What are you doing tonight at 10 p.m.?
I'd like to suggest that you settle into your couch and watch a moving and life-affirming documentary which was produced and directed by one of my dearest friends Sheona McDonald.
Capturing a Short Life is a film about families dealing with infant loss and it reinforces how important it is to remember and celebrate the lives of children who are on this earth for just a short time. Sheona, herself a mom of two, has broached this subject with astounding grace and sensitivity.
Just a few weeks ago Sheona and her children were at our home helping celebrate Graham's birthday and the subject of the film came up. "It must have been so difficult to make," my mother observed.
But Sheona's answer was not what you would expect.
"It was actually easy in some ways," she said. "Because people are desperate to tell their stories. They want to be acknowledged as parents. As a society we don't know how to talk about the death of a child, so these parents never get a chance to talk about their child's life."
And that's just the kind of sensitivity and perspective that Sheona brings to the film.
"We have, on the whole, desensitized ourselves to violence. Images of war, stories of rape, destruction, murder, child-abuse, etc seem to fill the landscape of our news and media and we have become used to those images," she added in an e-mail to me today.
"We accept them and seem, somehow, to process them. There are no violent, graphic, bloody images in CASL and yet so many are afraid to watch because of the fear of what? The emotion? The fact that this can happen here, to us, our friends, family, neighbors?"
Capturing A Short Life makes its television premiere at 10 p.m. Tuesday, December 9th on CBC Newsworld's Series The Lens. You can also learn more about the film by visiting its web site.
I will be watching (for the second time - I was at a screening last winter) and I hope you will be too.
