A Mother’s Breath 3 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

There’s something magical about going to the movies alone, especially on the first chilly day of the season. Surrounded by strangers, I feel something of the childlike thrill of comfort at bedtime reading, perhaps under the sheet, perhaps not, while around you the rest of the family goes about its business. Mom and Dad in the den or kitchen, talking or cleaning up; brothers and sisters also tucked in or doing their homework; the cat curled at the foot of your bed, the dog asleep against the kitchen door. Outside, owls might be hooting or raccoons foraging, all manner of nighttime sounds and unknown mysteries astir in the dark. But inside, in one’s bed with a book, the word felt both contained and safe and wonderfully, inexplicably infinite.

Infinite, of course, because until you picked up the book and started reading, you didn’t know what would happen. Dangers could possibly—and often did—lurk. The possibilities of a new book held me in thrall. Opening it felt like stepping up to a window—or to the edge of a cliff. Maybe the view would limit in its familiarity, maybe it would even disappoint, but there was always the chance it would blow you away, the way my first view of the Grand Canyon made me say nothing, nothing at all, and then burst into tears.

Yesterday afternoon, I took my seat at the hip new Sundance movie theater in San Francisco to watch Bright Star. I prefer the independent Balboa, with its funky original marquee and squeaky seats and double bills and popcorn-with-real-butter.

But the movie I wanted to see was at the Sundance, and I can walk there in twenty five minutes, and so that’s where I was yesterday, in seat E1, as I watched Fanny Brawne take Endymion into her hands for the first time. Her little sister is in the room, her brother too, but as she leans back on her pillow to read the poem, she approaches the precipice alone, her life about to change.

Poetry, love, eroticism, death, grief. Danger indeed.

I found the entire movie captivating in its images, but the one that stunned me happens toward the end. Mr. Brown has come to the Brawne household with the news that Mr. Keats has died in Rome, in those rooms overlooking the Spanish steps. Fanny gets up, rushes from the room, and—in a tightly framed shot that surrounds her with walls and staircase – stops. She grabs the banister of the staircase—the same staircase up which, earlier in the film, she and her mother and brother struggled to carry an ailing John to bed—and collapses. She doesn’t burst into tears. Yes, she wails and falls to the floor, but the moment before that, the moment of gripping the banister, of bending at the waist, of clutching her chest, of the silence before the sobs—that moment convinces us. Art—artifice, a director’s camera, a screenwriter’s script, an actor’s movements—dissolves.

I was already mopping my face with the sleeve of my shirt by the time Fanny calls out for her mother. She cannot breathe. Her mother runs to her, and kneels with her, and holds her by the shoulders and breathes onto her. The two women face each other, and you see the mother breathing—in, out, nothing overly dramatic or forced, just the slow steady in and out, perhaps like those breaths she took when giving birth to Fanny some twenty years before. Like a mother bird feeding babies through her beak, like God breathing into Adam’s nostrils, the mother’s action ensures that she—the healthy, robust young woman who loved the tubercular poet—will live.

My mother didn’t always know what to do to comfort me when I was a child (or, for that matter, a broken-hearted adult)—either because of her own fears of vulnerability or my own self-protectiveness around her. She died almost nine years ago, on October 26, 2000.

The other day, she appeared to me. I felt her, and in that feeling, I saw her. Saw her face, heard her voice, smelled her skin – the first sensations I ever knew. Relationships do not end when the other person dies, someone once wrote to me in a sympathy card. At the time, being new to grief, I didn’t really get it. Now I do.

And so does Fanny, at the end of Bright Star. She has sewn herself mourning, and she puts it on, and goes walking in the woods where she and John walked, reciting to herself lines of his poetry. Her face moves between grief and solace, the unbearable and the glimmer that even the unbearable can be borne. The moment shows the power of poetry, of course, as well as the power of love between two people. And it surprises by showing as well the tagging-along brother, sent by their mother to watch out for her on her walk. Fanny would have loved her John even without her family’s support, and yet her family’s support made possible a space for her to love and grieve.

My mother never blew on me. But when she showed up, the other day, to smile on me and tell me something I needed to hear, I felt it as the breath of life. And I felt it the whole walk home from the movie, in my wool sweater and my wool cap, swimming in the sensations of the movie and thinking, among other thoughts, how mothers give life, again and again, the best they can.