A near(ish) death experience and a movie!
Emphasis on the (ish)
I am going to tell you about a movie I saw last week. (I think you should see it too.) But first I am going to tell you about what happened the night before I saw it. One now seems to belong to the other.
Not so surprising. That's how stories work, you know? They get embedded in our realities. I can't ever separate a book or movie from the moments surrounding our first encounter. Can you?
This isn't a review. It's just a little rumination. (With itty bitty spoilers that spoil nothing.)
I listened to this song 100 times while I wrote this. Well...99 and 1/4 times.
Wednesday Night
It was late. I was tired. But I couldn't quit clearing my throat. It felt like a slightly worse version of an allergic reaction I have sometimes. But to what? I hadn’t eaten anything new. Riley was out of town, so we’d ordered takeout from a favorite Chinese restaurant. Maybe I was dehydrated on top of being allergic. On my way to bed, I filled a glass with water. I made myself drink all of it before brushing my teeth.
My hand hovered over a box of Benadryl. I hate taking it. It makes my thinking dizzier than usual. And I always wake up so groggy. The throat clearing was annoying but not unbearable. It happened all the time. It was no big deal. No Benadryl.
Brontë, my six year old, was settled in Riley’s side of the bed. I read beside her, turning my head into my pillow each time I needed to clear my throat. I fell asleep before the end of the chapter.
I dreamed I was sitting in a very deep chair in a front room. The chair was pushed against the northern wall. When I turned my head to the right, I could see the raised edge of casing, the profile of a knob - the front door. The western part of the room was divided by a wall. A kitchenette north of the wall. A hall south of it. I was alone. I seemed to be sick. I could not move.
I felt some relief when I saw Brontë coming down the hall toward me. She stood at the threshold, “Mom, I am checking on you.” And then, just in the corner of my eye, I saw the front door knob begin to turn. I turned from Brontë and toward the door. It swung very slowly into the room, it seemed heavy. It was being pushed open by a hand, its long fingers extended and flexing against the door’s midrail.
The fear I felt when I saw that hand is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my waking life. I started to scream, “Don’t let him in! Brontë! Don’t let him in!” Brontë stood in the hall, watching. I turned back to the door. The gap was wider now, I could see the hand was attached to a wrist. The part of my brain that always knows it is watching a dream broke through and asked, “Who is he? Why are you so afraid?”
I screamed the answer, and then woke up.
Brontë wasn’t standing in a hall. She was tumbled up beside me. I could move. But I was having a hard time swallowing. Disoriented, I stood up holding my throat.
Maybe I needed water. I moved quickly to the bathroom, filled the glass with water and gulped it down. The water shot out of my mouth, splashing the mirror, counter and my feet. I tried again. More splashing. I couldn’t get the water down my throat.
My body started doing a retching, clearing, gasping, rasping thing. I held onto the bathroom counter and tried to help, but didn’t know what to do. After seconds or minutes or no time at all, I could feel the slightest release. I tried to drink again, just a little, slowly. The water pooled at the back of my throat before slipping down. Tired, hysterical, confused, I felt the water’s wayfinding and thought,
“This must be how a mountain feels when water seeps into its cracks.”
I calmed myself down by following the water.
Water can move through a mountain. It flows through cracks too small to see. As it moves, it collects minerals from the rock. When the water reaches a hollow place, and drips, drips down, air releases some of those minerals. They are deposited back into the mountain, but in a new form.
Another sip of water.
That is how stalactites and stalagmites form in caves. When I was little, a park ranger at Carslbad Caverns told me how to remember which is which. A stalactite grows down from the ceiling, it has to hold on tight to not fall down. A stalagmite grows from the floor, it might reach the ceiling someday.
I thought about the water dripping into my stomach, so slowly, forming multicolored speleothems.
It was only after my third sip of water that I realized I was having an allergic reaction. I took Benadryl and then stayed up the rest of the night.
Thursday Morning
I called Riley around 9am and told him what happened. He asked questions and made me promise to see a doctor. And then a moment of quiet.
He didn’t understand. Why didn’t call I him during the night? Why didn’t I wake our 15 year old to sit with me while I waited for the morning? Why had I waited till after breakfast to call him?
