I Finally Watched "Up" and I Really Can't Handle It
I finally watched Up, more than a decade after its release and its subsequent Academy Awards. I’ll sound a little melodramatic saying this, but I can’t help it: the movie was profoundly sad for me, and even now, several days later, I have a hard time thinking about it, much less writing about it, without feeling a strange and tender ache pressing into my chest.
For those of you who haven’t seen the film, it focuses on a man who marries his childhood sweetheart and goes on to spend several happy decades loving her and growing alongside her. They have no children; they just have each other. After decades of happiness, he loses her to an illness, and his world is destroyed. The movie explores how the man tends to his grief and finds a life worth living again.
Up is emotionally powerful in a way that feels at once too sophisticated for children and too pure for adults. You watch this movie with a constant sense that the heart you possess is ill-equipped to take in all of the love and all of the pain of this man’s life.
Watching Up was brutal for me. Christoph and I dated when we were young teens—sweet, idiotic, scared—and decades later we found each other again—sweet, idiotic, scared, but ever so slightly less so— and we got married.
We have no kids, so when we talk about “the family” we are speaking about the two of us. We make dinner for “the family,” we do laundry for “the family,” we pick up a gallon of milk for “the family.”
For some, this small life would lack meaning. But a bad accident a few years ago meant that we very nearly lost everything, our entire world. Maybe that is why every day with each other is enough. All we want is this.
But in the background of our happy home, there is always the electric hum of a question we just don’t want to hear.
It’s the question of what will happen when all of this ends. Who will be asked to go on without the other? And how?
Up is a beautiful reminder to Christoph and me that, no matter what happens to our story, no matter how hard our eventual separation and how deep our eventual pain, we will be able to overcome the worst of it. The power of love and, in particular, the power of love towards young people, will give succor on even the saddest days.
xoxo
kate