This is how I felt after watching the movie "Amour" which won the Palme d'Or last year. The ending of the movie caused strong controversy. The old lady was paralyzed from the right half of her body, her body was deteriorating, she needed more and more care, and she lost her dignity more and more. In this process, her husband, who has been with her all his life, took care of her patiently, not talking about suffering or regret. However, at the end of the movie, he chose to smother her with a pillow. Then he decorated her cheeks with flowers and turned away by himself.
Some people say, how can this be done? This is murder! Old man, you have no right to do this! What kind of values does this movie promote!
None of us have experienced old age, and we cannot empathize with them. But the mood of the old man in this movie, I think I can refer to my grandmother.
My grandfather died of illness two years ago. Like the old lady in the movie, she was in good health, but suddenly she didn't work. It seemed that life had finally reached the edge of the continental shelf and just slipped down like this. Below was the dark, empty deep sea, and the colorful swimming fishes and corals of the past can no longer be seen.
But the exhaustion of the body is a process. Grandpa's struggle on the sickbed made everyone around him feel grief. I can’t take care of myself anymore. I need someone to change the diaper frequently. Sometimes I just pull it out after changing it. And long-term inactivity in bed, coupled with skin loss, the bones will pierce the flesh, and grandfather's body is damaged in many places. Need to turn him over from time to time, and also apply potion to the damaged area.
When the children and grandchildren were still serving her heart, grandma started cursing. "Don't save him! Let him die!" "Trash, he can't defecate!"-Grandma is always a strong woman. She is an intellectual woman, who smoked when she was young, and later quit because of tracheitis. Since I can remember, she has always been in conflict with all kinds of people around her. Having trouble with relatives, neighbours, and son... The most frequent one is still having trouble with grandpa. There are various reasons for the troubles, but I don't remember them clearly. It can be seen that they are all trivial.
My parents, uncles and aunts feel so helpless. This is a person who has been with him for a lifetime. Why is it that even my grandpa cannot get along with him at the last moment? At that time, the grandfather could no longer express his thoughts clearly, and everyone couldn't figure out what he was thinking when his grandmother cursed him and he didn't hurry to die. They just thought he was so pitiful.
But I am always a little skeptical. Sixty years of getting along, sixty years of memories, who of us has experienced it? We can't experience the inner world of our grandmother. Simply judging her as savage and vicious is tantamount to watching the fire from the shore.
I remember that a few days before my grandfather's death, his body deteriorated and everyone was mentally prepared. At this moment, my grandmother said suddenly that she was not feeling well and she was going to be hospitalized. The children are all messed up. It was already troublesome to take care of one, but now you are going to be hospitalized again? Grandma said that she was just uncomfortable and couldn't stay at home for a moment, so she was going to be hospitalized.
So my mother found a doctor who knew me well, and put my grandma into that hospital, and lived in the same ward with my grandpa. The dying grandfather was half awake in the hospital bed, and the grandmother on one bed was very energetic, and continued to curse and curse...until one night, grandpa finally left. From swallowing the last breath to putting on the shroud and being carried out by the funeral home staff, the grandmother witnessed everything.
Grandma didn't cry at the time, she just told her children, arrange for me to be discharged from the hospital tomorrow. The hospital helped her move to a separate ward that night, and she called my aunt to stay at my aunt: "They went to watch the night at home, you have no place to sleep, just sleep here. "My aunt doesn't understand, say, "I can go back to my own house." Sleep..." Grandma collapsed suddenly and said loudly: "I'm afraid! Can't you accompany me!" Everyone knows that Grandma's heart is not as hard as it seems. She was just used to protecting herself with a cold and hard shell in this life.
After watching "Amour", I seem to have a deeper understanding of my grandmother's mood at the time. It is meaningless to criticize the murder of the old man in the movie, because the movie is a movie. As an art, it needs to use this extreme way to express a universal and deep human emotion. Can't the old man stand to take care of his old lady day after day? Does the old man feel that the old lady suffers too much physical pain, so it is better to die? No, what really made the old man determined to end the life of the old lady was the collapse of the dignity of the old lady on the sick bed. When she was in a wheelchair, she was so embarrassed that she was unwilling to accept the sympathy of the students, and when she finally became too sick to take care of herself and was bullied by the nurse, how much should she hate her current situation? It's just that she can't say it, and she can't bear it out in person.
Thus, in the movie, the old man used extreme methods to end up with the wife he had loved for life. But in reality, my grandma uses cursing, cursing, and swearing, hoping that my grandpa will be in bliss as soon as possible, so as to avoid the suffering of being on the verge of death and exhausting the last trace of dignity.
Going back to what I said at the beginning, what this movie conveys is in line with my outlook on love. It is not suffocating the lover or cursing the lover to die in accordance with my view of love, but the reason behind these appearances. I keep asking myself, why do people need to stay together? Most animals have no fixed mates. In addition to the ethical reasons, the answer I gave myself is that there is another important point. The existence of a spouse who has accompanied us throughout our lives from a young age can help us better fight against the proposition of birth, old age, sickness and death. As you grow old, he (she) will grow old too. You will die, and he (she) will die. You face the mighty god of destiny, and you can share the same hatred. Because you are each other's mirrors, you understand each other, whether physically or spiritually, you will not be alone. Or to borrow Yao Chen's sentence that many netizens ridiculed as "sour": "Two people can resist life together."
And your children can't replace this. They can only look at you from a distance, like a big ship drifting away in the skyline, they can do nothing but wave a handkerchief. Only your lover can become the oak tree standing with you. You share the wind, rain and rainbow. Therefore, the whip of fate is drawn on you, but it can be conveyed into his (her) reflection arc, just like the old lady in the movie. To the old man, just like my grandpa to my grandmother.
See "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Garcia Márquez. A not-so-tome novel, like a love museum, containing various forms of love from the time of adolescence to the twilight years. But what moved me most was the old life of the three protagonists. It was in the interaction with their lovers that they each discovered the fact that their youth was no longer, but felt comforted by it. For example, in this episode, Arisa, who has been in love with the heroine Fermina for more than half a century, finally got his wish in his later years, and is the goddess Fangze in his heart.
"Ariza was shocked. Really, as she herself said, she already had the sourness of an old woman. However, when he was looking for a way to his cabin in the hammock maze of sleeping passengers , Thinking that she was four years older than her, she should have the same taste, and she would have noticed it with the same excitement, so she was comforted. My taste is offset by your taste."
So, let's believe in love. That cliche that has been sung for twenty years, "The most romantic thing I can think of is to grow old with you". Although it is a vernacular, it is true.
Because Marquez said, "No matter at any time, anywhere, love is love, the closer to death, the deeper the love."
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