Grief (Emotion)

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      in Television

      The Dead Get a Do-Over

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      In a flurry of streaming television shows, the departed get a second chance. And viewers find an outlet for sorrow and remorse.In “Manifest,” a series streaming on Netflix, Michaela, one of the show’s more candidly troubled characters, turns up with her companions after a lengthy, unexplained absence to be reunited with their families.She ought to be ecstatic. But her reactions more aptly reflect the Kübler-Ross model of grief, some of its stages — denial, depression and anger — mingling on her features, along with a slow-dawning acceptance. As she tells Jared, her former fiancé, “Part of me wishes we hadn’t come back at all.”Her response seems relatable. Mourning her life as she knew it, Michaela is one of some 200 passengers on the Montego Air Flight 828, who have mysteriously vanished only to return five years later, not a day older and sound of body but freighted with all manner of weighty emotional baggage.In “Glitch,” Maria (Daniela Farinacci) resurfaces still caked in the soil from her grave.NetflixThat tale is but one in a rash of streaming series finding new audiences in the midst of a lingering pandemic, luring viewers with the suggestion that the boundary between life and death may be porous indeed. The departed get a new purchase on life in “Glitch,” an Australian offering in which the long-expired denizens of Yoorana, a fictional community in the Australian outback, stagger back to their homes, bodies still caked with the soil from their graves.“The 4400,” focused on the undead but with none of the zombie horror effects, shows the newly risen wielding oddly assorted superpowers. In “The OA,” a fable-like iteration of the resurrection theme, the heroine has perished many times over, blind in one incarnation but gifted in another with an extraordinary second sight. Death itself is illusory, she assures a young school friend. “I think you are always somewhere.”There is “The Returned,” an American adaptation of “Les Revenants,” a decade-old series about the long-gone members of a French Alpine village intent on picking up the shards of their lives, unaware that their near and dear have long since moved on. And “Katla,” an Icelandic production in which the deceased resurface in the shadow of an active volcano, seeking to salve emotional wounds.At a time when people are grieving not only their dead, but lost jobs, opportunities and daily routines, the appetite for such fare seems especially poignant. Reveries, sci-fi fantasies or meditations on life’s great mysteries, these shows offer viewers little in the way of resolution but hold out a promise of redemption, reunion and, not least, a chance to muse on their mortality.“Death has been a more omnipresent force in our lives in the last 18 months than it has been in our lifetimes,” said Steve Leder, the senior rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles and the author, most recently, of “The Beauty of What Remains,” about the nature of bereavement.“Death is no longer something we can banish to the basement of our psyches,” Rabbi Leder said. “It is that broomstick pounding on that basement ceiling, demanding: ‘What about me? Pay attention. I must be reckoned with.’”Dr. Andre (T.L. Thompson) and Claudette (Jaye Ladymore) of “The 4400” beam down with a mission.Adrian S. Burrows Sr./THE CW, via Associated PressSuch shows offer, as well, a chance for viewers to confront, or at least contemplate, their most nagging anxieties. “These shows are our version of a roller coaster, a death-defying ride with the things you fear most.” said David Kessler, whose most recent book, “Finding Meaning, The Sixth Stage of Grief,” explores the reverberations of loss.“When people are grieving, one of their greatest fears is that they’re going to forget about the person they have lost,” Mr. Kessler said. “We don’t want to move on because that feels like abandoning those we love.”There is scant chance of that in the latest shows, many of them defunct network series revived for streaming at an eerily opportune time. “We live in the world’s first death-free generation, meaning that many people live into their 40s before experiencing the death of a parent, sometimes even a grandparent,” said Alan Wolfelt, a death educator and grief counselor.