We’re Cast Aways together

“I’ll be right back,” says Tom Hanks as he unknowingly boards a FedEx plane destined to rip his life apart in the film Cast Away. It’s a story for everyone content with their controlling grip of on the world. When loss obliterated the path we were traveling, our journey back became a personalized Cast Away experience.

The illusion of control plays out in my favorite scene of the movie. It’s a quiet moment seldom counted as a “best scene,” and it’s not included in the highlights above. Hanks is back in Memphis. A fire crackles as his friend listens. Ice rattles in his glass. The love that sustained him is gone. His life is a blank slate. What had five years on that island taught? He had control over nothing. “I would get up each day and just keep breathing,” he confessed.

Surrendering to victory

When you give up trying to control and accept what is, it’s a turning point on the journey back to you. Letting go of our partner is also letting go of the life we knew with them. The abyss of unknowable days to come silences the strongest among us. It takes courage to be still with it.

My list of mistakes on the way back is long; not being still with it sooner tops them all.

Today is lived out of yesterday. Life and laws are based on precedent. That’s our problem: we have no preceding experience of starting over after losing a spouse. We stand alone, part of an “us” that is no more by no choice of our own.

These are the foggy days of our journey: can’t see where we’re going and where we came from doesn’t help. You can’t fight the fog. It passes with time. There is something to do during the fog in preparation for your journey still to come.

Waiting out the rain

When it rains in Texas, people go a little crazy. I turn on the TV waiting for the inevitable video of some wingnut’s car submerged roofline-deep in an underpass. “Gotta go” gets people in trouble like nothing else. An hour or two later, the rain is gone, the flooding subsides. Life goes on.

Just like the crazies who don’t know enough to stand still and let the storm pass, many of us aim to rush through the rain of healing. Maybe we think it will get us all healed up faster. It won’t. Maybe we’re afraid the boogie man of grief will catch us. He will anyway. Maybe we think being in motion is better than standing still. It’s not. Not in the rain, anyway.

Answering the right question

Many a shrink came and went during my rainy season as I bounced across a series of counselors’ couches. I fired each and every one because they all had the the wrong answer. It took two years before I realized, they had the right answer, it was my questions that were wrong.

I wanted to get right back to my life. I finally realized what we both now know: there’s no going back to the life we lived before death. Surrendering to that truth opened my heart to the promise of a greater good that would come from all this.

During my first hour on the first couch, a wise man told me, “you can run hard and far for as long as you like. When you stop running, your grief will be right there waiting to be acknowledged and dealt with.” He added, “when you give yourself over to it, though, you will come out the other side a more compassionate man than you can possibly understand right now.”

On the beach with Tom

As his life washed away day by day, Tom Hanks looks out on an indifferent sea. Sitting in the theater, I was on the sand beside him. Coming home to Memphis brought him no closer to a life that no longer existed any more than filling that empty space will return us to normalcy.

Ultimately, fate brings him to a  Texas crossroad, he looks up one way and then down the other and then directly at us. He understood what we all must to move on: there is no coming back, there is only moving on. And, just like him, the choice is ours.

Related posts:

1. Cast Aways together
2. Lend a hand, show the way
3. Suddenly single dads unite
4. Better DaddyMomming by Design

Tags: Cast Away, fathering, parenting, single parenting, Tom Hanks, widowed dad, widower