Missing the missing.

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Watching 1992's “Resevoir Dogs.” In 1992, the daughter was 2, her parents 33, and I know we—parents—watched this movie, maybe even during theatrical release. K (Mrs. and mom) was as much of a movie fan as I, she had worked for a PR agency that did a lot for productions in Chicago, as well as some studios. Back then, we both had dreams or wishes or wants to work in the industry, even tangentially. The buzz around this film was pretty loud.

Now, I've no stomach for the cruelty. I wonder if we can roll it back, if we've become so inured to the intimacy and energy in the violence, that we simply can't go back.

And I can't say I remembered the movie. Before reading Wikipedia and imdb, I couldn't recall the torture and watching it I have to say it's forgettable. The only verities are Tarantino's fame and the bar he raised for savagery.

So it's odd that this is a nostalgic night, 12 months ago my mom was actively dying, 28 months earlier K was actively dying, and almost 4 months later my brother would die. Mom, BFF, bro: it sounds worse than I'm feeling it, perhaps to my failing. I know my sister's having a hard time today, she's said so in an email earlier. My response was to remark that because of her Lewey Body Dementia, the mom I knew had checked out a long time before. I was pretty clinical by May 2012, because I'd been through it with K. And she was coherent 5 days before when we all stood around her bed and she polled us each and we all agreed that it was over. And by Thursday, she was dead.

Mom's spiral was longer, more gradual, and both harder and easier. It was almost like she'd quit eating a few weeks earlier, and just slowly died. We'd lost the ability to converse several months earlier as her speech degraded below my poor hearing's threshold. Her cognitive failings had begun to be a problem 2 years earlier, and the first inklings of this slow decline, like the melting of a great glacier, appeared perhaps 3 years before that. It was during that slide, from “something's wrong with mom” to what I think of her mental departure, that I realized hat my mom was the smart one. My dad's one of those good student types, he nerds out on stuff he's interested in, and delivers. But mom was pretty damned close to a genius. And born at a time when the nuns still retrained left-handed girls to be right-handed, when her conservative dad didn't think college was for women.

My brother fell down the stairs. Diagnosed with colon cancer in an eerie repeat of K's horrific late-diagnosis, his progress was uneven, ups and downs and inevitably more downs. Unlike K, there was no clear line for game over, it was more of a surprise. Actually, it was a nightmarish whirlwind of getting him moved home for an undetermined period of time, only to die about 4 hours after coming home. He was tired out by the transport, went to sleep and never woke up.

So I'm sitting here, typing to you of my nostalgia for three people, while trying to remember what was important or of value about the first of Tarantino's movies. You know, I think I'm done with this kind of violence, the intimate kind. The long, drawn-out death scenes kind. The death-bed confession that undoes whatever honor there might've been. And I almost thought I'd give “Jackie Brown” a try. It's just not my cup of tea anymore.