The Sadness Book - A Journal To Let Go

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Director Karen Maine’s new comedy, Rosaline, works overtime to find a new perspective in one of the most well-known stories of all time. The tale in question? None other than William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, which remains so iconic that its influence continues to be felt today. As its title suggests, Maine's film does not place its focus on either of that play’s eponymous, star-crossed lovers, though, but rather on the woman who had originally captured young Romeo’s heart before he set his eyes for the first time on her cousin, Juliet. I’m not sure this book would be suitable for a sensitive child who had not lost a loved one, especially as Rosen is writing about the sudden death of his son, but for anyone in the early throes of grief, including young children, it’s beautiful, cathartic, and true.

If a child is to *touch wood* experience loss in my class I will 100% be sharing this with them. It is such an important book and should be read by people of all ages. With unmitigated honesty, a touch of humor, and sensitive illustrations by Quentin Blake, Michael Rosen explores the experience of sadness in a way that resonates with us all. It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams–sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief.” When I first read this book, I was teaching a children's literature class. In that context, I loved it because it talked about emotions without pandering to kids, without being gooey or cutesy or saccharine.

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I have always had a high tolerance for violence and gore and wanting to push the boundaries of horror as a genre, but I feel that as I've aged I've mellowed out more and my tolerance has plummeted to the point that I can't stand to stomach horror films that are so mean-spirited and vile. Perhaps this is due to life experiences I have had involving the deaths of loved ones and close friends or perhaps as I've grown, I've realised that I no longer enjoy watching being be brutally butchered and raped for no reason at all. In Getting Better, Rosen implies that coping is an everyday practice – we are coping even when we are unaware we are coping, and perhaps especially in those moments. Partway through our conversation I ask Rosen, “How have you coped?” hoping he might share some strategies, though he misunderstands the question.

Elsewhere, the Businessman continues his pursuit of Kat through the hospital's off-limits hallways, but she crushes his head with a fire extinguisher. Kat is then rescued by Dr. Wong, who has been hiding in the maternity ward. Wong explains that he attempted to find the cure for the Alvin virus, which—in its mutated form—connects the parts of the brain that govern sex and aggression. Wong also theorizes that the reason the infected cry is because they are fully aware of the terrible things they do but are completely unable to stop, likening it to resisting the urge to blink. In Getting Better, Rosen describes the moment he discovered a photograph of a baby boy sitting on his mother’s knee. When he asked his father who the boy was, Rosen or his older brother, Brian, his father said neither – that it was a third son, Alan, who had died as an infant, before Rosen was born. Rosen was 10 at the time. Nobody in his family had spoken of Alan previously, there were no photographs of him in the house. And though Rosen’s father, Harold, mentioned Alan from time to time over the course of his life, Rosen never spoke about him with his mother, Connie. While zombie movies usually work in broad strokes, the kind of extreme exploitation horror Jabbaz is working with thrives on the specificity of its circumstances and characters. But with The Sadness, the pileup of bodies becomes so exhausting, and the violence is so widespread, that it renders any wider point moot. After a while, one should expect nasty things from the various supporting characters that Kat and Jim meet, even the ones who seem relatively benign despite their glaring eccentricities and character flaws. I wish I could say I was able to out-think or stay ahead of this movie’s schematic plot, but I was often so overwhelmed that I couldn’t think far enough ahead to anticipate each successive rug pull.Every day I try to do one thing I can be proud of. Then, when I go to bed, I think very, very hard about this one thing.” Amazingly, he lifts the book at the end, out of sadness into something else. He does it without sounding false or pretentious or sentimental. He ends with candles.