The hardest "in memoriam"

Over the years, I've written eulogies on this blog for, it looks like, 19 movie stars, directors, or others who have touched my cinematic life. It's probably more, but that's the number I remembered to give my "in memoriam" tag.

The 20th will undoubtedly be the hardest.

If you wondered why I left up a post entitled "The interchangeable erotic thriller posters of yore" for an entire week -- especially given that it was already incompatible with our current moment of coronavirus and protest -- well, I'll tell you now.

I lost my mom this past Monday.

And in a very real way, I have her to thank for my becoming a cinephile.

First, let's discuss the necessaries. She had dementia, which means we were expecting this for a number of years -- even long before she started showing signs, as her mother also had it. The pace of her illness gained an alarming speed in the past year -- she was living in her own home as recently as last October -- but in the case of dementia, a faster decline is probably more merciful anyway.

I'm doing better than I might have expected, for a number of reasons. For one, my sister was able to be there with her for her last week in hospice, when she was moved to a place where visitors were allowed. I could not travel to the Boston area from Australia of course, but I was able to see her on video chat and speak to her when my sister held the phone up to her ear. I told her what I wanted to tell her. In each instance she gave an indication that she knew I was her son, something I had already prepared myself not to be possible when I considered this outcome years ago. She knew she was loved.

Then of course there's all the love and comfort people provide you via Facebook, email, phone, text and in person. If you haven't been through it, maybe you don't know just how amazingly the people who care about you step up for you in times of sadness. Especially if they've been through it, they know what it's like, and now I will be even more likely to step up for them in the future, having gone through this myself.

Because of all this, I am doing well. Maybe not well enough to write a blog post before now, but well.

I won't go on in too much detail about the type of person she was, though I hope you love this photo from the early 1960s as much as I do. I've written her obituary as well as a more informal tribute on Facebook. Unless you happen to know me personally, you don't really need to read those things, and if you do, maybe you've already read them.

I will, however, try to describe my mother's role in my movie history.

I think my mom was always a cinephile, but I didn't fully realize it until recent years. I always knew what she considered her favorite two films, which were Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969) and Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude (1971). I watched them both when I was in my early twenties because I was curious to learn more about the depth of her affection. I must say Women in Love didn't make much of an impression on me, though now that she has passed, I will likely watch it again. Harold and Maude, on the other hand, has become a favorite that I have seen four times, most recently Tuesday night Australia time, when I watched it in her honor.

It may be no great surprise that this was my favorite Harold and Maude viewing, given the circumstances, nor that I got emotional during the climax, which finds Maude slipping away from Harold after taking poison tablets on her 80th birthday. Cat Stevens' score in general, and song "Trouble" specifically, certainly helped with my tear ducts in those final scenes. (My mom's love for Cat Stevens transferred to me completely, and I finally saw him in concert for the first time a couple years ago.) And though I could probably write a whole post about it, I'll just say quickly it was not lost on me that Maude chose the timing of her death in a way similar to how Mom chose the timing of hers -- opting, to the extent she could, to decline quickly, and spare her loved ones years of being the burden she never wanted to be. She didn't make it to Maude's 80, but she was close enough at 76.

I don't remember my mom watching a ton of movies when I was growing up, in part because that wasn't as easy to do back then. She would watch them when they came on TV, I think, but since many of the ones that she watched wouldn't have interested me at the time, and she would have watched them after I had gone to bed, it wasn't something I noticed specifically.

But around 1984, we subscribed to The Movie Channel on cable. Not HBO, not Cinemax, but The Movie Channel, which was telling as it contained no non-movie content. As my dad has never been a cinephile -- though he does love a good movie as much as the next person -- this decision was undoubtedly spearheaded by her.

We didn't stay subscribed to The Movie Channel for more than a year or two, which I think was possibly a conscious decision not to pay for something we weren't using. I think maybe the kids were using it, and that could have been part of the problem, because at one point there was a real effort to curtail our TV watching. As a parent now whose kids are way too addicted to TV, I get it.

