How This Film Helped Me Grieve

A look at processing through stories

Film Still from Third Star Directed by Hattie Dalton

Spoilers Ahead!

I am hunched over, kneeling on the dingy, basement carpet. The time is maybe two in the morning, but I can’t be sure. My head is in my hands I begin to sob uncontrollably. If humans are 80% water, I’m fairly certain I lost about half of that crying alone. The credits are still rolling for the film I just finished, and I am singularly destroyed. The film is Third Star (2010) and it twisted the knife in just the way I needed it to.

Third Star follows a young man, James, and his three best friends as they hike to the man’s favorite spot in the entire world — Barafundle Bay. James is suffering from a terminal illness and is using this trip not just as a getaway from all of that, but as a getaway for good. He plans on letting himself drift off and drown at sea, an intention he very much tries to hide from his loved ones.

They are, essentially carrying him to his final resting place, acting as pallbearers unbeknownst to them.

Obviously, not everything goes according to plan, because what fun would that be? The friends bicker, confront and challenge each other and their relationships with one another along the way eventually culminating in them discovering James’s true aim. Third Star is a quiet, unstuffy, and intimate look into friendship, autonomy, and death. That last one was something I had only experienced a few months earlier with the passing of my grandmother.

Now, she was not so much my friend as she was someone who demanded I buy her the snacks she liked and would scoff at my youthful discretions, but I loved her dearly. Although I had witnessed much loss in my time, she had been the only person to go that I was genuinely close to. All of this was compounded by the fact that my uncle, her son, died only a month before she had. She, like James, had been diagnosed with something typically fatal, but she had lived with it for far longer. I was lucky to have had her in my life as much as I did, but that did not stop the train of grief railroading me that early morning.

I did not cry when she left us, although I was there when the moment came. Everyone was allowed to, but I had…