The Paradox of Loss

  The lobby card speaks of it. The co-existence of the wonders of our world and the immense, catastrophic loss that lurks all our days and sometimes explodes into them.

Sometimes, the things we fear happen. The movie opens with a family on holiday flying to a resort in Thailand (they live in Japan where the husband has a job). Mom and one of the kids uneasily tolerate the turbulence attendant to their landing. But all is well. They arrive and begin a fairy tale vacation amid palm trees, turquoise waters and balmy breezes. Nothing would seem able to intrude. But nature shifts violently and the entire area is ripped away by a tsunami that injures the mother severely and separates husband from wife, and youngest children from oldest boy, left to tend to a likely to die mother amid a disorganized, filthy hospital where vacant faces reflect the incomprehensibility of mass death and seemingly accidental survivals.  If we lay the survivals at the feet of Providence, then there comes the question, "Why do some die and some live?"  Many chalk it up to God's cruelty. Others assert that He allows nature made and man made evil to occur--a consequence of the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden, but something to be overcome by the promise of Resurrection because of the vindicating act of Christ on the Cross.

I may subscribe to the latter view, but I am not immune to resistance, even rebellion, at the paradox of beauty and destruction locked in this physical, philosophical, and theological battle in which we are either beneficiaries or victims. 

As I sat in the theatre, actually holdiing my breath while Naomi Watts was flung like flotsam through the streets of a former resort area, I wanted to fun home and do what? Prepare. You can put away supplied, Djinn. But will you be able to get to them?  Well, I don't have enough. I should get more. I need to have money around, because when something happens, there won't be access to ATMs. But then I am not sure in a catastrophe like the one in the movie or the ones we have seen in real life, money makes any difference. So relax Djinn.  I don't do relaxed.  And relaxed was out while watching this film.

They took you to an edge in the film and then normalcy peeked out and the characters and I grabbed onto it. The blonde boy, named Daniel, whom mother and Lucas rescued--they lost him briefly--but he found his father who flung him in the air amid the throngs of the injured, generating a toddler's laughter. In a kind of makeshift refugee camp in the mountains, the middle boy of the family talks to an old woman about the stars that shine peacefully above them--some alive, and some dead, but all still luminous. Death, and life, always together, or consequent one to the other.

The Impossible in this movie (and in the true life story it detailed with its fictional enhancements) was that this family left Thailand battered, but intact. And then the thought occurs to me, "Nothing is Impossible with God".  Even when it seems so. Especially when it seems so.

And still there is always the underlying why, even when we have the answer in our hands or think we do.

The movie had a "happy" ending for this family, though clearly not for many others. I thought I'd have a nightmare last night on the vagaries of life and death. I have been known to have them, nightmares, or night terrors, in my case. But maybe I am coming to leave things in the hand of God rather than to force an errant, and futile, show of control over the realities of the brief human iinhabitancy of the universe.  Including my own and those of the people I have cared about and do.

Somewhere I read, "Oh, to be alive, when I die."  Words to live by before loss interrupts, and even while it does.