But why wasn't my mom using it? Oh, she was, in her way. She wasn't sitting down to watch a lot of movies, but she sure was collecting them.

Before the days when you could watch movies on your TV whenever you wanted, you had to either sit down to watch when they were scheduled to air, or record them for later viewing. And when we had The Movie Channel, my mother went on a recording binge. She filled several plastic bins with the VHS tapes of movies she recorded off The Movie Channel, intending to watch them I'm sure. Maybe some she did watch. The collection mentality was what interested me, as I have become quite the collector myself. See all my movie lists, which are the type of movie "collection" you keep when you don't see it fit to spend a lot of money amassing a large physical collection. A certain frugality was something I inherited from her as well.

As a kid I would look at those titles with fascination, as examples of an adult movie world I could not yet access. Fitzcarraldo. Phar Lap. Equus. Victor/Victoria. Paris, Texas. Whose Life Is it Anyway? Breaker Morant. Dozens of others. The thing they all had in common is that they were relatively new releases during the time we had The Movie Channel.

But my mom also recorded movies for me from that time. Some of those I still consider masterpieces, like Time Bandits and WarGames. Others were guilty pleasures that I still think of fondly only because I wore them out at the time, like The Pirate Movie. (My crush on Kristy McNichol helped with the wearing out of that one.) Whatever the movies were, I first fell in love with movies during those years. Without my mother pushing to order The Movie Channel, and then operating the VCR before I could, I can't be sure my love for cinema would have taken hold at that key juncture of my development.

My mom may not have watched many of the movies she recorded, or maybe she did. The joke was always that she recorded them but didn't watch them, as we assumed that if she did, she would have recorded something else over them. But maybe she watched them and just wanted to keep them in her collection. It's what we collectors do.

Whatever the case was, she made up for it in the last ten years of her life. Again always a fan of something free, my mom really benefited from the vast movie collection of her local library in Bedford, Massachusetts. Since she did not live with the man who was her partner for nearly 20 years until he died in 2018, seeing him only on weekends, she had plenty of time during the week to watch movies.

And watch movies she did. I don't think I really had a sense how many she was watching until a visit in 2018, when we looked at the Bedford Library collection together. I thought I would curate a list of films I loved that she hadn't seen, but it was extremely difficult, as title after title were things she had already watched. I did finally amass a collection of about ten such films, but I don't think she actually watched them after I left. By then movies were already less able to hold her attention, I'm afraid.

But before that, she would watch them, and would ask my thoughts on them when we talked on the phone, or over email, before email was beyond her capabilities. Her observations ran the gamut from explorations of key themes of the films in question, to discussions of which men in the films were attractive or not attractive. She wasn't ashamed of being a little superficial in her appreciation of a beautiful face. I always think of Jeremy Irons as one of her favorites.

Over time, she often did not remember the names of the films even a few days after seeing them, though she could still talk about them, and I was often able to supply the name based on her description of the plot. Some ten-minute portion of every phone call was reserved for a catch-up on movies, and I always looked forward to those ten minutes.

When I get dementia -- a near biological certainty, it feels like -- I've told my wife that she should just sit me in front of my favorite movies, which are sure to speak to some core of my inner being, even after I've become untethered from other parts of myself. This is, in a way, how my mother spent her own decline, except in her case it wasn't favorites she watched. She may have watched some favorites, but her hunger for the films she hadn't seen yet -- a hunger I share -- defined that period of her movie watching life.

And in a way, that was a supreme act of optimism for her own future. She didn't say "Well, this is the beginning of the end -- better watch Harold and Maude a dozen times." No, she kept going on that impossible quest to see every movie she hadn't yet seen -- which I also share.

When your loved ones pass, one of the things that gives you comfort is recognizing the ways you see yourself in them. I owe so much to my mother for making me the person I've become. Those personality influences are more far-reaching than film, of course. But on a film blog, I'll place special emphasis on how she shaped me as a lover of movies. It's just one of the many gifts she gave me.

Thank you, Mom.