Sob Story

Great. For the two hours I watched the Lifetime movie, I sobbed. Mia doesn't understand tears (hell, I don't understand tears), so she stayed close. By the time the credits ran, I was totally drained from the experience.

The movie is Charlie and Me, the story of a young girl, her grandfather (Charlie), and her father. Basically, the girl's mother is killed in a traffic accident and the father cannot move on. Rather than comforting his daughter, who is too young to understand her father's devastation at the loss of his wife, he withdraws from his daughter and Charlie, who then form a deep, loving bond. When Charlie's heart condition becomes imminently life-threatening, he realizes that the father is going to have to be the father and parent his daughter, which means he has to accept his grief and move on with his life.

He can't love others if he cannot accept and forgive himself for the way life turned out for his young wife.

Okay, so it's a sappy story, but it is really well-written and well-acted. The young girl is much too young to be so old in spirit, so wise in the ways of the world. Her g'pa is grounded in reality and he knows that he has to pave the path for acceptance of his death, so he confronts the father and tries to make him understand what's coming. However, the father has buried himself in his career, distanced himself from his daughter, and brushes off the prospect of another death in his family.

The best scene is when the g'pa and the g'dotter take a trip to a special place Charlie shared with his wife and talk about what's coming. The flood gates wrench wide open when the young girl presents a speech about our two hearts to an audience that includes her g'pa and her father.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: we all know how it ends, but sometimes the truth is found in the journey. And, every once in a while, we all need to re-establish our own emotional bond with life and death: crying over a movie isn't such a bad way to accomplish that goal.