Bogumił Pacak-Gamalski

I have watched two movies recently. Very different and very powerful on a very personal level. Stirring emotions, and memories. The Spanish “Society of the Snow” produced by Netflix and directed by J. A. Bayona, and the Canadian production of “Good Grief” directed, produced, and written by Dan Levy. Dan Levy also played the main character, Marc.

The “Society of the snow” – let me take you on a journey in time. At the time of the catastrophe, I was 14 years old. A year later a book by British writer Clay Blair “Survive” appeared. A well-known Polish writer or essayist wrote in a Polish literary weekly “Literatura” a piece about it. It might have been Jerzy Andrzejewski, an excellent writer whose weekly column I have always read – but truly I can’t recall now. Yet the story and especially the dilemma of cannibalism versus survival made me write a short piece about it. By that, I was fifteen and of course, as any fifteen-year-old ‘writer’ had a lot to say about the issues of life and death. I sent it off to the editorial desk of Jerzy Putrament, a Polish writer, who was the editor-in-chief of the weekly ‘Literatura”, a major literary and art publication. And he published it. As it was my second publication in a major Polish magazine (the first one was in “Perspektywy”) it cemented my ‘fame and prestige’ among my teachers in my school, but not as much among my classmates, LOL.

I don’t recall if I have read the book by Clay Blair. Not sure if it was translated into Polish. Most likely I never did. But I have seen years later the first movie about it based on that novel. And I wasn’t impressed. Yet the Spanish “Society of the Snow” impressed me very much. The screen-writers (Bayona, Vilaplana, and Marques), the director, and the actors were superb in their austerity of dramatization. Everything was left to the minimum: air, food, movement, and words. Years later, while visiting Mendoza in Patagonia (the ill-fated plane took off from Mendoza on its last tragic leg of the flight to Chile), I took a special bus tour to the Andes and was able to do some hiking at the base of Aconcagua (almost 7000 meters, one of the titans of the world). The outmost desolation of that place there is amazing and overpowering. As far as you can see is a frozen horizon of white peaks and valleys. Can’t imagine surviving there with hardly any provisions for longer than a few days. I felt that the movie captured that feeling very well.

“Good Grief” by Dan Levy. Who doesn’t remember and didn’t love that sweet, funny, and almost useless in practical skills young gay guy in the now iconic CBC series “Schitt’s Creek”, with his father, great Canadian actor Eugene Levy, and fantastic Catherine O’Hara? But Dan Levy playing a grief-strickened, middle-age man in serious drama, tragedy actually? Can he carry it? He did.

I shouldn’t have watch it. But I did. I had to. As I watched his grief, as I travelled with him in his yearly journey of that grief of losing the love of his life – I went through mine. Every silent moment. Every object in his and mine apartment, photographs, furniture. At times I didn’t know if it was Dan Levy or me on that screen. If it was a movie or my memories of last year. No, I didn’t go to Paris and there was no surprise in finding ‘the other lover’. But these are just details, unimportant almost didaskalia of the drama. The differences between the lives of me and John and that of Mark and Luke are just a different shade of the same colour.

As I watched that movie sitting on my (on our) sofa I felt John taking my hand into his and squeezing it gently. I heard him saying I’m sorry, and I wanted to grab his hand, to cover it with kisses. But I didn’t, I knew the hand, his voice would dissipate into the air. So I just sat quietly, didn’t even turn my head, and continued watching the movie. With him undisturbed sitting next to me. As he always did. It felt good. Sad but good. The next morning I went for a drive to a little town called Fall River. I took him there in 2019 to a little Provincial Park, with a forest, by a long, wonderful lake. This time it was wintertime, windy and cold. The gate to the park was closed for the season. I left my car and walked the long trail on foot. The sky was splendid with clouds and sun in crispy air. It was my trip ‘to Paris’. Thank you, Dan Levy, for letting me submerge myself in that grief again.  Grief is hard, is sad. But it also is beautiful, because the seed of grief is love.

After

I couldn’t sleep.   

Didn’t know how to

console You.

How to tell You –

it’s all right, Babycake.

I have survived.

No, it wasn’t Your

fault.

You tried,

You tried so hard.



Do I lie, when I say:

‘it’s all right’?

Yes, I do.

It was

so fucking hard.

I knew it would be

if and when,

but had no clue 

how hard it is.

Didn’t know 

that grief

could be like 

hot lead 

slowly injected 

into your veins.

Like the disappearing

bubbles of air

you have tried 

to squeeze into your lungs

nailed to the heavy

cross of impossibility.

As I watched with terror.

So what was

really the weight

of my grief

compared to that?

How do you compare

the pain of life

to pain of death?

How do you?

What’s the balance ratio

of life in grief

in one hand,

and no life

in the other?

Does a man know?

Does God?