My daughter, Jess, loved King Kong. We saw the movie and traded trading cards, posters, magazines, even Edgar Wallace novels. Godzilla was different. She couldn’t understand why my mother-in-law and I enjoyed it so much. “Sure, Godzilla is really big,” she laughed. “But so what?”
Sadness comes suddenly, stays forever, moves on indifferently, and leaves capriciously.
Jess is right. Godzilla is not scary or creepy in the slightest. The film’s warnings about unchecked nuclear testing still ring true, but as with all myths, modern or ancient, we sense that something else is going on. As this allegorical behemoth slithers into our lives, all we can do is respond to the damage. We are powerless in the wake of the destruction.
My daughter died in 2015. She was 26 years old. The loss was so profound that I can’t think of a more apt metaphor. Godzilla came.
“This is a bad movie.” Roger Ebert Original Godzilla (1954). “But it ended up making its mark on history.” Novelist Kayama Shigeru’s screenplay was a basic giant monster story. Writer Murata Takeo and director Honda Ishirō reworked his outline into a morality tale about a monster born from nuclear testing. Kayama, who later wrote a young adult novel based on the film, found the change wise. “The atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb take the form of Godzilla in this story,” he says.
Godzilla The film was released two years after American occupation forces withdrew from the Japanese archipelago. Before that, artists had been working under strict government restrictions on talking about nuclear weapons. The film broke a powerful cultural taboo about nuclear testing. But it did much more than that.
Godzilla was a monster in the auditorium — a metaphor for Japan’s national grief over war, loss, and the horrors of the atomic bomb. Audiences left the theater in tears. “Godzilla is a tool for overcoming trauma,” one rhetorician wrote. Shannon Stevens A collaborative study with the University of Nevada: “Films that explore trauma metaphorically allow viewers to reflect on past trauma at the same time as the characters on screen, but in a guided and safe way.”
“O you who pass by, is this nothing to you? Look around you and see; is there any suffering like my suffering?”
Over the decades, Godzilla has taken on many forms, some reflective, some comical. But each incarnation offers a new interpretation of a creature that is at once mythical and modern. Why does such a ruthless force of nature resonate with us so much? Perhaps it’s because, like death and grief, Godzilla is unstoppable.
Bereavement is eternal. There is no immediate solution, no good news, no comfort that can bring our dead back to us. But we will always love them and forever feel their absence. Grief is a natural and healthy expression of that love. Monstrous.
This paradox may be hard for others to understand, so I’ve resorted to a metaphor.
Sadness Comes waveSlowly, inexorably, it consumes and ebbs, which is accurate enough, but you just need to move away from the shore to avoid the swell. storm This is another common comparison: if the weather is bad, you might choose to evacuate or at least take shelter inside. The sad thing is, you can’t run or hide from your grief.
Probably death Losing a limbWe suggest that it never comes back, it never gets “cured,” we must adapt and adjust to the deficit. C.S. Lewis “I was being lied to,” he wrote about the loss of his wife, adding that he would always be aware of the stump. He later changed his mind. “I was being lied to,” he wrote. “The stump had so many ways of hurting me that I would only discover them one by one.”
Psychologists and bereaved families Katherine Sanders She also sees grief as amputation: “It’s like having a part of yourself cut off,” she writes. “The pain is excruciating. Even as scar tissue forms, the agony of living with a missing part of yourself leaves you feeling isolated, foreign, awkward and anxious. There are no prosthetics.”
One staple of early Lutheran funeral poetry describes the loss of a parent: Big scar If not treated in a timely manner, it will fester. In 1690, Margarete Susanna von Kuntsch’s nine-year-old daughter died, the eleventh child she had lost. She wrote that this latest death reopened the wounds of the other ten, and in particular likened it to the cry of Jeremiah of Israel: Lament: “O you who pass by, is this nothing to you? Look around you and see if there is any suffering like my suffering.”
“Sometimes the only way to heal a wound is to make peace with the demon that created it.”
I host a bereavement support group. We share so much that ultimately cannot be put into words. Our grief goes beyond physical metaphors. I often say that the pain of loss can be expressed literally, not figuratively. Our souls are woundedThis is certainly true for me. We will find true healing the moment I hold Jess in my arms again. Until then, I will love her even without her. But I will never feel completely alone.
Once, while working under a truck to replace the starter, I looked to the side. The sunset was breathtaking, just like so many moments I shared with Jess. If I turned my head, I could almost see her pounding on rusty parts next to me. Suddenly, I was lying on my back, filthy, under a partially repaired engine, crying. Moments like these still creep up on me. They force me to pause and take the time to grieve. Grief cannot be denied, pushed away, ignored, or “got over.” It is the price we pay for love.
Grief comes suddenly and stays forever, marches on indifferently and leaves on its own whim. It offers no pact or truce. But in the face of such devastation, I am not powerless. I choose to grieve because I choose to love. In mourning my daughter, I love her. “Sometimes the only way to heal a wound is to make peace with the demons that created it,” one character observes. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). “There is something beyond our understanding. We must embrace it and learn from it, because these moments of crisis can become moments of faith.”
As a metaphor for sadness, Godzilla is better than almost anything else.