“In a mourning-avoidant culture such as ours watching these shows is, in part, a rehearsal,” he said. “They permit audiences to mourn and to acknowledge the reality of their own death.”Yet they raise more questions than they can or care to answer. What makes us special? Do we, as in the case of “Manifest,” return with a mission or calling? Are there others like us? Are we in danger, or are we among the chosen? Will we get the chance of a do-over?Matters of faith are underscored in “Manifest,” as when a startled passer-by drops to her knees at the sight of Cal, the youngest and most insightful of the Flight 828 returnees, chanting, “He is risen.” For people eager to regain some semblance of certainty in a disordered time, these stories exert a powerful pull.“We’re a very mastery-oriented culture, always wanting answers,” said Pauline Boss, an emeritus professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota and the author of “Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change.”“With the spread of the virus, those answers are not necessarily forthcoming,” Dr. Boss said. “We don’t know if we can trust the person at the grocery store, whether or not they have been vaccinated. People are dying apart from their families, and those families may be feeling no sense of closure.“What we have now is this whole host of ambiguous losses: loss of life, loss of jobs and loss of faith that the world is a safe place.”“Manifest” will return for a fourth and final season, though Netflix has not announced a date. Peter Friedlander, who heads Netflix scripted series in the United States and Canada, said the series resonates with viewers because of their insatiable craving for mystery.“It scratches that itch, trying in some way to hypothesize about the great unknown, to explore the notion of revisiting unfinished business,” Mr. Friedlander said. Such fare is a balm as well for people dealing with regret, he suggested, those eager to extract a message of hope from apparently meaningless, ungovernable events.Sean Cohen, 27, a digital artist in Chicago who posts “Manifest”-inspired illustrations on Instagram, finds solace in the series. “It creates this whole story of how everything that happens is connected,” he said in a direct message on Instagram. There is also the emotional uplift, he said, “of seeing the passengers come together to help one another as the mystery unfolds.”The show also captivates Princess Louden, 25, a dancer and graduate student in social work in Los Angeles. “‘Manifest’ technically is about something that could never happen,” Ms. Louden said. “It’s not like aliens are invading the planet. But it leaves a little room for all kinds of possibility. That’s what draws me in.”The show is pure escapism, said Audra Jones Dosunmu, 52, a talent manager in the fashion and entertainment industries. “But there is also the idea that ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”“In a way I think of these shows as crisis pornography,’” Ms. Dosunmu added. “People like to see others going through things that they could never manage. But if that makes them feel thankful and better about their own lives, it’s a good thing.”Many of the shows offer the tantalizing possibility of rescue and redemption, reassuring fans that, as is repeated like a mantra on “Manifest,” “all things work together for good. …”In “Katla,” the dead, rise naked and covered in ash, a volcano erupts.  NetflixOn “Manifest,” the risen heed inner voices urging them to acts of heroism. Michaela responds to a “calling” to free two teenagers trapped in a killer’s lair. In “Glitch,” a young woman sets out to confront her rapist and murderer. In “Katla,” estranged sisters, one of them dead, work at mending their frayed relationship; and in “The Returned,” a serial killer in a former life learns to rue and curb his lethal impulses.These shows explore the prospect of a second chance, of tackling unfinished business, revisiting relationships, and dealing with regret, Mr. Friedlander said. “They let you look at the choices you’ve made and reflect on your priorities and values.“It’s that sliding-door scenario that asks, ‘What if I could say one more thing to that person I’ve lost?’” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Space Jam,’ My Dad and Me

