"What Dreams May Come"

Good days and bad days--I have them both. Today was an interesting day which gave me some strange hope and good memories. I went to the hospice thrift store and bought a book called The Force Is With You: Mystical Movie Messages That Inspire Our Lives. Money from the thrift store goes to pay for the workings of this hospice group and I have attended several of their grief groups so I am happy to support them by frequenting their store. Somehow when I saw Stephen Simon's book I knew it would contain the movie "What dreams May Come" as part of the commentary. It did.
This movie was always one of my favorites. I can remember watching it and being so comforted by the depiction of the after life. It was so beautiful and artistic. My love was an artist and I can honestly remember watching the images, like paintings, and thinking one day those images would be important to me. They are.
Since my love always had failing health and was not a young man, I knew that one day I would probably have to face his death. I was grateful for this film because I had never really imagined the post-death future as anything but clouds before I saw the film. Parts of the movie were filmed in Glacier Park, Montana. My love and I visited this park years ago and I can still remember how beautiful it was.
Anyway, the author tells us just how difficult it was to get the movie made and how important it is for him to this day. In the book he provides an anecdote about a little girl who saw the movie just two days before her death and how her father related that upon viewing the film she had "relaxed." She had asked to see the film and it was no small thing for her to view this newly released film at the time.
If you saw the film, you remember that Annie, the  mother of two, commits suicide after the death of her two children and then a few years later the death of her husband. Simon says that he believes we choose our lives before we come to earth. He believes that we choose the events which will occur in our lives because we have particular lessons to learn. In the case of suicide, Simon says that we create our own "hell on earth." "Annie is living in a nightmare version of her life with Chris because this is the karma that she has chosen in order to work out her issues over having taking her own life." Surely suicide is a living hell for everyone it touches.
When I look back on the love of my life and the issues he might have been working out in this life, I can see the issue of love and justice at every turn. I would like to think that my issues include fear and acceptance. Only time will tell and possibly I will not figure this out during my life. Either way, I want to choose something really beautiful with the time I have left.