The Memory of a Smile

One of the most perfect movie moments I’ve ever seen is near the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King when Frodo boards the ship to sail to the Gray Havens after his tearful farewell with Merry, Pippin, and most of all, Sam.  That moment when he pauses and then he turns and smiles at them and his face is truly happy and he all of sudden has color in his cheeks and you realize that you hadn’t noticed how pale and sad and wan he had become and how tinged with sadness and weariness his smiles had been until right at that moment when he suddenly looks like the sweet, carefree Frodo he had been at the beginning, and you sigh as the tears are streaming and think, “Oh. He’s whole again.”

This evening I was making grilled cheese sandwiches and thinking about my mom, specifically thinking about one of the last times I saw her and how she smiled at me while I was making a grilled cheese sandwich for her when she asked for one after she came home from the hospital when we were there in January. Grief is a strange thing, how it hits at unexpected times, but tonight I got to thinking about that scene from The Lord of the Rings and how sweet that unguarded, loving smile from my mom was, and how sick she actually was then and how sick and exhausted she’d really been for a long time even though we didn't realize it and she faithfully kept on and kept on, and I thought how if I were to be able to see her today and she were to smile at me, she would be whole in a way I’ve never known her. 

I know Tolkien didn't mean The Lord of the Rings to be an allegory or anything, but I think that scene and how Peter Jackson chose to portray it in the movie perfectly captures the emotions surrounding the death of the believer in Christ. There is the grief those who are left behind feel so tangibly, there is the sadness the one who is dying feels at leaving, yet there is that sense of relief and joy and wholeness in knowing they go to be with the Lord and enter into a joy that this world can only hint at. And there is also that sense of letting go and moving forward for those who now have to live with the grief of the separation from their loved one and that emptiness we feel when we miss seeing their smile, but also to live the life we still have to live and to live it in joy, even while we often ache with the missing of our loved one and are so often reminded by little things - even things as ordinary and simple as a grilled cheese sandwich.