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      A writer adored the basketball-Looney Tunes mash-up as a boy. Watching the movie again after his father died, he felt the movie resonate in a surprisingly deeper way.When I was 10, I thought the coolest person in the world was Michael Jordan. The second-coolest person in the world was my dad. He played in an amateur men’s soccer league; I preferred basketball, so MJ got the edge. Like a lot of kids who grew up in the ’90s, I revered the seemingly unbeatable Chicago Bulls, and I was devastated when, on Oct. 6, 1993, Jordan announced that he would be retiring from the NBA to play minor-league baseball with the Birmingham Barons. I liked baseball even less than I liked soccer.Jordan’s triumphant return to basketball in March 1995 was a moment of intense relief and exhilaration for me; and when the Bulls won their fourth championship, in the summer of 1996, my enthusiasm for Jordan reached a fever pitch. So when “Space Jam” debuted that autumn, I could not have been more excited. Michael Jordan teaming up with Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes in a feature film about a high-stakes basketball game? It was as if they had scanned my brain and made a movie of my innermost fantasies. I begged my dad to take me to see it, and the minute it was over, I begged him to take me to see it again.He was not especially impressed with “Space Jam,” but it was everything I dreamed it would be. First, it was hilarious. The Nerdlucks, a cabal of short, wormlike aliens who smack one another around like the Three Stooges, had me in stitches; my friends and I impersonated their screechy, helium-pitched voices for months, to gales of approving schoolyard laughter. Jordan’s bumbling, nebbish assistant Stan — played by Wayne Knight, whom I knew as the guy who gets smeared by a dilophosaurus in “Jurassic Park,” another childhood favorite — was hysterically funny. And of course the Looney Tunes cracked me up. When the Tasmanian Devil spins around a basketball court and cleans it single-handedly in a matter of seconds, declaring it “lemony fresh” — that seemed like the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life.Jordan with the Looney Tunes in 1996 — a young basketball fan’s dream lineup.Warner Bros.What I loved most about “Space Jam” was the candid glimpse it seemed to offer of Jordan’s life off the court. I had seen him in action, and in interviews as well as in commercials. But “Space Jam” showed me a family side of Jordan. Here was the star talking to his wife. Here was Jordan watching TV with his kids. And here was a flashback of a young Jordan, shooting hoops in the backyard, talking about his hopes and aspirations with his own dad.His father, played by Thom Barry, has only a small role in “Space Jam”: He appears in the first scene of the movie, watching his son drop bucket after bucket in the moonlight. “Do you think if I get good enough, I can go to college?” asks the young Michael, played by Brandon Hammond. “You get good enough, you can do anything you want to,” the elder Jordan replies. Mike starts rattling off his dreams: “I want to go to North Carolina … I want to play on the championship team … then I want to play in the NBA.”His dad takes the ball and says it’s time for bed. But Michael has one more dream to mention. “Once I’ve done all that,” Michael says, beaming up at his father, “I want to play baseball — just like you, Dad.”In April 2020, as the coronavirus was sending most of the world into lockdown, my dad died suddenly in his home late one night of a heart attack. He was 58. He’d been in immaculate health. We were extremely close, and spoke or texted every day. I was shattered.Around the same time, ESPN began to air “The Last Dance,” the network’s 10-part documentary series about Jordan and the ’90s Chicago Bulls. I watched the show in the weeks following my dad’s death as a distraction from my grief. But I was not prepared for the revelations of the seventh episode, which deals with the death of Jordan’s father, James R. Jordan, at the hands of carjackers in 1993. I was struck by certain similarities: how close Michael had been to his father, how much he relied on him as a mentor and a friend. James Jordan died a week shy of 57.A young Jordan (Brandon Hammond) and his father (Thom Barry) came to mean a great deal years later.Warner Bros.After that episode, I put on “Space Jam.” Again, I was looking for distraction; again, I was floored by grief. That opening scene with young Michael and his father, such a beautiful testament to a parent’s influence, now seemed completely overwhelming. Three years after his death, Jordan Sr. had been resurrected onscreen for a heartfelt tribute. And what’s more, Jordan had invoked his father as the reason he was pursuing baseball — a career move most people had dismissed as ridiculous.When Jordan announced his retirement, back in 1993, he told the gathered reporters that, although he was sad to leave the sport behind, he was glad his father had been alive to see his last game of basketball. The same line appears in “Space Jam,” in a restaging of the retirement news conference, and in light of the earlier scene with Jordan’s dad, the moment has a special emphasis.At the time, pundits could not fathom why someone as gifted as Jordan would give up his place at the top of one sport just to start at the bottom in an entirely different one. Jordan used “Space Jam” in part to explain his decision, to explain that while it looked as if he was following a whim, he was actually following his father. In light of my own loss, it seemed to me that Jordan was pouring his heart out. Watching last year — nearly 25 years later — I was profoundly moved.“Space Jam” was not really as candid about Michael Jordan’s home life as I believed when I was 10 and as “The Last Dance” made clear. Understandably, “Space Jam” did not touch on Jordan’s sometimes reckless gambling, nor on his embattled relationship with the media nor his weariness with the demands of fame. But the movie does contain some sincere and deep-seated wisdom about loss, which I was only able to see once I was in mourning myself.It’s about looking up to somebody and wanting to follow in his footsteps. To do right by him. To reflect back the love that person selflessly showed you. And although it might seem strange to say of a movie about Michael Jordan playing basketball with Bugs Bunny, seeing that truth in “Space Jam” after all these years helped me deal with the pain of what I’d lost. More

