Dr. Strange

Dear Dad,

G3 and I visited Mom this weekend for a belated Mother’s Day. I wish we could go for the entire weekend and spend two full days, but G3’s activities make it difficult. I suppose I should be glad we get to go at all. Yesterday, was a full day. We had to get up early so that G3 could help one of the older Boy Scouts with his Eagle project. The Scout was redoing the prayer garden at his family’s church. G3 worked hard and he seemed to enjoy the labor. He planted a few plants and helped cart stone to spread around in the garden. 

We had to leave the Eagle project early so that G3 could get to Taekwondo class. The regular season is over, but now he has to train for Districts which will be on Father’s Day weekend. I guess that’s a good weekend to have it. It will keep us busy so I won’t be as focused on missing you. Father’s Day weekend we’re supposed to be out in Mattituck, visiting you, and going to the Strawberry Festival. I still can’t believe all of that is in the past. Why does it still feel so unreal? If you were here, I’m sure you would have booked a hotel in Lancaster for Districts. You wouldn’t have missed it, even though it is on Father’s Day weekend.

Anyway, the traffic heading into Queens was awful. Both the Belt Parkway and the BQE were slammed so horribly that the GPS rerouted me through the center of Brooklyn. So G3 got quite the tour of the borough. We got to mom’s a little after three and when got there she helped G3 with one of his rank advancement requirements for Boy Scouts. He has to be able to identify ten plants that are found near his home. We did Mom’s home instead for obvious reasons. I’m pretty incompetent when it comes to things that grow, but after years of gardening, Mom knows plants. Instead of the necessary ten, she pointed out fifteen, and G3 took pictures so that he has evidence of seeing them.

Today, Mom took us to the movies. She knows G3 loves superhero movies as much as you did. Since you weren’t here to take G3 to see Dr. Strange, Mom took us. Gone are the days when G3 would see a trailer for a superhero movie and announce that he was going to see it with you. His excitement was always so cute. But now that I’ve been forced to step in, I have to admit I do enjoy the MCU. It has sucked me in and I enjoy being able to dissect the plots and the analyze the characters with G3. 

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet seen Dr. Strange and don’t want me to ruin it for you, stop reading.)

G3 loved the movie. Mom hated it. I’m still processing it. I think if you weren’t dead I would have just despised the movie. It was bizarre and unrealistic and dumb. But you’re dead and your death gives me a different lens through which to see things. My grief has connected me to Wanda, and that has seriously affected the way in which I related to the movie. What I enjoyed most about Wanda Vision, last year, was the way in which grief tortured Wanda and twisted her psyche. Grief drove her to create a world that made her happy. She escaped into her imagination so that she didn’t have to live with the ending that crushed her. I understood her motive. I felt bad for her because I felt her pain. I wanted the other superheroes to rally around her and comfort her because that’s what she needed. But they didn’t. They all left her alone. They left her to deal with her emotions without any support at all. These superheroes can save the world from the most vicious threats but they can’t offer emotional support to save a friend. They can punch and kick and destroy but they can’t hug or listen. And so Wanda withdrew deeper into her loss, isolating herself to the detriment of all. So if superheroes help to create the demon they must destroy, are they really heroes?

I am troubled that in Dr. Strange she is the bad guy. She is so consumed with grief, she can’t move forward. Her desire to recapture the past—not even her real past at this point but the past created in her imagination—drives her mad. She can’t see beyond her need to regain what is lost and will stop at nothing to get it. She kills because death and destruction appear to her as the only way she can find her way back to being happy. But her goal is unattainable and only when she is forced to see this, forced to witness the impossibility of her desire does she back down. And in making sure that no one can ever again possess the black magic that enabled her to cause such devastation, she destroys it and in process, she kills herself. I liked her. I empathized with her. I felt her pain and her anger. Because she felt things too deeply, her inability to move on turned her into something dark and cruel. It’s a freaking movie, and yet, her transformation and death will haunt me.

As for the multiverse bit, of course it left me wondering what my other selves might be doing in other worlds, other dimensions. Am I happy elsewhere? Is there a universe in which I’ve attained my goals? Am I employed elsewhere? Am I a successful writer? Did COVID wipe out a millions of people in other dimensions? Or is there one in which you survived? Is there another universe where I can visit you? I doubt it, because I no longer dream about you. But have you stopped visiting me in my dreams because I never believed it could be you or have you stopped visiting me because you are as dead in the other dimensions as you are here?

I wonder what you would have thought of this movie. Mom said you didn’t care for the first one. Therefore, I’m guessing you wouldn’t have been a fan of this one either.

I miss you!