“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
I think I was about 10 years old the first time I saw a theatrical production of “Our Town.”
It was a story of ordinary life in New Hampshire in the early days of the 20th century. an amazing production that left almost everything you could see open for your imagination.
It was a wonderful play, first written and staged in 1938 and produced as a film that was not nearly as special in 1940. It was less special because Hollywood changed the ending fundamentally in a way that made it less meaningful.
I hesitate to say it for a movie that came out 82 years ago, but …
SPOILER ALERT …
The most important character in “Our Town” is Emily Webb, a young girl in the first act, a young bride in the second and a young mother who dies in childbirth in the third.
It’s the fact that she dies that makes the story what it is and makes Emily’s final speech one of the most poignant moments in American theater. She tries desperately to hang onto the memory of her life only to see that in the end, we need to let go.
“Good-by, good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners … Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And good and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
She asks the stage manager — the narrator of the piece — if any human beings ever realize life while they live it.
His answer is that maybe saints and poets do, but the rest of us are as lost as if we were blind.
In the 1940 movie, death in childbirth becomes a near-death experience and Emily has an epiphany of sorts, making it far more likely she will appreciate what she has.
But there truly is a cycle of life from birth to death, and there is no predicting how long it will last in individual cases. Emily dies giving birth to her second child, while other people might live a hundred years.
I have a friend who lost her father earlier this month. He was a month shy of his 95th birthday and she is 70. She is heartbroken, and it certainly is no consolation that she is the only contemporary of mine to still have parents alive at such an advanced age.
My mother died when I was 70, but she had been ill for years and had actually outlived the love of her life by more than 12 years. I’m at an age now where I’m much closer to the end than to the beginning, and I find myself wondering what if anything comes next.
As I watch “Our Town” and think of those who have passed away reliving memories, it fills me with an ineffable sadness at my own failure to enjoy the good and overcome the bad when I experienced it all for real.
If I could tell my children one thing, if I could pass one thing along to my grandchildren, it would be to celebrate the good moments as best you can, and when you make mistakes or otherwise fail, take whatever lessons you can learn from them and make the most of it.
Life can be wonderful if you let it.