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      in Theater

      In Covid’s Early Days, Her Loss Resonated. She Hopes Her Hope Does, Too.

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      LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More

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      in Music

      ‘For Those I Love’ Sets Sad Stories to Electronic Beats

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      David Balfe never thought the public would hear his deeply personal debut album. But it became a runaway success in his native Ireland.David Balfe feels guilty. The Irish musician’s debut album “For Those I Love,” which he recorded under the same name, has had the kind of success most artists only dream of: It has won widespread critical praise and was only beaten to the No. 1 spot in the Irish album charts by Justin Bieber.But the record wasn’t made for public release, and Balfe said he feels uncomfortable receiving recognition for an album about his working-class Dublin childhood and a friend’s recent death.“I seem to have benefited from the release of these difficult and deeply personal stories,” Balfe, 29, said in a recent video interview. “It’s a little bit out of my control now.”He described the album — which depicts gang violence, poverty and substance addiction — as “storytelling set against a backdrop of electronica.” Its lyrics mix reminiscences of all-night parties with Balfe’s close circle of friends and indictments of wealth inequality in Ireland — a country where both house prices and homelessness rates have surged in recent years.Balfe grew up in the North Dublin suburb of Donaghmede, but went to school and had family and friends in nearby Coolock, where crime levels were rising throughout his teenage years. “I emerged at a young age into quite a violent backdrop and aggressive place,” he said. To survive there, he added, “I needed to learn a coldness.”On the album, Balfe explores death, grief and inequality in Dublin, which he said were all “intrinsically linked.” On one track, “Birthday/The Pain,” he recalls a homeless man who was murdered on the street where he lived when he was six.Balfe said he was “struck by the universal acceptance of a record that is so descriptive of a very specific piece of geography,” adding that he was surprised to see the “minutiae of a world that I grew up in resonating with people from a world so far from mine.”Balfe’s best friend, Paul Curran, played a key role in many of the stories told on “For Those I Love.” They met in high school, and Curran went on to become a popular spoken word artist, writing and performing work about everything from politics to soccer.At Chanel College, in Coolock, the two discovered music in lunchtime guitar jam sessions organized by an English teacher, Mick Phelan. “David and Paul were non-judgemental,” Phelan said of Balfe and Curran in a video interview. “They had their friends, but they talked to everyone. I saw a humanity and a maturity in them that I don’t often see in teenage lads.”After graduating, Balfe and Curran continued making music and art together: first in a hardcore band called Plagues; later, as part of Burnt Out, a collective that made audiovisual works that addressed youth unemployment in Coolock, which was running at around 25 percent throughout Ireland at the time.Balfe returned to the problems of Dublin’s suburbs in 2017, when he began “For Those I Love,” layering vocals over a solo instrumental project he put together in his mother’s garden shed. He brought his own voice — half-sung, half-spoken, in a strong Irish brogue — to the sample-heavy dance music he had written, mixing in snippets of WhatsApp voice notes and spoken word work by Curran.The tracks were made to share with his closest friends and his family, he said: “A document of love and thanks for the sacrifices they made.”In April, Balfe released a short film, “Holy Trinity,” as part of the For Those I Love project. Tiberio VenturaBut in February 2018, Paul Curran died by suicide and Balfe, grief-stricken, put “For Those I Love” on pause. The next few months were “a thundering whirlwind of chaos,” he said, that felt like “a day and a decade in one.”“In the shadow of grief, all of us were very different people,” he said. “It’s very easy to believe that you might never be creative again.”Balfe’s return to writing music was the “first step in the recovery” after Curran’s death, he added. Some of the material, like the opening track “I Have a Love,” was rewritten completely, changing from an ode to his group of friends to a eulogy to Curran; nostalgic new songs, such as “You Stayed,” were added.“It was very much a mode of self expression and survival at the time,” Balfe said.When “For Those I Love” was finished, in May 2019, Balfe put it on the independent music platform Bandcamp, to share with family and friends. A few Irish music blogs found it, too, and the record received some favorable reviews. But Balfe’s fortunes really changed when “For Those I Love” came to the attention of Ash Houghton, an A&R manager at September Recordings, which also represents Adele and London Grammar.“The album speaks for itself,” Houghton said in an email. “My only thought at the time was that it would be a tragedy if more people weren’t able to hear it.”Houghton offered a release on the label, yet Balfe initially was hesitant to share such personal work with a wider audience, he said. But friends who had also known Curran suggested the album could help others, he said, “and speak to them as they move through their own grief.”In March, September Recordings rereleased “For Those I Love,” which entered the Irish album charts at No. 2, and Balfe’s debut live show in Dublin, scheduled for October, sold out in 10 minutes.Niall Byrne, the editor of Nialler9.com, an Irish music site that was one of the album’s early champions, said in a video interview that, while many Irish musicians were producing good music, “you don’t hear a lot of rawness.” It was this quality, he added, that set Balfe’s record apart.A recent wave of new artists, he said — including Balfe, the group Pillow Queens and the post-punk band the Murder Capital — were “less defined by genre or sound,” but rather “by the sensibility and values their music holds. Their lyrics are informed by real issues.”Balfe said he was working on a new album, that would also be informed by Dublin and its politics, but that the project had hit a “frustratingly stagnant brick wall.” Despite the success of “For Those I Love,” he was still working “a day job,” he said — though he didn’t want to say what that was. He kept the job, which he had before signing the record deal, out of “fear of turning the thing that I love the most, the creative pursuits, into labor.”Since the wider release of “For Those I Love,” Balfe said, fans had been messaging him on social media, to share how the record has “helped them shake their grief.”He still mourns Curran, he said: “A semi-successful local record isn’t going to make that better.” But, he added, he was happy that his music has touched others. “Those responses,” he said, “have gone a long way to help with some of the guilt.” More

