Inspiration
The Beginning
Being in a creative capacity, inspiration comes in all forms. Sometimes it’s fun and exciting, other times it’s pain and suffering that drives the inspiration.
As some of you know, and the rest of you are about to find out, Jacob and I lost our grandmother to complications from a car accident last January (2016). We know a fair number of people who are not close to their grandparents. Fortunately for us, this is not our case. We are exceptionally close to our grandparents. Thus, when our grandmother died last year, it was accompanied by a great pain. It’s a pain that has lessened but will never go away.
After the car accident, Honey, as we called her, was rushed to the emergency room and ultimately admitted to the hospital.
The day that she was to be released, Jacob and I visited the hospital to take some paperwork to our mother and we witnessed Honey preparing to go back home. As we were leaving, I popped my head back in the room and told her, “I wanted to tell you both, ‘good luck; and we’re all counting on you.’” This quote from Leslie Nielsen in the movie “Airplane!” was returned with “And don’t call me Shirley.”
That was the last thing my grandmother would ever verbally say to me.
Later that day, she would suffer debilitating headache and severe vomiting, that were caused by a blood clot going to her brain.
Following that, she spent several days in Surgical ICU. It felt like living in suspended animation and being on a rollercoaster.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but, I felt like I was living life by the hour. Never in my life did I feel my trajectory completely changing every time I received a new text message. It was peaking with hope and bottoming out with despair, many times throughout the day over several days. I felt like a rubber band getting pulled in opposite emotional directions over and over and over again. I turned to prescription medication to help me sleep and slept on a inflatable mattress in my own living room because my sleep was so restless that my wife was suffering from it.
However, as hard as it was for me, I did not see anyone suffer more than my mother. She and Honey were more than mother and daughter. They really were best friends. They traveled together, cooked together, joined social organizations together, and loved watching Dancing With The Stars together. They were virtually inseparable.
So, when Honey left us, I saw my own mother lose a part of herself that she cherished more than anything. Our mother was lost; not in the sense that she was gone, but, in a way that would suggest her life had been a road map, and suddenly, the map was torn and, not only were the next steps unclear, but there was no compass and no legend.
Watching my mother suffer like she did is something that I never want to endure again.
The Next Step
After such a dark time in all of our lives, one day, I noticed a change in my mother. She was better. She wasn’t healed, she wasn’t fixed, per se, but, it was like she was given a new piece of the map, with a new compass, and a new legend. She had direction. She had purpose. She had hope.
To my knowledge, I am the only person she told about what happened to breathe new life into her.
At this time, you will simply have to have faith that I will explain this to you when the time is right. But, now is not that time.
We fast forward several months and Jacob and I take part in what was the biggest, most terrifying job we’ve ever taken on. Part of that was to shoot a series of short films for educational purposes.
One of the scripts had multiple complications and the idea of a replacement script was put on the table.
It’s still foggy to me when this script was written, but, out of my experience, pain, torment, suffering, and my mother’s hope, was written the script for our next short film.
The script was not used for the educational series, and, while that bothered me at the time, I trusted the timing and now understand that it was the absolute best thing for this film.
This blog series is going to be a chronicle of my journey through this film and I hope you will join me.
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