Hope, as in Hope, Michigan
I did this funny thing and wrote a short film script - Liminal Friend - about a woman who loses her son, and her grief becomes a living, breathing being. For me, it isn’t such a stretch of the imagination; in fact, it requires very little stretching or imagining.
Somehow I’ve amassed writer/producer/director friends who have embraced the project, and we’re filming it. I could write a whole essay on why my friends are doing this - is this free therapy, pity, art, or a combination of it all? Or is this art?
I guess the why doesn’t matter because in a week I’m going to Hope, Michigan, and words on the page are going to be pressed into a real home, a live woman, army men, a handyman, and a cat.
I’ve had some moments where I feel like I might be in a simulation.
One is my friendship with the producer, Laura. I met Laura online in a writer’s workshop, and our friendship has been a gift mostly made on Zoom.
Laura paved the way for this film to become real. Which brings me to another reason this feels predestined.
We are shooting a film about grief near Laura’s home, filming in a house that used to be waterfront property. Now, it sits on a dry-ish lake bed. From what I’ve read, in 2020 a dam broke, and now this city needs to rebuild the dam to recreate the lake.
Hope.
While planning the movie, Ross, a director friend who has ties to a mountain I find sacred, sent me a list of actresses. I clicked on one’s bio and had no doubt that she was the main character. None.
Gabriela said yes to the part and let me know that she’d been in God’s Ear, where she played a grieving mother and army men played a part in the meaning of death. The child she lost in that play would be the age of the child in this piece. Is this synchronicity or grief pushing things together?
It’s been interesting watching people interact with the theme, the idea of grief turning into an alive creature. Is this science fiction? A mini horror film? Real?
I believe my brain has changed. It’s wired differently now with Nicholas gone. Grief isn’t an idea or a feeling.
Scientists used to believe in critical periods for the brain and that if you bypassed those, the brain couldn’t rewire. For example, if someone was born blind and you fixed their eyes so they could see, you had to do it before a critical period, or the person’s brain would never be able to interpret the signals.
We now know that’s notcompletely true.Babies born in India with cataracts lived to adulthood blind. When they became adults, eye doctors performed cataract surgery. It was predicted that their brains wouldn’t know what to do with the signals their clear eyes were sending. Scientists said that those formerly blind people might ‘see’ blobs of light and dark but would never really see.
