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| "Remember Me" from Coco |
Remember methough I have to say goodbye.Remember me.
+ Ernesto to Miguel to Mamá Coco
With the final week of Lent on the horizon, we are bringing this year's exploration of the ache for meaning, desert spaces, and memento moris to a close. And to help bring us to this finale, there is a Pixar film that specifically focuses on memento mori or "remember you must die," in the story of Coco.
With most of my film essentials, I get to write the reflection (see Arrival, Of Gods and Men, and Gravity for some examples), but for this one, Tyler Staton who wrote Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools (one of my favorite books I read in 2022), shares a glimpse into Coco from his first book, Searching for Enough, that complements a profound story from a man who encounters death as part of his vocation.
Coco's Land of the Dying
I have a three-year-old son and have watched the Pixar movie Coco. I find one piece of the plot to be profound. In the movie, when the living die, they go to the land of the dying, which is more like an amusement park than a haunted house. Here's the part with a profound kernel of existential truth, the land of the dying, even in the dream world of Pixar screenwriters, is not the final destination. You live on there until you're completely forgotten. The day you're no longer alive in the memory of any living person, you die a second and, seemingly final, death.
"Will Anyone Remember Me?"
That's the question EMTs watch race through the minds of the dying (just like all the characters represented in Coco). And in July 2014, I heard a 5-minute TED talk that I've probably spent 5,000 minutes turning over in my mind.
"Am I Dying?"
Matthew O'Reilly is an EMT first responder in Suffolk County, Long Island. His five-minute talk was titled "Am I Dying?" The subject of his talk was a moral dilemma common to EMTs. He often arrives at the scene of some horrible event, only to realize that he is standing over someone who is breathing their final breaths, with nothing he or any other medical professional can do for them. At that point, the suffering person will often ask, "Am I dying?" That leaves two bad options open to him: he can lie, keeping hope intact, even though there's nothing to actually hope in, or he can tell the truth, delivering the worst news of all to a complete stranger.
One day he surprised himself. Arriving on the scene of a brutal motorcycle accident, he rushed out of the ambulance and kneeled down over the top of the rider, whose body was splayed out on the pavement. Quickly, O'Reilly assessed that nothing could be done for this man who was moments from everything going dark, when the man asked that familiar question: "Am I going to die?" In a shocking need to be honest, to let this accident victim hear the truth and make of it what he wanted, O'Reilly said, "Yes. You're going to die. There's nothing I can do for you." The reaction wasn't the terror he feared. Something felt right about letting the dying at least know they're dying.
From that day on,
he was done lying to the doomed.
The truth was less comfortable
but more dignifying.
In the years since,
he's kept on with the truth,
observing 3 common patterns
experienced by those aware
that they're walking the final steps
between their journey in this world
and the great unknown:
The Need
1 | for Forgiveness
2 | for Remembrance
3 | to Know Their Life had Meaning
| 1 | The Need for Forgiveness
When the final page of a single life is written, every human being this medical technician has ever stood over has expressed regret. Awareness of personal wrong and regret for the ripple effects of that wrong in the lives of others are universal. It cuts across every variety of belief and unbelief. In O'Reilly's own words, "The first pattern always kind of shocked me.
Regardless of religious belief
or cultural background,
there's a need for forgiveness.
Whether they call it sin or they simply say they have a regret,
guilt is universal."
| 2 | The Need for Remembrance
"Will anyone remember me?" That's the next question EMTs watch race through the minds of the dying.
There's a universal need
for remembrance,
which everyone reaches out for
when the end is closing in
on them.
Every human being, when faced with death, has an instinctive desire for something eternal, an instinctive desire to keep living, even if only in the memory of others.
| 3 | The Need for a Meaningful Life
"There was so much more I wanted to do with my life." Lying next to crumpled metal and spilled oil, a growing pool of blood forming underneath a failing body, the final thing that passes through the consciousness of the dying is the people, the places, the dreams, and the experiences. The people I gave everything to and those I wish I had given more. The places I passed my time, the places I should've spent more time in, and the places I wasted far too much time in. The dreams I brought to life and lived — were they as good in my life as they seemed to be in my imagination? The dreams that never made the jump from imagination to reality — were the forces that kept them hidden worth it? Then finally the collection of experiences that made up my days, which at one time felt endless and now suddenly seem unjustly short.
Did any of this really,
truthfully matter?
In his book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker writes, "All historical religions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life ... When philosophy took over from religion it also took over religion's central problem and death became the real 'muse of philosophy.'" French philosopher Luc Ferry said it more succinctly: "All philosophy throughout history is trying to deal with one thing: Death."
The ambitious scientist with a wall full of degrees; the ten-year-old leukemia patient in that most sobering wing of the hospital; the elderly matriarch whose heart is failing after an objectively long and full life; the victim of a motorcycle accident spread out motionless on the pavement, shaded by the silhouette of a stranger in an EMT uniform — we're all asking the same question:
Is there anything I have
that death cannot take?
+ Abrupt Ending:
Am I Dying?
Searching for Enough
by Tyler Staton
pgs. 55-59
After reflecting on Coco's "Remember Me, "Am I Dying?" asked by Matthew O'Reilly's patients, and Tyler's thoughtful words above in relation to the three main needs of a dying person, Jesus' last words on the cross came into focus in another profound way.
The Need for Forgiveness
"Father, Forgive Them"
"Father, Forgive Them"
The Need for Remembrance
("Remember Me ...")
The Need for Meaning
(It Is Made Meaningful)
Jesus answers each and every
human being's crucial existential needs
in His last words from the cross.
His death is swallowing up death
as He gives us the final words
we need to die well,
forgiven and remembered
with the gift of
a life of meaning
now and forever.
Jesus can sing,
and we can trust Him
when He never stops
serenading us:
Don't cry please,
I carry you in My heart
And you will have Me close.
"Remember Me"
Coco
More Lenten posts:
Christ is all,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
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