Five to One

I’m having trouble remembering the name of the character Natasha Lyonne played^* in Blade Trinity.

In everyday life that normally wouldn’t make much difference; it’s one of those things you shrug off and move past even in the context of whatever incredibly geeky discussion about the mechanics of anti-vampirism serum or just how much Parker Posey must have needed money to go in five years from the indie queen of Clockwatchers and Henry Fool to playing a vampire in the third installment of a not very well adapted franchise. But I’ve been thinking about this movie a lot not just because it seems like every time I want to turn my brain off and watch a little TV it’s on yet I can never catch it from the beginning. No, I’ve been thinking about one particular scene in the third act that is especially pertinent for me at the moment.

Roughly sketched: Blade returns with Abigail Whistler (Jessica Biel) to the hideout of the vampire hunters to find that their nominal leader Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds) has been kidnaped and the rest of their fellows, including the character played by Natasha Lyonne, have been killed. Lyonne’s character, who I know in my review of the film I referred to as “blind geneticist [name]” requires cutting down from where she’s been strung up crucifixion style. Blade tells a shocked, enraged Abigail that she should take the emotion she’s feeling and “use it, use it!” He wants her effective and operational for the confrontation he knows is coming and someone paralyzed by grief and rage is neither of those things.

I’ve been thinking about this for two reasons: one is that Blade’s advice to Abigail is something I’ve been pondering myself, how to use a negative emotion to your advantage. More, how to not let a negative emotion take over your life.

I have this project at work that is imploding rather spectacularly due to the gross incompetence of the vendor we hired. Our point of contact is a principal in the company, a managing partner in fact, and he is an extremely poor communicator. In the nine weeks since we’ve signed the contract with his firm they’ve initiated exactly one contact to set up a meeting.

He promises deliverables and then misses deadlines. When pushed about this he regales me with his hiring problems and stories about how busy he’s been on this other, big project in New York. We still have no schedule, no final statement of work, no meetings with the graphic design firm, probably the only reason we hired this company, that he says we’re working with (and that this point I have my doubts that they’ve even heard of our project), and we’re now, even if you charitably count from the day we had our “kick-off” meeting, four weeks into a 16 week development schedule.

This man’s communication skills are so bad that the first time he scheduled a face-to-face meeting with me when I called him after he was an hour overdue his response was to tell me how much trouble he had starting his car and then that he had a blow-out between his house and our offices. And while I’m sympathetic to these problems as a human being, after all those whom the gods wish to destroy they first give car trouble, as a client I really don’t care; this is the reason we have cell phones. Get your butt off the road and out of harm’s way and then call the client to apologize profusely and reschedule. Don’t make the client wait three days and then have her call you to try to reschedule the meeting. For our next face-to-face when he was 40 minutes overdue for a 60 minute meeting that he’d requested his response when I called him was “Oh, I wasn’t sure we had a meeting.”

And as much as I tell myself that this isn’t personal, that he’s simply too incompetent to live much less to be in the business he’s in, I find myself coping with a lot of disbelief, anger, and a lot of misplaced responsibility. After all, I’ve been diligent: contacting the company to request meetings (I did a chronology of my contacts with them at my boss’ request: I’ve contacted them an average of once every three days since we signed the contract), trying to impress upon them that we need a schedule to get moving, that we have this fixed, immovable deadline event in November that we have to start organizing around this spring and summer. I can not force him to produce documents or show up to meetings on time, or even to call me back in a timely fashion. I can, as I told one of my coworkers in a discussion about her frustration over the pace of getting things done inside our organization, only be responsible for my part of the task-based partnership. Trying to do his part will not only not get the work done but it will very quickly turn me inside out.

But I was thinking about this particular scene in another context recently. As I was driving across town idly listening to the news rehash the no updates about Heath Ledger’s likely accidental overdose death I was thinking about grief and where it comes from.

I was thinking about my uncle Chuck and all the things he’s “missed” in the two years he’s been dead. And then it occurred to me: the things that I think are significant probably wouldn’t have mattered much to him. I’m not talking about personal triumphs or life changes, the kinds of things you care about because they have affected a person whom you hold dear. No, I’m talking about things like the insanity of the Presidential race, the fact that we are, in baseball terms, deep, deep into the circles of Hell with both Barry Bonds’ breaking the home run record and the Red Sox winning yet another World Series. The reality is that most people live out their lives without being involved in anything really spectacular.

What qualifies as spectacular? Having a baby may be spectacular for you and your loved ones but the reality is that as a singular event it’s really pretty ordinary. It happens all over the world multiple times a day. Surviving the World Trade Center attack and living through a tour of duty in a combat zone are truly spectacular. Being recognized on the national stage for your work regardless of your field is spectacular but can also occur on a range of meaning (winning the Nobel Peace Prize: spectacular and meaningful; winning a People’s Choice Award: spectacular and not so meaningful). These are by no means the only spectacular things someone can be involved in but they illustrate the sort of scale of which I’m thinking.

So what is it, then, that truly makes us grieve? Are we really saddened over the idea that our loved one who has died will “miss out” on life? True, there are personally significant things that someone will miss: a child growing up, a wedding, a birth, the laughter and tears and small joys of every day life, but are we really sad that the deceased will be missing those things or are we sad that we won’t get to share those things with the missing loved one? After all, no matter how you cut it the dead person doesn’t care; if you buy the Christian idea of heaven then our loved one can experience our joys and our sorrows from there and isn’t really missing out, and if you’re more inclined toward the death-as-oblivion school of thought, well, the dead guy pretty much isn’t worried about anything.

I wonder how much of grief is a direct result of humanity’s inability to perceive order. Death is, after all, part of the natural order of things. We’re all going to die at some point. But modern medicine, the advertising machine, and the plentiful nature of food, indoor plumbing, and lodgings where we aren’t spending body energy trying not to freeze to death have extended the natural life expectancy. In 1905, the year one of my favorite neighbors was born, the life expectancy for a white female was 50.6 years according to the Centers for Disease Control. My neighbor has outlived that by more than double. And while that 50.6 years is an average, it’s true, that average means that some people die younger than others.

So if we all harbor the knowledge that life will end why are we so surprised and shocked when it does? Nature has an almost infinite capacity for making life nasty, brutish, and very short when we don’t interfere with it, anyone who has ever watched Animal Planet knows the risks of the small animals devoured hour, so why do we expect to be immune from those processes?

Folks who believe in fate, a concept on which the U.S. was founded – after all, how else do you explain the Puritans’ belief in predestination – will tell you that the day we’re born certain events in our life are set, that no matter how hard we work to change them we move inexorably toward those events, pulled by some hand and plan we can neither see nor control.

The opposite view, one that is also prevalent in American cultural thought, takes the position that anything in life is possible, that if you work hard, make the right connections, and “get ahead” you can achieve anything up to and including immortality. OK, so I might be exaggerating about that last part but it’s the implicit promise of most advertising and is, I think, at the root of our desperate grasping at fame (“baby remember my name!/I’m gonna live forever”).

Is it, perhaps, that we perceive chaos in an “untimely” death simply because it displeases us, that the grief that we feel comes from the cognitive dissonance between the natural order of the world – birth, life lived, death – and how we would like to control that progression?

It’s not that I don’t think that grief has a natural place in the order of the world; for certain it does. But more, how do you minimize the impact of something you know is coming, that you know you’re going to have to deal with over and over and over again if you are extremely lucky and you manage to outlive your friends, relatives, and loved ones? How do you put out the emotional sandbags, so to speak, to deal with the flood you know will arrive at some point just not with any certainty when?

Happy thoughts for a bright, sunny Saturday in January.