The idea of loss was so poignantly portrayed in the movie WILD, that it got me thinking.

Loss is the most painful of life’s experiences. Loss of childhood, loss of loved one, loss of innocence, loss of self, loss of path, loss of relevance, loss of purpose, loss of joy. All of these things are the loves of our lives and without them how can we be?

Cheryl Strayed, the main character and the author of the memoir that the movie is based on, says, in her defence to her frightening downward spiral,

My mother was the love of my life.

Her mother, a tragic angel on earth, died quickly as cancer tore relentlessly through her body. She was a single mother who ached to protect her babies and present the world to them better than it was.

Her daughter Cheryl was not finished needing her, when she departed the earth. (I realized during this movie how secretly scared I have always been that this would happen to me before my children were done needing me).She spiralled south until, from her lowest moment, she decided to trek the 1100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail to find in herself, as she so magnificently puts it

the person my mother saw in me.

It did not make me wonder how anyone could fall apart so dramatically but rather how it is that any of us can endure the losses of the loves of our lives, whatever and whomever they are, without falling apart.

When the lights went up at the end of the TIFF screening, the neck of my poncho was soaked with tears.