000. They never caught the bartender that did it. No one told me my grandmother had died cos I was at a horse show, she had gone into the hospital for hip surgery after falling on some ice and never came back out, they found advanced bone cancer, she was dead within 6 days. I never got to say good bye, I didn't get to see her at all. My great aunt, well I got to watch her die of pancreatic cancer. She fought it as hard as she could, but that's generally a battle you don't win. She stayed at home with my mom and her sisters and the hospice people taking care of her. They all did a marvelous job, but still it was awful when she went. My great grandmother was 97 and fell out of a car, hit her head and went into a coma. 3 days later she was dead.
I am an only child. We don't talk to my dad's family cos they practically disowned my dad after he married my mom, they now only call for money. So to lose so many people on my mom's side in so many ways has done 2 things: made death easier and made death harder. Easier cos everytime you go through it, go through the motions of it you get more familiar with them. I think i could plan a funeral in my sleep. Harder because I realize that without siblings and my dad's side of the family when my mother, her sisters and my father are gone, I will have no one. No body. My parents are in their mid-60's and I am constantly paranoid that they are going to die before I get married, before I have babies, before I do the few things they want for me. It's hard, and the thought kills me.
In The Body when Anya freaks out about brushing her hair and the fruit punch it slays me. I can usually hold it together until that and Willow trying to find her shirt. cos that's the thing, no one knows what to do, and there never is a why. People die, and it sucks, and it's not fair. There's no rule book, there's no excuses, there's nothing. it's worse if you don't have a god or anything, cos you get no answers. it's just you, and your head.
Much like someone else on this thread, all of this is very very hard for me to talk about.
I gotta say death is one of those things that until you've really experienced it, you won't get. I gotta tell you the idea about putting the thing about the girl's dead father in her graduation video was really disrespectful. Her father's death was not something to put on that video. It was hanging over her enough, to drag that into it would have been totally inappropriate. Also the 'Everybody Hurts' montage, wow, talk about kinda evil. It was very nice that you wanted to make is somber or whatever, but
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I realize now that those two times I dealt with death as a videographer was higly inappropriate. I wouldn't go so far as to say evil. Malice was never my intent with those two. At the time, I thought I was handling them with kid gloves.
I now realize that just to acknowledge it at all was uncalled for, and will clearly avoid the subject if it should ever come up. I Suppose that by filming it and dealing with it in my projects that I would be able to understand death a bit more.
But you're right. It was a bit evil but only a misguided one and not deliberate.
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"YES!!!I'm a man posessed by many demons....Polite demons that would open the door for a lady carrying too many parcels...BUT DEMONS NONETHELESS!!!! Yes. I have walked along the path of evil many times, it's a twisting, curving path that..actually leads to a charming plot garden, BUT BEYOND THAT EVIL!!!"
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I didn't mean that you were intentionally being mean, no it was totally innocent. You didn't understand or get it. I'm glad to see that now you get that it wasn't the best idea. I also didn't mean evil in the big evil way, just more like the opposite of nice and good. Ahh watch me dig myself into a hole! Regardless, i think you should capture life as a videographer, there's too much death around us every day so celebrating life becomes a very important job.
Also though the brightside: Cos of all this death, and my comfort level with death (cos for all my btiching I'm actually really good around death and stuff) I went into anthropology, and eventually got a certificate in Medicolegal Death investigation. I wanted to help grieving families by helping to identify the dead to return them and to find the circumstances surrounding such events. Now I work in fingerprints, where I get to fingerprint the unknown dead occasionally to identify them to give a family closure. It's not a pleasant job, but someone's gotta do it. Although I am still considering going into the funeral home business and getting my mortition liscense. Yeah I'm this creepy and morbid. ;)
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http://pluralofapocalypse.blogspot.com
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Inara: "Do aliens live among us?"
Kaylee: "Yes. One of them's a doctor."
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