The first full-length movie ever made about the issue of stillbirth premiered on Lifetime television this past weekend. “Return to Zero” starred Minnie Driver and Paul Adelstein, and it followed a couple, Maggie and Aaron, who learned late in Maggie’s first pregnancy that the baby she was carrying had died in utero, and that she was going to have to deliver their son stillborn.
The bulk of the movie, however, did not focus on the events leading up to the sad birth moment. Instead, it was a character study of the couple as they waded through the shoals of their grief, anger and acceptance of this terrible thing that had happened to them, and the reactions of the people around them.
Lifetime, on its website, describes the film as a “tear jerker” (although I thought that was a requisite for Lifetime movies.) And while my eyes are swollen from the crying I did watching late into the early morning last night, I found the movie actually touched a nerve in a different part of my memory banks from my own experience with neo-natal loss.
Maggie, after losing her son, sleepwalks through the world for a long time. But her closest companion during those brutal, raw first months was not her also-grieving husband, but her anger. Her anger at the utter random, unfairness of it all, her anger at her husband for not suffering in the exact same manner she is (and his ultimate decision to find solace elsewhere,) her anger at her mother and father-in-law for attempting to find some sort of normal at a Thanksgiving meal when there is no more normal to be found, her anger at random insensitivity from shopkeepers and party-goers who do not know her story and are not bending themselves to her needs. The list goes on.
Continue reading ""Return to Zero" - A Story of Loss, Grief, Anger and Resurrection" »
Recent Comments