By Matt Zoller Seitz
January 2, 2016
Me: I first was exposed to your video essays several years ago, the zenith, for my money, being the ones on Wes Anderson and the substance of style. Then I found also your written work to be wonderfully structured and provocatively deep food for thought. I say provocative because it truly provokes thought and wonder and reflection, providing for a sort of Socratic dialogue in the mind of your reader. I've noticed from time to time the trace of a voice confronting loss and pain in some of our writing which, after first reading some time ago your mentions of a cherished and departed wife, was confirmed. Astonishing, how one's reflection on pain and suffering can be channeled into a prose style that inevitably beats with heart and soul that may provide the life-blood of a particular piece, though continues stringently down the path of a particular literary structure such as that which may be concerned with space allotment or appropriateness in a given forum.
Please continue what you do.
I'm in my thirties and I lost my father in May. He was 4 days shy of his 71st birthday. Total shock. A man who woke up early every morning to meditate and pray with holy beads he brought back from Lebanon where for a time he taught teachers on teaching. Our backyard had sculptures of both Saint Francis and Buddha. I'm never shy in mentioning that my father was a Roman Catholic priest who met, married, and had children with, a former Roman Catholic nun. He also was a local-Emmy-nominated writer for a public access show. He was empathy incarnate, and was the first person to put a pen in my hand as a toddler, telling me to write my stories.
Of course, I also have innumerable memories of the movies with him. When I was two he took me to my first movie, "Superman II" which me dressed in a red apron tied around my neck and red underwear on the outside of my pants. Then I can just reel them off: "E.T.", "Gremlins", "Muppets Take Manhattan", "Fantasia", "snow White", "Space Balls", "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", and on through the decades.
He knew very well of the brief time I had spent with Roger and Jim Emerson in Boulder, Colorado over a couple years, and saw what I said of both of them as emblematic of people who would do just fine at our family dinner table. A dinner table that provided more food for thought and cultural exploration that most of my formal education did. The weekend before he passed, he watched "Life Itself" at home followed by an all-nighter with the "Back to the Future" trilogy. Then he kissed Mom goodbye, went, per his usual, to the monastery to meditate, then went to a nature preserve of woods leading to a pond for his usual walk among the trees, where, despite years of working out three days a week and an impeccable lifetime diet, he fell instantly from a cardiac arrest due to an enlarged heart. In quite and solitude, and his usual contemplation and wonder of the natural universe.
Gratitude. I'm grateful for the completeness and totality of one man's fatherhood. Grateful for his lack of suffering. I am no one to be offering advice to a man with two children who has lost his spouse, or to friends and loved ones of a man who faced physical pain and challenge for years and at such a young age. All I can say is gratitude. Gratitude for the actual presence of these people's lives and the meaning provided during those lives and beyond. We're all in this life with little else than each other.
Please continue what you do. On the page and off.
Matt Zoller Seitz: This is without a doubt the most generous and moving comment anyone has ever made about my work. It cuts right to the heart of everything I hope to be as a writer.
Thank you even more for sharing your memories of your father. He sounds like he was an extraordinary man, and I feel certain from how you describe him that not an hour goes by that you aren't reminded of something he said, did or showed you. I am sorry for your loss.