My Plague Year: Breath.

What am I supposed to watch, Beaches? There’s an artifice to all the films engineered to make you cry. The scene builds to its inevitable crescendo and then the tears. And then the funeral. And then the deathbed or the road accident and the people left behind. Everything tied up in a bow of how this is what you’re supposed to do. There’s a tidiness to the films I’ve seen that deal with death because death is the thing and then the film continues and you move on to something else.

And the tears. Soft, lilting little things that last precisely for a moment. A rolling solitary tear while someone is on the phone. That panicked moment when they rush to a bathroom to wash their face, then they look at themselves in the mirror as if looking at yourself is precisely what you would want to do.

In Midsommar, Dani (played by Florence Pugh) excuses herself for a moment, because an acquaintance brings up her parents’ death. She goes to the bathroom, which turns into an aeroplane bathroom as if to say she has done this before. Her fists are clenched, and she bawls. This is how grief comes in reality. They say the waves but maybe it’s more like daggers.

There’s a scene early on in the film when Dani learns about her parents’ death and calls her boyfriend. No, no, no she screams into the telephone. Her boyfriend visits her at home and holds her while she screams more. He looks helpless, with nothing to say. She looks like she’s trying to claw herself out of her own mouth. It lasts for what feels like five minutes. I was ready to turn the film off. That’s how I saw of myself in Dani’s grief.

I’ve been reading and searching and watching for something to at least make me feel like there’s a connection to my past year. Some form of movement forward that lets me see the other side of the shore. It certainly hasn’t come through therapy, or exercise, or all the books dominating the Amazon charts. Instead, I found it at the end of a long week, at 10pm watching a two and a half hour indie horror film set in Sweden.

Yet it’s all there. There’s a scene towards the start where Dani is at a party. Everyone around her is talking, but it sounds like an incomprehensible drone. Dani stares out into a void that’s out of focus. I know that feeling. People with the best of intentions invited me out and I could barely function. Less understandable people expected me to join in with the fun. Barely two months after my father died, I went to a staff party and my (thankfully now former) boss called me boring, because I didn’t want to drink shots and dance around with a smile on my face until two am. Not just a gentle ribbing either, a full rant in front of everyone else about how boring I was. I went home. I haven’t seen her since.

In another scene, Dani eats a magic mushroom and for a small moment, feels some peace. She then looks down at her hand to see grass growing on it. The inevitability of the universe, that someday you will also die and return to the earth. She freaks out and walks away, telling herself to not freak out. She thinks people are laughing at her. Everything about social convention is strange. In her grief, she is Othered.

It’s not until she dances around the maypole for hours with people that understand her, that she is suddenly shocked into happiness. This is the trauma of the grieving body, a desire for something extreme to come and just shock you out of what feels like an inner treacle.

Towards the end of the film, she is confronted with imagery that shocks her into her primal grief. She screams. A group of young women envelop her, and they scream together. She lets it out. She watches a building full of her old life burn. She dances around, covered in flowers. In the film’s final shot, she smiles.

I feel like what I’m still waiting for is that jolt, that shock, that burning building. For life to tap me on the shoulder one morning and surprise me. Then I feel intense guilt because my entire life is built on happiness and plenty. How is it not enough? Why does something have to burn?

There’s a breath running through Midsommar, that the cult members share through a sacred book. It’s the gasp of birth, the shortness of a thrust during sex, and the last intake of death. Death is not a journey for those who have died. I’m beginning to feel it’s a profoundly selfish act for those that remain to figure out what the breath they have in them means.

I suppose I am at least starting with the question.