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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

By November 15, 2011Denial

Eternal Sunshine is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is one of the most powerful movies I have ever seen in that the overwhelming power of love, and the loss of the same, would drive us to remove it completely from our minds so as to have never experienced it at all.

I’ve talked with a couple people about the ending. The way I see it is that no matter what you try to do to erase the pain, love always drives karmic magnetism, and two people connected will always keep finding each other regardless. See last scene where Joel and Clementine meet yet again after all that has already happened.

The ending has nothing to do with the post. I just wanted to share what I thought the writer/director was trying to convey in this movie. I digress.

Where I was going—with respect to erasing one’s memories and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—is I feel like I am living the scene where Joel’s brain is just erasing the memories. Literally the scene is evaporating right in front of him. The difference is I didn’t ask for it to be taken away, so I am not questioning a bad decision I had made.

I cannot speak from a parental perspective, but from a sibling perspective when you lose your brother or sister, an entire piece of your existence disappears as quickly as a lightening bolt. Pssst, flash of light, and gone as quickly as it was there… a little rumbling a bit later to remind you that it existed and then nothing. What is so unique about a brother or sister is that they are your witnesses to your entire being. They have the same overarching relationship to your entire family that you do. Your aunt is their aunt, your mom their mom. Your family vacation was their family vacation. You will likely have spent more time with them than any other human being on the planet leading up to high school. If you are lucky, as I was, perhaps beyond.

But when they die, your childhood is instantly snatched from you. No longer is there that witness to your formative years. While they see things through different lenses, they were your life’s camcorder, and you are and remain theirs. They also have the ability to add color to your memories because they can provide the details you glossed over and are able to create the high-def 3D version of your past.

Losing a sibling ranks among the absolute worst thing that could happen to a person. More so than a parent. I dare not imagine nor fathom the loss of a child. If you are lucky enough to have a sibling, your parents’ memories are still mentally cataloged in your sibling, and your grief is shared and experienced very similarly and together.

When you lose your sibling, however, it’s as if somebody has taken a giant electromagnet to your entire VHS collection and rendered your validation—the official recording of your life—unplayable. You will always have your own memories, but you lose the one person in your life who knows exactly what you experienced and what it felt like… the colors, the smells, the raw footage, it’s all gone.

This is one of the most challenging parts of dealing with my brother’s suicide. Like Joel in the movie, I am fully aware that these memories are being taken away. Not in the literal sense, mind you, but figuratively in that there is no place I can run, and no place I can hide them from being taken away from me. The brutal fact is they vanished with David’s last breath. The difference between me and Joel is that I don’t get to wake up and make new memories with David.

Is it better to have loved and to have lost than to have never loved at all? If you were going to be blind, would you rather have been born that way or have lost your sight knowing truly the color purple?

If you are an only child, I am somewhat grateful that you will never have to go through what I am going through right now. (And I am not implying anything bad about being an only child.) You are just immune to what I am going through right now.

If you are a brother or sister. Take a moment out, right now, to let ’em know how much you love them and how important they are to you. They are so very unique and like everything in life something you will never truly appreciate until they are gone.