FILM I DRAMA
‘Our Friend’ — The Truth About Real Dying is Ugly and Repulsive
Depicting the ugliness of death and the beauty of friendship.
In thirty-one years, I had my own encounters with death. I worked one year in an NHS hospital, at the A&E unit, as a porter. I’ve seen people in pain and agony, and I’ve seen people die. There is a difference between how we think of death as a concept and how it happens in real life.
Real death isn’t glorious or peaceful — it’s cruel, ugly, and repulsive most of the time.
Matthew Teague’s award-winning personal essay, The Friend, attempts to depict the sheer ugliness of death he witnessed up close. It’s a devastating confession of the last years of his wife, who died from ovarian cancer at the age of thirty-four. It’s a fascinating, emotionally heavy, and honest piece of writing about a life period he couldn’t have gotten through by himself.
Although the film adaptation, Our Friend, does no justice for it, it somehow achieves to highlight the important part: we all need a friend to lift us up when we hit the floor.
“I think I’ve hung on to the sensation of the hospital floor and being lifted away from it because it captures…
