Make me laugh

But I remember just being disgusted with the idea that someone had approved that movie. Parents don’t get to come back from the dead. I hated the movie before it even came out because I was just sure that it was going to be some hot garbage posing the question: “but what if we could bring them back for the day?” Well you can’t.

And then when it was released on Disney+ I watched it out of some passing curiosity. Within the first five minutes, I was in tears—not just crying. I was absolutely sobbing. I have many of my Dad’s shirts, and I like to wear them. They’re special to me. Any good story writer could have gleaned that from a little bit of research or simple observation of people, but when Ian runs into one of his dad’s old classmates and is hanging on to ever last detail he can get, that’s when I realized that this story wasn’t just written by someone who thought the story might be interesting. This was written by someone who had experienced the same kind of loss of a parent as Ian and Barley.

There are so many details I love about that movie, but particularly the end is what gets me (of course). When Ian says “I never had a dad.” I’ve said that about myself before, and I usually get the same reaction out of everyone: “you had a dad! He was an amazing man and he loved you so much!” As if saying that I never had a dad is some sort of disgrace to him. Yes, I have a father, and yes I do admire him and wish I could have known him, but I never had a dad to be there for me. I never had a dad. Simple as that. No one who hasn’t experienced the death of a parent at such a young age would understand that enough to write it in a story.

And the scene where Barley is actually getting to speak with their dad, actually getting closure, while Ian is trapped within the pile of rubble…I think that’s the most profound moment in the movie. You see Ian trying so hard to climb out of the debris, to get the chance to at least see his Dad and maybe wave hello. In the end, he is denied that chance. All he can do is watch though a gap in the rubble at a distance, no way of communicating with his father, only observing. If that had been Barley who had been forced to only watch, it would have been so much more devastating for him to accept that he had not gotten the chance to say goodbye. For Ian, it’s still emotional, but nothing has changed.

It’s like the memories I hear from others about my dad. They all got to experience those moments, and my sister was even old enough to vaguely remember a few, but the closest I can ever get to having memories will have to be settling for the stories I hear about my dad instead, like I’m observing from a third person’s perspective at a distance. That’s all Ian has ever been able to do either, and that’s okay. That’s enough.

I was 20 when I watched that film for the first time. I’ve had several phases throughout my life where I “mourned” my dad, but it was always really just the mourning of not having met him. After this film was the first time I went into what I feel like a true period of mourning my dad, experiencing the stages of grief, mourning the man that I have heard people tell stories about and remember fondly. It lasted about a week, and although I was miserable, it was cathartic. The grief I’d been carrying around for 19 years and pretending to ignore was finally addressed and I was able to let go of it.