“I don’t live my life in pixels.”
My friend was telling me how much more meaningful his existence became after giving up all movies and TV. I had just been gushing to him about the recent TV show that changed my life—how I’ve watched it dozens of times, written essays about it, and read it like a text. How I dissect its messages and meaning with my friends, bonding over our favorite video essays on YouTube.
“I gave all that stuff up years ago, and I decided to live more in the real world.”
While I’m sure he was not trying to come off as judgmental, I felt a familiar pang in my gut. As a spiritual, ritual leader-type person, I’ve always felt a little shame at my affinity for media, specifically, film and TV, and analysis of film and TV. In college, I almost majored in media studies but switched to Sociology because it felt “higher-brow.” There’s this nagging part of me that feels guilty when I settle in to watch something. But I don’t think it needs to be that way forever. What if the pixels themselves were imbued with meaning?
Yesterday was my father’s eighteenth yahrzeit, the eighteenth anniversary of his death. It was a big one, a hinge point for me; just as many years without my father as with him, in this life. I had been feeling it energetically for a while now. This past Passover, during the Yizkor prayers of remembrance in the morning service, I sobbed openly, wondering where all this grief was coming from until I remembered: Oh yes. The next yahrzeit. 18.
My father lost his own father when he was very young. Although I never met my grandfather, I was named after him: My middle name, Sara, for Sydney. His memory was honored in other ways, too. After a long workday in his office at the synagogue where he was the rabbi, my father would occasionally smoke a pipe, just as his father did. He made sure never to smoke when I or my little brother were around, but nonetheless, it bothered me immensely. A sensitive, rule-following child, I was so scared of what smoking might do to his health. I’m not sure I could have articulated it at four years old, but perhaps I was afraid that by honoring his father in this way, he would, in a similar fashion, leave us too soon. Wasn’t there something else he could do that would connect him to his father? After much protest by me, he gave up the habit entirely. I was grateful and relieved. But I understand it now: The desire to be as close as possible to someone long gone, to breathe them in, as their memory grows hazier each year like an apparition, like smoke.
In early college, I started collecting pocket watches. They were cheap facsimiles of the ones my father would wear, bought online or at gaudy accessory stores in the mall. But it didn’t matter that they weren’t actually heirlooms. To wear a pocket watch (or even better, a vest and a pocket watch) felt like a material, physical way of connecting across time itself, because I imbued it with that very intention.
It’s only in hindsight that I can see the thread, the cosmic rhyme of the pipe and the pocket watch. Only in hindsight can the scattered dots of grief turn into something like a line, a narrative. We can only make sense of it looking back.
Even after all these years, I am still learning from my father—from his life, from my memories of him. Some memories, after collective familial hardship, are buried deep. Some seem simple on the surface when they arise and had simply been forgotten. Like the fact that my father loved movies.
Two nights ago, at the end of our virtual Kaddish gathering for my father’s yartzeit, my brother invited our friends to honor his memory by “drinking whiskey, listening to Chicago, or complaining about the Cubs.” I wrote this in my journal later adding, “or watch a movie.” How had I forgotten? How had I forgotten that my father majored in Radio, Television, and Film in college, and wanted to be a director?
The thought crackled in my mind like a light suddenly coming back to life. Right. My father was inspired by a summer at Brandeis Collegiate Institute (a sort of Jewish summer camp for young adults) to use his passion for media and storytelling for the good of the Jewish people. I read that once, in a letter he sent to his mother that my aunt had kept. I remember him teaching “Jews in Film” classes at the synagogue, using film as sacred text in writings and sermons. And I remember deciding where to bury him, and settling on Forest Lawn in Los Angeles, where he could be with his siblings, Warner Brothers, and other movie studios shining in the distance.
Each memory clicked into color like a film cell, telling a story of who my father was. And, like all good movies, it reflected my own life back to me. I wondered: Could watching media, and watching media about media, be in the same category as the pipe and the pocketwatch? What might happen if I imbued watching with the intention of honoring my father’s memory? Even just with this first thought, I felt some of the shame lifting. Because of my father, I know what my friend does not: Film is storytelling, is sacred text, is a way of connecting across time and space. Or at least, it can be. The writer and researcher Casper ter Kuile teaches that the line between secular and sacred is not vertical, but horizontal. We have the power to imbue even the most seemingly mundane moments with meaning. So I am choosing to find the meaning in the pixels. May those we have loved and lost be a blessing to us, and through us, through the stories we tell, read, and yes, watch.