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      in Music

      When Her Mother Died, She Found Solace at a Korean Grocery

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      Michelle Zauner, a musician who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast, is making her book debut with “Crying in H Mart.”After an hour of discussing her mother, the afterlife and the shamelessness sometimes required in producing art, Michelle Zauner adjusted her video camera to show her Bushwick apartment. Her coffee table, suddenly in view, was covered with Jolly Pong Cereal Snack, NongShim Shrimp Crackers, Lotte Malang Cow Milk Candies and other Asian junk food.“This whole time we’ve been talking,” she said, “you’ve been in front of these snacks.”These are her favorite selections from H Mart, the Korean-American supermarket chain that for her serves as both muse and refuge. Zauner, best known for her music project Japanese Breakfast, wrote about the “beautiful, holy place” and the death of her mother, Chongmi, in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, “Crying in H Mart,” which led to a memoir by the same name that Knopf is publishing on Tuesday.In the essay, which is the first chapter of her book, she relayed her grief, her appetite and her fear that, after losing Chongmi to cancer in 2014, “am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” The rest of the memoir explores her identity as a biracial Asian-American, the bonds that food can forge and her efforts to understand and remember her mother.Zauner at home in Brooklyn with a painting by her mother.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesZauner’s parents met in Seoul in the early 1980s, when her father, Joel, moved there from the United States to sell cars to the American and Canadian military. Chongmi was working at the hotel where he stayed. They married after three months of dating and traveled through Japan, Germany and South Korea again before landing in Eugene, Ore., where Michelle Zauner grew up. In early drafts of the book, she said during our interview, she tried to imagine what it was like for her mother to marry so quickly, to face a language barrier with her husband, to uproot herself over and over. When she asked her father questions like “Do you remember how she was feeling?,” he answered with geographical facts and figures.As with many immigration stories, scarcity threaded its way through a lot of what Zauner found while writing the book: In their family, her father was so focused on providing that he couldn’t give her the emotional support she sought, while her mother viewed identity crises almost as a waste of energy. “I feel like she’d be moved by parts of the book,” Zauner said, “but I think there are parts she’d think, ‘I don’t know why you had to go on about this for the whole book when you’re just like an American kid.’”Zauner, 32, writes about their volatile relationship, contrasting her mother’s poised restraint with her need to express herself, her sense of urgency that “no one could possibly understand what I went through and I needed everyone to know.”After graduating from Bryn Mawr, she threw herself into the Philadelphia rock band Little Big League in 2011 before striking out on her own as Japanese Breakfast. Her first two solo albums, like her memoir, focused on grief: “Psychopomp,” in 2016, and “Soft Sounds From Another Planet,” in 2017. Her next one, “Jubilee,” is scheduled for release in June, and it is more joyful, influenced by Kate Bush, Björk and Randy Newman. In between these projects, she worked on video game soundtracks, directed music videos and crashed into the literary world, reflecting her maximalist and, yes, shameless approach to creativity.