Death

Lisa Parker lived close to the heart


Like most WordPress bloggers (or any blogger really) I am fascinated by the searches that people do that lead them to by blog. Probably the search term that comes up most often here is the name Lisa Parker. I first wrote about her in a piece called Going to the Movies. Rob and I had taken in the Viggio Mortensen film, Eastern Promises. Parker was the production unit manager for the film and it was dedicated to her, which is not uncommon in the movie industry when a member of the cast of crew dies during its production. Being me, I googled her at the first opportunity only to find that while her body of work is well-documented, there was little to no personal information to be found. That was frustrating to me at the time but now I find it quite fascinating. The public has this image of those in the movie world being eager for recognition to the point that any and all things about them are fair game and here comes Lisa Parker. A film is dedicated to her memory. A good film. And there is nothing to be gleaned about her save the work she left behind. How about that? Being remembered for your accomplishments only and not your dress size or tumultuous personal life.

I have searched and searched, in vain mostly, for more information on Ms. Parker. I haven’t uncovered much. She was just 39 when she died on June 4, 2007 at Charing Crossing Hospital after a brief illness. She was well-known in the Irish film industry and had worked on international films as well in many capacities. Her funeral was held shortly after her death in London with another memorial service in Dublin, Ireland the following fall. She was survived by her mother, sister and many friends. Donations were asked to be given to the Battersea Dog Home.

The second tim I wrote about Lisa Parker was in a piece about search terms. I thought it an odd memorial to her that people would find in the original blog piece that often brings them here. One of her obituaries carries the quote “she lives life close to the heart”. What a beautiful thing to have said about a person after he/she has gone. To me it means that she lived out her life doing what she loved and with that people who mattered most. What a lucky woman. And what better way to be remembered than as someone who followed her heart.

Overly Sensitive to Violence and Death as Entertainment


Rob and I watched the film, Babel, last night. It starred a very harried and old looking Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. I am pretty sure that Pitt’s wrinkles were his own but enhanced to make him appear emotionally worn and very tired. The plot isn’t clear on many points but Pitt and Blanchett were apparently on holiday in Morrocco following the death of one of their three young children. She is then shot while on a bus tour by whom officials by is a terrorist but turns out to be a pre-teen boy playing with a rifle. Meanwhile back home, the couple’s illegal Mexican nanny/housekeeper has decided to take their surviving two children to her son’s wedding in Mexico when the parents are late returning due to the shooting and she can’t find anyone she trusts to watch her charges. Now, I had a lot of questions while watching, not the least of which was why the scenes of the couple and the nanny and the children were constantly being interupted by the life of a sullen, grief-stricken deaf/mute Japanese teenage girl in Tokoyo. First why would you choose Morrocco as a holiday retreat after your child dies? And travel on a bus tour with cranky senior aged Europeans and Brits to boot? And why wouldn’t your sister-in-law rush in and take your kids after your wife has been shot? And why would an illegal take her employer’s kids to Mexico when you would think she’d realize that she was going to have one hell of a time getting them back over the border? And finally, why were all the teens in the film fixiated on sex? The Japanese girl practicially assaulted her dentist and then a policeman (though I didn’t see that part – more later on that), and the Morroccan boy was peeping at his willing older sister. 

I didn’t finish watching the film, which I know will drive Rob crazy. He looked up the synopis on Wikipedia to satisfy himself and show me that there was nothing to be upset about in the coming scenes. I told him I couldn’t watch anymore after the nanny and children are dumped in the desert in the middle of the night by her drunken nephew after an incident with U.S. Border Patrol. I was certain that something horrible was going to happen to the children and I just couldn’t bare to watch. Things like this always remind me of my own child and anxieties about her safety. “It’s just a movie” my husband reminded me but I am too raw still when it comes to possible death, even when it is just make believe. I don’t see this as entertainment although an article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail assures me that it is now violence and not sex that is the number one entertainment draw.

