I was organizing footage for my editor this weekend and came across film reel 015, which I had just had digitized. I’m two years old, dancing in my underwear in our apartment in Singapore, where we lived at the time, shaking my little groove thing, dancing like no one was watching.
I’ve been feeling anxious about the upcoming trailer edit. I’d left a rambling voicemail for one of my producers, and he texted back right away: “Hey, wanna talk?” We jumped on a call, and as soon as I started to talk about what this film is bringing up for me, I teared up.
So many feelings. Sometimes overwhelming.
Making this deeply personal film about my grief feels like dancing in my underwear again, except this time I’m 47, and when the film gets released, many more people will see it. Well, that’s the hope. And here I am, revealing my grief journey in such a vulnerable and exposed way.
While going through the archive for the film, I found a video tour of my mother’s house when she was 70. I had filmed it years ago with my mini camcorder, wanting to understand how the house and all the things in it made her feel. I knew how it made me feel, but I also knew I couldn’t fix it. We had certainly tried.
When I pressed play, there was Mum, radiant in her blue Sri Lankan Barefoot kurtha (the same one she wore to our wedding, and the one I found in her house and wore to her celebration of life). She’s standing at the front gate, smiling. I ask her questions before we venture in, though even opening the door was difficult, the entrance was blocked with so many things.
Watching it again was confronting. It made me sad, and I wanted to shut down, as it often did when I visited. It felt so out of control, a visible manifestation of her grief. A grief I underestimated, and never truly grasped until now, with both my parents gone.
But as I kept watching, I found something else too: humor and joy. In all the chaos, there we were, mother and daughter, navigating the absurdity of the situation with love and laughter. There were moments of light in the darkness.
When I spoke to my producer, I told him, “I know this footage needs to be in the film. I can’t tell our story without it.”
After Dad passed, Mum’s accumulation of things became her way of coping. For years, I felt shame about that, fearing people might judge her, or me. But I’ve come to see it differently because she was more than her grief, more than the things she held onto. She was truly magic, and I miss her.
Today, I bravely took my grief hard drive to Amsterdam to meet my editor Emma Mandjes, and as we discussed the film and how I was feeling, I teared up again, and she met me with such kindness and care, the kind I needed in that moment.
This film, Unpacking Grief, is teaching me something.
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