When you’ve known someone a very long time, there are conversations that are never over. I realized we’d just stumbled into one of ours. He’s been exasperated before, shaking his head because I’d die before asking someone for help. This was just a very literal manifestation of that worry.
He might not be wrong.
I am anchoritic, existing in a space withdrawn from other people. I can identify some of the materials used in its construction - childhood experiences, processing disorders, beliefs, fears. But there are elements I don’t recognize. And so I can’t deconstruct it. I am not sure I would if I could.
Riley’s never tried to pry me out of my enclosure. Instead, he meets me at an east-facing window. This is okay. It always has been.
The problem is...I’ve never known how to ask for help from inside my anchorhold. Asking and receiving is an interaction that just seems improbable to me. And so even when I was gasping in my bathroom, I didn’t once think about trying to get help.
I told him I’d wake him up next time. I promised to make an appointment with a doctor. We both know this conversation isn’t ever ending, so he turned to the dream.
“You said you screamed the identity of the person before you woke up. Who was it?” My throat felt clear and so I could laugh when I answered, “Oh! It's kind of horribly perfect. I screamed, ‘It’s a neighbor!’”
He laughed too, a little. Of course my hermit dreaming self would identify, “unable to stop a neighbor from dropping by” as the height of terror.
I didn’t say what I’d thought while I waited for the morning. That the opening made for a door is called a portal. That neighbor is a word that existed long before neighborhoods. It just means, “one who dwells nearby.”
Doesn’t it make more sense for that hand to belong to something like grief, or death or the processes of time than a category of person? That my daughter at one threshold, mortality at another, with me in the middle was a frankly unsettling and weird thing to dream while experiencing a mild medical emergency.
I wasn’t keeping any of this back from him. (And he'll read it here today, anyways.) It just didn’t seem relevant. I think a lot of ridiculous things before the sun comes up.
Thursday Afternoon
I felt too tired to work, and too uneasy to sleep. I asked my two older kids to see Thelma with me. My 15 year old leaned her head to the side, searching her memory for the trailer.
June Squibb, who did many of her own stunts in the film, plays Thelma Post, a feisty 93-year-old grandmother who gets conned by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson (The White Lotus’ Fred Hechinger) and sets out on a treacherous quest across Los Angeles, accompanied by an aging friend (Richard Roundtree) and his motorized scooter, to reclaim what was taken from her. - Magnolia Pictures.
When my kid finally pulled Thelma to the front of her brain, her eyes lit up.
“Oh! It’s like John Wick but for grandmas, right? Yeah, I’ll see that. Can I bring a friend?” I told her she could. My twelve year old asked if she could could get popcorn. I said she could.
We walked into the theater just before the lights dimmed. It was a 2pm showing on a weekday, so the theater wasn’t sold out. But there a dozen or so people already seated, all over seventy-five years old.
As the girls found their seats, my twelve-year tripped and sighed loudly. I hushed her, at least as loudly as she’d just sighed. “Hey, the trailers are starting.” She looked at me like I was bonkers. And I guess I was! I don’t know. I just didn’t want to ruin the theater experience for anyone’s grandparents.
Thelma is kind of like John Wick for grandmas! If John Wick wanted restoration instead of revenge, never hurt anyone and learned to accept help along the way. But it’s also about care work, resistance and grief. It nods at the way traditional gender roles impact the aging experience. And mostly, it’s about the way relationships shape our lives.
Thelma Post is a 94 year old woman living alone for the first time in her life. She lived with her parents until she was twenty-three. She moved out when she got married. She lived with her husband until his death two years earlier. I got married when I was twenty-one. I’ve never lived alone either.
As I’ve gotten older, especially as I’ve moved away from my traditional upbringing, I’ve struggled to understand the best way to process this aspect of my life. I wouldn’t change anything, not really. I like how things turned out. (At least so far.) But I also know I’ve missed out on something.
The scenes of Thelma moving through her home, on her own terms, made me hug my knees.
I didn’t expect this movie to solve such a long-standing problem. But it did. June Squibb plays Thelma with a kind of radical acceptance. Thelma doesn’t regret her first 92 years. And she doesn’t regret the last two years. I can live like that too. The scenes of Thelma moving through her home, on her own terms, made me hug my knees.
The set design helped make her movements feel immediate. The walls, shelves, couches and table tops all just looked just right. Like if Wes Anderson decided to zero in on a sense instead of a palette. I could almost smell Thelma’s home. Not in a bad way! In a library full of old books way.