“The thing about Michelle is you just need to give her a little push in that direction — an affirmation — and suddenly she’s just flying,” said Daniel Torday, a novelist and the director of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr, who has been a mentor to Zauner.For her the artistic process, whether it is in her music or her writing, often feels all-consuming and anxiety-producing, something she handles by working through it. “If I’m going to take the time to go in on something,” Zauner said, “I want to be terrified of it.”And there are terrifying parts she confronts when retracing the last few months of her mother’s life. It is not exactly the cancer — in the book, she describes the disease with polish, crushing Vicodin for her mother with a spoon and scattering its blue crumbs over scoops of ice cream “like narcotic sprinkles.” It is that Chongmi was dying just as their relationship was at its best, “a sort of renaissance period, where we were really getting to enjoy each other’s company and know each other as adults,” Zauner said.In 2014, she moved back home to help care for her. Chongmi died that October, two weeks after Michelle Zauner married Peter Bradley, a fellow musician. By Christmas, he joined her and her father in Eugene, navigating the first heavy moment of their new life together — “like a baptism of adulthood,” Bradley said.“Crying in H Mart” is out on April 20.She and her father haven’t been in contact for more than a year, save for an attempt at therapy over Zoom. After her mother died, “our grief couldn’t come together in this way where we could experience it together,” Zauner said. “He started wearing this big ruby in his ear and then got a big tattoo, lost 40 pounds, started dating this young woman, and it felt like kind of a second death.”In an essay for Harper’s Bazaar published earlier this month, she wrote about the pain of that experience, then searching for a way to make peace with him and his new relationship, which has since ended.Joel Zauner, in a phone interview, expressed sadness about their estrangement. He avoided reading “Crying in H Mart” for months (Michelle Zauner sent him an advance copy), but when he did, he wept throughout and was stung that he wasn’t included in the acknowledgments. The tattoo was done on the anniversary of Chongmi’s death, he said, and is of her name in Korean, with the Korean word for “sweetheart” underneath.“I’m not a perfect guy,” he said. “But I certainly deserve more than I was given in both the article and the book.”Today, Zauner feels ready to shake this period of loss and just tour, and there is still more she wants to unpack about being Korean, possibly by living there for a year. “I think there’s a big part of my sense of belonging that is missing because I don’t speak the language fluently,” she said, and she is determined to preserve the thread she has to the Korean side of her family.She became engrossed at one point with Emily Kim, who as Maangchi is known as “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child,” finding peace in the way she peeled Korean pears — “the Korean way,” Kim wrote in an email — using the knife to remove the skin in one long strip, the way Chongmi used to. In 2019, the two starred in a Vice video that explored the effects of migration on cuisine, and on Zauner’s 30th birthday, Kim made her dinner. “She’s a real Korean daughter,” Kim said.Zauner feels wary, however, about her work in any conjunction with the anti-Asian attacks in the past year. “I’m fearful of using this tragedy to try and promote anything I’ve created,” she said over email the day after the Atlanta shootings. “It’s a little hard to encapsulate my feelings on such a heavy thing with a few words.”Her belief system these days has become more nuanced than before. She is an atheist, “but then there has to be some smudging of the edges for me,” she said. “In some ways it is impossible for me to not feel like my mother was looking out for me because of the serendipitous, fateful way that things happened in my life.”Almost a year ago, when she finished writing “Crying in H Mart,” she posted a photo of herself in her living room with her eyes closed and a peaceful smile, holding the book’s draft in her hands, with the caption “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.”There are instances when even though it goes against everything you believe, it’s important, Zauner said, to create an ambiguous space for things.“Like when I leave flowers on her grave, I know technically what I am doing is I’m leaving the flowers for myself. I’m creating a ritual and commemorating her with my time by doing this. But that is not enough for me to feel OK about it,” she said. “I need to kind of believe that she knows that they’re there.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More

