Blog 3073 – 03.30.2024

Love Me

Today’s song is one of those tender and moving songs that left me misty-eyed the first twenty or so time that I heard it or tried to sing it. It calls to mind one of my favorite movies, What Dreams May Come, with the late Robin Williams.

In the movie Robin plays a child psychologist whose teenaged son and daughter are tragically killed in an automobile accident. He and his wife are crush with grief, but she so much so that she ends up in a metal facility and only snaps out of it when on a visit he threatens to divorce her if she refuses to move on. She does move on and is back painting for she is an artist.

She calls Robin in a panic over what pieces she needs to pick from her works for an art show and how to get them to the art gallery across town. Robin calmly helps her pick the appropriate pieces and says he will leave work early to personally get them to the gallery in time. On the way, the traffic ahead comes to a standstill in a tunnel and Robin gets out of his car to assist people injured in a car crash blocking the traffic. He is immediately killed by an oncoming car that fails to stop in time.

After refusing initially to move on and leave his wife till he realizes his haunting her is not helping her but only hurting her more, Robin wakes up in his own personal heaven which is made of oil paintings that his wife has done. A young black man, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., is Robin’s guide and helps him to visit his daughter’s heaven and later sadly informs him that his wife has committed suicide and according to the rules has thereby condemned herself to her own private hell.

Robin refuses to believe that his soul mate is lost forever and he and the young man enlist a tracker to help him find his wife and free her. The tracker tells the young man he will help Robin find his wife, but only so he can say good-bye to her because suicides are forever trapped by their own guilt to relive the lives they threw away.

Along the way Robin recognizes that the young black man is his son and that the tracker is the child psychologist he interned with. They both changed their appearance in order to aid him without adding to his emotional baggage. The tracker says that the son’s emotions are making it difficult to hone in on the wife’s signal so they leave him behind and finally find her in a dilapidated and decaying version of the home they shared together in life. She does not recognize Robin for she is out of her mind with grief, mourning the loss of her beloved children and husband. The tracker warns Robin that he is in danger of losing his own sanity if he spends more than a few minutes with her for her delusion is so strong nothing will break through to her. Before leaving the son behind the son tells his dad, “Don’t believe him you bring her back.”

After trying to get through to her Robin realizes that what she had said to him at the mental facility about how she had been been angry at him for not going crazy with her when they lost their children was still true. He apologizes to her and says, “In a moment I won’t recognize you anymore than you recognize me, but we will be together for I am not going to leave you here alone.” That is what reaches her through all her delusions. When Robin comes to they are back in his heaven, the two of them, and they decide that heaven can wait for they want to try again, be born again, vowing to find each other sooner and to avoid sharp objects this time around.

“If you get there before I do, don’t give up on me. I’ll meet you when my chores are through. I don’t know how long I’ll be. But, between now and then till I see you again, I’ll be loving you.

Love,

Me.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18Le96bIzhrmgKoKX5kP_U21dPd7XhULC/view?usp=drivesdk

Love Me