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| Pedro Armendáriz |
A good friend today at a Commercial coffee joint told me that I must control my present depression with meds. One of my daughters insists I should seek counselling.
I rejected to my friend his suggestion of meds and kept my true thoughts to myself.
John Ford directed a film in 1947 called The Fugitive based on Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory. It features a priest (called the whisky priest in the novel) who has lost his faith during the war against Catholicism in Mexico (called la Guerra de los Cristeros) during the mid 1920s. The priest is played by Henry Fonda, and, since the film parallels the Christ of the bible, Dolores del Río is a Mary Magdalene. What makes this film one of my favourites of all time is that the assistant director is Indio Fernández and the lighting and director of photography is the formidable (named one of the best of the 20th century) Gabriel Figueroa.
When the whisky priest is finally caught he is to be executed in the morning. A lovely looking and wonderful Mexican actor, Pedro Armendáriz, plays the atheist policeman who offers Fonda brandy to ameliorate his execution.
It is here where Fonda utters something that to me is the most wonderful (and I take it to heart) statement that is not found in Greene’s book. Fonda says, “No thank you, I want to live my death”.
And so my depression over the loss of my wife (we lived together for 52 years) on 9 December 2020 is one that I do not want to forget. I do not want to make it less melancholic.
Like Fonda, I want to live her life gone in my own life. We shall never meet as we both believed in oblivion.
I feel that in my present melancholy my blog writing may be getting better and I am inspired to take photographs and scan my plants for me and for her memory.
As St. Luke in his gospel paraphrases Christ, “Do this in remembrance of me.” I remember her every waking moment and she haunts my dreams. I want that.
