Perhaps Some Balm for the Post-Traumatic Soul

On this sad anniversary of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Mr Broke Hoedown (aka Collateral Damage) reposts an article from one year ago yesterday, speaking to us of Finding Nemo:

Nemo is a movie about the experience most of us had as a result of the event: learning how to live in a world filled with dangers that you can no longer deny by pretending they are irrational. It opens with a huge loss that happens in a single horrible moment — Marlin loses his wife and 499 of his children. Understandably Marlin loses all his trust in the rest of the world but still manages to raise a relatively well-adjusted son who then gets snapped up by a yet another unstoppable force. In his quest to fulfill the movie’s title he meets up with Dory who is so odd that I would argue she, too, is a trauma survivor. (And yes, I do think Ellen DeGeneres deserved the best supporting Oscar for that performance.) In the end, of course, Marlin does learn to not be so afraid of the world and to enjoy his life and he and Dory and Nemo create an odd family of survivors that wouldn’t have existed before the tragedy. Now that’s 9/11.

He speaks also in a separate post about his experiences that day, both the mundane and the shattering.

Like many frequent business travelers, I was on the road that day. and spent the rest of the week trying to get home, both literally and figuratively. A moment of silence, please, for those who were not so lucky.

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Finding Nemo: A Fine Commentary on 9/11

I’ve been avoiding all the docudrama about 9/11; it feels too soon for me to watch United 93 or World Trade Center. But, as my husband Collateral Damage writes in his post “Sept. 10, five years ago”, Finding Nemo is a “masterpiece on the topic.” He goes on to say:

Nemo is a movie about the experience most of us had as a result of the event: learning how to live in a world filled with dangers that you can no longer deny by pretending they are irrational. It opens with a huge loss that happens in a single horrible moment — Marlin loses his wife and 499 of his children. Understandably Marlin loses all his trust in the rest of the world but still manages to raise a relatively well-adjusted son who then gets snapped up by a yet another unstoppable force. In his quest to fulfill the movie’s title he meets up with Dory who is so odd that I would argue she, too, is a trauma survivor. (And yes, I do think Ellen DeGeneres deserved the best supporting Oscar for that performance.) In the end, of course, Marlin does learn to not be so afraid of the world and to enjoy his life and he and Dory and Nemo create an odd family of survivors that wouldn’t have existed before the tragedy. Now that’s 9/11.

I’m saying a prayer for all the Marlins and Dorys of the world today.