Cancer with a smile

On May 11 2001 my father died from cancer, exactly four months before 9/11. Those two events are tied together in my mind. For most of my life my father was Superman. He was like an encyclopedia on two legs. He appeared to have everything under control until the cancer came and it turned out that he didn’t. Besides he worked in a field that was related to fighting terrorists and illegal weapons.  I couldn’t let go of the weird idea that if he only had been alive, 9/11 wouldn’t have happened. Or if it happened, he would have explained it, like he explained the periodical system or the concept of more than three dimensions.

But he had no solution for cancer so he died and 9/11 happened and as little as I could prevent it could I understand it or accept it.

They say there’s this mourning process you need to get through when someone dies but after ten years mine hasn’t even started. There is a locked door to my emotions that I reckon I should open but I can’t bring myself to do it. I tell myself that one day I will, only not today. Tomorrow maybe. When I’m strong and mature enough. I push it forward, one day at a time.

And I’m telling you all of this just to make you understand why I watch every movie about people dying or almost dying in cancer or losing their parents in cancer that comes in my way.

Sometimes those films trigger me to cry a little bit, letting out a little bit of whatever is hidden behind that mental door I have. Sometimes they don’t.

The cancer humor
The last one I watched was 50/50 and it only made me cry properly once (a scene between the guy with the cancer disease and his mother, which really messed me up.) On the other hand I laughed or at least giggled quite a bit. For how weird as it sounds, this story about a young man who all of a sudden gets a severe form of cancer with 50 percents chance of survival is more of a lighthearted romantic comedy than it is a gripping close-to-death drama.

It’s actually not all that strange. Cancer is dark and scary and horrible, yes, of course it is, but it also puts you in situations you hadn’t imagined, makes you do things you never thought you would do and you can’t but smile at it in all its absurdity. This disease gives you a quite twisted sense of humor, which I think 50/50 reflects very well.

There are for instance some funny scenes where the cancer patients eat marijuana cookies as a pain killer and this immediately tossed me eleven years back in time, thinking of my own experiences of this.

My parents used to live in Netherlands, where the view on such things is vastly different from in Sweden. When my father was in his terminal stage and there was nothing to do but to wait and try to keep the pain as low as possible, a nurse recommended us to bake him some cookies with marijuana. To her it was as natural as if she had recommended us to give him vitamins. It’s sold openly in coffee shops where anyone over 18 is allowed.

For me and my mother the thought of entering one of those shops was shocking. She could as well have told us to buy heroine by a drug dealer in a backyard. But again: cancer makes you do things you didn’t think you’d do. While my husband stayed outside with our kids, mom and I entered on trembling legs, cleared our throats and did our purchase. And then we went home and made cookies. I can still remember the nauseating smell. The stench filled the apartment. And my father didn’t like them particularly much so most of them ended up in the trash. But thinking about how lost we were in that coffee shop still makes me smile wryly.

What I thought
But I’m losing myself in memories here. Let’s head back to 50/50.  What did I make of it? Well, admittedly there were elements I didn’t like all that much. Did the girl friend need to be THAT shallow? Did the psychiatrist need to look like a young cheerleader? How believable was that? Did his friend have to be completely obsessed with getting chicks and getting laid? It got a bit tiresome. On the whole I liked it well enough, but it didn’t break into my top 10 list of 2011, which I kind of had expected it to do considering the topic. I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to love it. Perhaps I could have done with a few more cries.

My 17 year old daughter on the other hand was super enthusiastic, but from a slightly different perspective. She told me that she had watched it vanilla, so the whole thing about the cancer theme came as a complete surprise to her. All she knew, all she even cared about, was that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the leading actor in it, the same guy who had made her watch 500 Days of Summer at least four times, if not more.

“He’s so CUTE!” “Did you see his dimples?” “I want to watch this movie again. Three times is a minimum!” she exclaimed as we walked towards the car.

I gave her a hug and asked her if she’d push me away the way Joseph’s character did to his mother if she got cancer.

“No way!” she said, smiling at me. “I’d use it! You would get me ANYTHING, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded. Indeed I would. Anything.

50/50 (Jonathan Levine, US, 2011)  My rating: 4/5