Harold & Maude

Before I came home to help my mom with my grandfather, when I still lived in the city and was several thousand miles away, I only visited once, maybe twice a year at best. On one of my visits, shortly after dinner one night around Christmas or New Year’s, my mom turned and asked if I had ever seen a movie called “Harold and Maude.” I hadn’t. “Really?” She was surprised. “It reminds me so much of you.” I asked what it was about, expecting something sweet. “Oh, it’s about this kid who’s depressed and wants to kill himself. He sneaks into a funeral and meets an old woman and they fall in love.” To say I reacted well would be a lie, but then again, this column probably proves her right, being as it’s frequently mordant and melancholic, and has a tendency toward navel-gazing.
We ended up watching it together and I got what she was saying. She sold the story wrong. It was less that it reminded her of my low periods and worst moods, and more that it reminded her of my weird, dry sense of humor, of my shyness and awkwardness, of my sunniness and my youth spent searching for people that would like me for me. To boil it all the way down, it’s a story about making the most of whatever time you have on Earth.
It’s an old movie, but I still don’t want to give too much away, so forgive my digression: I started watching the third season of “The Bear” over the weekend, which I’ve loved from the very beginning, and I ended up sitting on the first episode for a while and am still turning it over in my head. Basically, the central premise of it was that you can’t outrun your demons. Everything that’s happened to you stays with you, good and bad. And this is something that I took away the first night I saw “Harold and Maude,” which goes a step further and says maybe you can’t outrun those demons, but you can certainly choose whether or not they control the arc of your life.
My family has a complicated history of mental illness, much of it having gone undiagnosed or only talked about with presence of mind years after someone passed away. Something I learned, with time, is that not only did the spectre of shame exist until recently, but there was almost always a financial barrier where my family was concerned: if the choice was between feeding one’s child or going to therapy, keeping the mortgage current or working through a history of abuse, the outcome was pretty obvious. Still, life often didn’t get better for those that had it hardest, even when times objectively became better.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my grandmother, Jean. I honestly don’t remember a time when she wasn’t depressed, or feeling trapped or unhappy and unfulfilled, but she was a woman born to a single mother with Bipolar disorder in the 1940s and had a deeply unhappy childhood, which haunted her. My mom and I sometimes talk about how different life might have been if Beanie had a fairer shake of things or the wherewithal to leave her marriage when it went south. We like to think she would have found a way to be happy and start again, but she didn’t. She stayed and that only made her more depressed. This isn’t to say that being depressed or mentally ill is a choice, but there were moments when things might have gone differently if she’d chosen to take the fork in the road instead of staying the course.
In many ways, it’s informed how both my mom and I live our own lives. Watching her parents was what gave my mother the courage to leave my father when I was very young, and watching my mother and my grandmother has often reminded me of the luxury of choice. Of course I have my demons, but I don’t have to stay, I can choose to wake up and most likely do something to change whatever has me feeling low.
But I think — and this only became clear with time — the real thing that made my mom think of me while watching “Harold and Maude” was deeper than the jokes or choosing to defy your demons.
After Beanie died, I went into a hard depression and felt paralyzed. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to stray too far from home anymore and I worried incessantly about what little family I did have left. Everything seemed to fall apart and for the better part of a year, I spiralled. Mom, on a drive one afternoon, asked what I was doing with my life and why I was still there. I didn’t know what to say. I had ideas, I had dreams, but I didn’t know what to say because I still felt so afraid. She knew it, too.
“You can’t control everything,” she told me that day. “You can stay here for as long as you want, but you can’t stop the inevitable and you don’t know when it’ll happen. It could be tomorrow. It could be 20 years from now. You have to live.”
And that’s Maude’s ultimate lesson for Harold, too: Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can.