#200 Liam

I tell friends when someone plays me in a movie. Jude Law plays me in The Holiday as a widower with two daughters. Denzel Washington plays me in both Unstoppable (also two daughters) and The Equalizer. Tom Hanks plays me as a bitter old man.

Then there is Liam Neeson. He played me in our regular Christmas movie, Love Actually, as Daniel, a recently widowed man. His first scene has him talking during the funeral about his deceased wife, telling a bittersweet anecdote and playing The Beach Boys’s music.

It’s funny that Liam plays someone called Daniel. When we were in the hospital, just three hours before Daniel was born, we hadn’t decided on a name. I gave two names to Janne to choose from, Daniel or Liam. She went for Daniel. Last year, Janne and I still showed Daniel the statue of his namesake, Daniel O’Connell, in Dublin.

Liam Neeson didn’t know then what life had in store. He was happily married to Natasha Richardson. In 2009, six years after Love Actually, Natasha died at 45 after an accident while learning to ski. She hit her head and thought nothing of it but fell into a coma soon after. She left two sons, Micheál and Daniel, ages 13 and 12.

I once watched an interview where Liam opened up to Anderson Cooper about this. Bono, the lead singer of U2, came to have dinner after Natasha’s death. Bono also lost his mother when he was a teenager (just listen to the song “Iris”).

Bono asked Liam’s older son, “how old are you, Micheál?” He replied, “thirteen”. Bono says, “yeah, that’s the age I was when I lost my mom”. Neeson adds that he could have kissed him for that, because he meant to say, “I lost my mom at this age and I’m doing Ok and you will do Ok”.

In a more recent interview, Liam says that he visits her grave often, just one and a half miles down the road, and still talks to her. He says that grief comes when he least expects it. Because of his work, sometimes that’s inconvenient, so he schedules his crying sessions to get it over with.

Thanks Liam for all of that. I knew deep in my heart when Janne was diagnosed of the uphill battle it would be. But just by hearing him say all of this, I know I’m doing what I need. The boys will be Ok, and I will be Ok too.