All paper decays. But books made before 1970 are particularly prone to cellulose decay. When people say they like the smell of old books, what they really like is the smell produced by acids eating up cellulose in the paper.
My grandparent’s house was full of slowly rotting paper - photo albums, framed pictures, every bill they’d every recieved neatly filed, stacks of letters bound with rubber bands, shelves of books - including two full sets of encyclopedias. I’d walk into their home and inhale. I found myself breathing in deeply every time we saw Thelma in her home.
Thelma’s grandson, Daniel, visits her every day. Daniel, played gently by Fred Henchinger, helps Thelma check her email. He asks her to wear her fall alert bracelet. Thelma helps him too. Daniel is having a hard time.
His last relationship fell apart. He sleeps in. He can’t find the right kind of work. I read one review that described Daniel as “an affable slacker.” But I don’t think that’s quite right. Daniel isn’t slacking. If anything, he seems to need to work harder than other people to process the world.
In one scene, an overwhelmed Daniel falls apart outside a gas station. He’s trying to explain why he’s having such a hard time to parents who don’t have the same kind of hard time,
Daniel: I can’t… I can’t do anything. I literally can’t do anything. I’m such a little bitch.
Daniel’s Mom: Don’t call yourself that. God.
Daniel: I truly have no ability to do anything. I can’t do anything with my hands. I can’t…
Daniel’s Mom: What do you want to do with your hands?
Daniel: I don’t know. Nothing. I just… I can’t…I don’t know facts.I have no qualifications for any jobs.
I… I can’t do math.
At that last line, someone in the theater chuckled. And I get it! It’s a silly thing for an adult to say! But I was crying so hard I had to bite the insides of my cheeks. I’ve shouted about math too. Living with disordered processing feels like failing at math. It’s all inputs and no function. Thelma helps Daniel render reality. What will he do when she is gone?
And what will Thelma do while she is still here?
Living with disordered processing feels like failing at math. It’s all inputs and no function.
Thelma is not vulnerable to being scammed because she is old and alone. She is vulnerable to being scammed because she loves people, and is loved by people. She knows this. So when she decides to go after the scammers, she does it alone.
There are moments in the movie when it seems like she’d rather die than ask for help. I guess I can relate. When she finally asks for help and receives it, it feels nearly improbable. But what about existence isn’t?
The girls and I passed the popcorn back and forth, laughing and crying through the movie. I worried a few times we were being too audible in our enjoyment.
As we walked out, an older woman tapped my shoulder. She’d come in during the previews, ducking down below the screen while she got her partner’s wheelchair settled next to her seat. I braced myself for a remonstrance. Maybe we’d been too loud after all. Instead, she nodded over to the girls and said, “Thanks for sitting with us.”
I told her the feeling was mutual.
Thursday Night
I called Riley and told him I’d made an appointment with a doctor. I took Benadryl, just in case. Brontë climbed into bed next to me. She held my hand while she fell asleep.
When Brontë was five years old, she walked into my room crying. She’d just realized we’d never be the same age together. She’d never get to be a child with me. I’d never get to be a thirty year old with her. I held her close, and told her that was okay. I was happy we got to be together, even at different ages.
I don’t know if she knew why she was so upset about this thing that has always been true. But I think I do. She’d just realized our timelines only get to overlap for a little while. I lived without her once. And she’ll have to live without me someday.
I was afraid of falling asleep. I didn't want to dream again. I thought about Thelma's house. How could I make my house feel that real? We needed more paper in our house. More photographs, more books, more letters.
I can't keep that neighbor from pushing open that door. But I can make sure they're met with the smell of decaying cellulose. I bet they like it too.
Properly dizzy with Benadryl, I giggled a little bit about Time or Death or Whatever pausing to inhale the smell of old books. Maybe it'd buy me some extra time. Who knows how long it takes for time to breathe deeply. In the morning, I'd take the girls to the bookstore.
And then, I fell asleep.
If this piece gave you something to think about for a day, a week, or a month consider making a one-time donation so I can keep writing! Buy me a pen, or a used book, or 48 minutes of childcare!
Thelma was written by inspired by writer/director Josh Margolin's grandma. Her name is Thelma! She turned 104 this week.
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