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      ‘Beautiful Something Left Behind’ Review: Young Children and the Trauma of Lost Parents

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Beautiful Something Left Behind’ Review: Young Children and the Trauma of Lost ParentsIn her new documentary, Katrine Philp takes us into Good Grief, a facility that helps the very young deal with unspeakable loss.A scene from Katrine Philp’s documentary “Beautiful Something Left Behind.”Credit…MTV Documentary FilmsJan. 7, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe death of a parent, at almost any age, leaves a mark, but the effect it has on very young children is especially confounding. “Beautiful Something Left Behind” is a simple, elegant documentary about children coping with such heartbreaking loss, at a facility designed especially for them.It’s a place called Good Grief, a large clapboard house in New Jersey (the film focuses on its Morristown location, one of two in the state). In a one-on-one session with an adult staff member, a child tries to give colors to his feelings. Blue and red, he says, are how he feels when he’s “sad and really mad.” The movie then shows a group-therapy session, with children from six to about 10 years old doing recovery-room-style sharing.[embedded content]We like to think of children as being more emotionally candid and expressive than adults. Among the moments this picture, directed by Katrine Philp, shows us is how kids put on brave faces and try to deflect what they’re actually feeling. This is even more painful to witness than a child’s overt sadness. Also striking is how the children are made to understand the way some parents met their ends. You may shudder when one uses “bad medicine” to describe the cause of his father’s death.Philp does not have any talking-head interviews with the staff of Good Grief; only the children address the camera directly. She structures the movie in a loose, satisfying seasons-of-the-year narrative.It could be argued that the film needed a little more documentary-style explanation about how the facility works — how long children stay, the goals of the treatment, and so on. But ultimately, Philp can’t be blamed for stressing emotional engagement over exposition.Beautiful Something Left BehindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More