And I felt it in all its might and strength as I watched the Kate I knew succumb to her illness, slowly disappearing. Joel felt it more powerfully than ever as Clementine began vanishing from his memory. Just ask the folks at Lacuna.īut all of that discounts the most important quality of all: love. And who doesn’t like easier? To paraphrase Hamlet, forgetting it all is a consummation devoutly to be wished. I wonder: What would my life be like now without the nervous breakdown, which took more than a year from my life? The trips to psych wards, whose sterile corridors made me feel more crazy, not less? The lost employment, the uncontrollable tears, the sensation that my soul has been scraped raw and bloody? In a word, it would be easier. The crying is the worst, and I’d be lying if I said I never wished for a means to erase my relationship with Kate from my memory. I can barely even think about it without crying.
I doubt I can ever again watch " Up," with its potent strain of love and grief that reduced me to blubber even in the best of times. Or Berkeley’s bucolic Greek Theatre, where we saw her favorite band, Radiohead, on a perfect East Bay evening. I can’t go to Royal China, where we always watched with fascination as the noodle makers did their thing. I still have more triggers than a classic Western-places and songs and foods films that we shared that I can’t yet tackle on my own. In recovery they talk about doing the next right thing. She threw herself into the task of finding a home for the kitten, working the phones, asking around, and finally arranging a meet-and-greet with a kitty-friendly couple I knew. Stephen was beside himself with worry for the little critter, which he didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to care for. One morning he found a tiny orange kitten in the library’s outdoor book drop. What kind of person was Kate? When she was raising funds and writing grants for the Dallas Public Library she befriended Stephen, a young homeless man who hung out in front of the building. Grief expert David Kessler says you’ll know you’re healing from grief when the memories bring more joy than pain. These are the memories I’d cling to tightest were I in Joel’s shoes. Or just the way her smile accentuated her deep brown eyes. A morning spent snuggling in bed with our overweight cat, Wuzz. A magical trip we took to the Venice Film Festival, and the way she beamed when I spoke on a panel there. Never the bad memories only the good ones. (For a long time those were the only weeks I had).
I’ve had weeks when I no longer wanted to be alive. I’ve had days when I marvel at the reservoir of tears within me.
It makes the present unbearable and the future undesirable. As anyone unfortunate enough to have lost a loved one will tell you, grief operates on a higher plain of pain. But I’ve come to view it differently since Kate’s illness and death. It’s an exceedingly clever film that I’ve always found deeply moving as an expression of love’s durability. And so they go on the lam inside his mind, staying one step ahead of the erasers, finding refuge within one old memory after another. He loves this woman, warts and all, and doesn’t want her erased after all. But Joel, a romantic at heart, changes his mind mid-procedure. As the doctor ( Tom Wilkinson) explains, each memory has an emotional core. Joel, seeing the allure of wiping away the pain, opts for the same procedure. In case you’ve forgotten (or had it scrubbed from your memory): After an acrimonious breakup, Clementine ( Kate Winslet) has had Joel ( Jim Carrey) erased from her memory by the technicians at Lacuna, who specialize in this sort of thing. Melding the creative melancholia of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman with the low-fi visual magic of director Michel Gondry, “Eternal Sunshine” uses a fantastical question-if you could erase someone from your mind, would you?-to get at matters that are, well, eternal: Are we more than the sum of our memories? Are the good times in a relationship worth the pain of loss? Perhaps most pertinent, does true love really conquer all, or is that just a sentiment we use to keep Hallmark in business? All of this has led me back in recent days to what I see as cinema’s deepest dive into memory, loss and enduring love, “ Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004).
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