So I didn’t finish the film and I am thinking that I will opt for comedy for the next while (though that isn’t always a safe bet as we watched Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang recently and it was dead people awash.) I wasn’t always this way but after watching my late husband die, and my fears about my loved ones in the wake, has made me quite squeamish. 

Rob thought the movie was dull and disjointed (disjointed passes for depth these days in cinema) but I got the point the filmmaker was trying to make – even though he did a very poor job of making it. I am okay with fake stuff. Like super hero movies. That’s not real. There are no superheroes. But movies that mimic reality, and it’s mostly the gross, horrible underside, I can no longer deal with. I don’t know if I ever will be able to again and am not sure that this is a bad thing.

Funeral After Parties


I have written and rewritten this piece several times in an attempt to clarify, for myself really, why I was so disturbed by the drinking that accompanied the funerals I have attended up in Grande Prairie since last September. A Sunday evening phone chat with my best friends pulled some of it together for me. It bothered me because its not healthy or normal. When I told Vicki about the excess of drinking that goes on at the gatherings in people’s homes after the funeral and dinner, she was as perplexed by it as I was. She’d never encountered or even heard of such a thing. And maybe it is because we are Iowans born and raised and this type of reaction to death is not typical of people from such a stoic background. Or maybe not. Sometimes I am too quick to assume that the difference lies within me and that it is others who are the true majority and I am the freak. But, even my hard-partying cousins on my mom’s side didn’t rent a keg for a funeral – a baptism or First Communion maybe but not a funeral.

 

I grew up around drinkers. Both sides of my family have alcoholics. My dad was an alcoholic up until going on three years ago. My younger brother also had a drinking problem and quit drinking last spring. Like many people my age, I did my share of paryting – the majority back in my college days though as being a grown-up with a full-time job and responsibilities, as most people find, isn’t compatible with late nights and consuming of alcohol. And too, at some point you ask yourself – what is the point of this? Today, I am practically a tee-totaler. I can’t drink more than a glass of wine over the course of an evening and I honestly never acquired a taste for it. It was always something I did to fit in. I don’t feel the need to please people in that way anymore and resent anyone who pressures me to “just have one – it won’t hurt you”.

 

In my family of mostly beer drinkers, which I have always found disgusting to the taste, I was made to feel a prude. I still resent that, but I could never fathom the incentive to get a little tipsy with one’s relatives. It seemed, and still does, a asinine idea and a good way to stir up bad feelings and smoldering resentments. Now, drinking among friends and strangers, as many do when they are out in public establishments, seems a dumber idea than drinking with one’s family even.

 

So, Tuesday night as I lay awake until close to 4AM listening to the conversations and arguments downstairs, it brought back a lot of memories for me. My father drunk and mean-spirited. My brother back in his druggie days when he was threatening to kill us all in our sleep and I would push the dresser in front of the bedroom door just a bit so it would wake me if someone came in after I had fallen asleep. It reminded me of Will who like many men with his illness turned to alcohol in the beginning to try and quell the angry he couldn’t explain but was in reality cause by his immune system attacking his nerve endings and brain. And I realized. I don’t find drunk people as amusing as I do scary. They are unpredictable in word and deed. They cannot be trusted and even though it is widely thought that alcohol lowers people’s inhibitions and allows their true selves to come out, I believe that it allows them the imagined freedom to do and say all the hateful things they truly know better than to do when they are sober. It is not their true self but their selfish self. It allows them to not give a damn. To be hurtful and then excuse themselves of it later on with “I didn’t mean it. I was drunk.”

 

In May the family is planning a big gathering on the farm. I am thinking that I would rather not go. There is going to be a huge bonfire from the out-buildings they are planning to raze and plenty of alcohol. It is my opinion that a huge pit of fire and drunken people are not a good combination, but I am not a native so perhaps I don’t know best.

 

I do know however that excessive alcohol consumption and wildly erratic personality changes that it causes in some people – is not normal. I won’t be cowed into submission on this point ever again.