Fictional with theme of loss
- Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo (Unexpectedly brilliant for a 116 page book.)
Memoir
- Wild by Cheryl Strayed (I rather liked this a lot and related to falling apart a bit and struggling to put myself back together.)
Movies
- Just watched (March '14) Brother Bear again, and sobbed through like the whole thing. god dammnit. But it's so saaaad! And his brother dies, and then he has to leave his other brother to be a mentor to the orphan whose bear-mother he killed....there's a lot of separation and death, even though death is not as divisive as in my world because the spirits still interact with his world...anyway. it affected me. I'm not joking. Buckets of tears were cried.
- Extremely Loud Incredibly Close (May '15) The scene where his grandfather drives away in a taxi feels exactly like grieving. For those of us not lucky enough to get a treasure hunt to solve after someone dies, all we have left are the facts. And what can we do with them but yell them at people? And what can they do but go away eventually? How they made us feel slowly drifts away, but I can tell you: My father's full name was Craig Eugene Davidson. He wanted that same middle name to be mine, if I was a girl because he and his dad both had the same name. Mom thought it was stupid because it was only a tradition for two generations. He was born in Scott City, Kansas. Growing up, he lived in McPherson, Kansas. And he had a dog. And a squirrel. His best friend in high school was Randy. He drove a dune buggy. I still don't know what that is, but he and his friends carried it into high school as a prank. Either that or Randy did it without telling Dad. He worked in a meat packing plant for a while. That's where he learned to sharpen knives and that's what he taught me to do. He joined the Air Force just in time to become a veteran. He had a flag on his coffin at his memorial service because of that, even though he wasn't really in the war. He liked beer. He especially liked German beer, but he made his own at home, too. I was in a bar at two weeks old because my Dad took me and wanted to show me off to everyone. He also liked motorcycles and VW campers. Ruth at the Bicycle Pedaler in Wichita still remembers him and gave my Mom and I free water bottles. He used to take his bicycle to Germany by disassembling it, deflating the tires and counting it as one of his two allotted checked bags, back when that was still a thing. He had an afro in his twenties. He wore glasses. He was an aerospace engineer and worked on the Boeing 747. He showed me how the first class movie screens tucked away once. He liked jumbalaya, and grits. And his workbench in the basement was meticulously organized. My aunt says he acted like a teenager in love when he met my mom. He sometimes rode his motorcycle to work. He had a BMW. He called japanese motorcycles "rice-burners." Mom says he didn't pay attention to math class in high school, so he had to take catch-up classes in college. He only had a Bachelors degree. He learned to sail on a yellow and white striped Hobie Catamaran. As an adult, he owned an all-orange one, that he peeled all of the numbers off of, except for one. He bought a pirate flag to put on his boat when he got to Lake Cheney, but when he saw there was a group of guys, led by Pirate Don, who also worked at Boeing, who all had pirate flags, he never put his flag up. He never finished remodeling projects. He came looking for me and found me at my school bus stop when I ran away from home. He could talk to anyone.
- Me and Earl And the Dying Girl (Sept '15) Fanfuckingtastic. See it.
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