Coping with Grief (Again!)

Coping with Grief: Another Perspective.
A while ago I read John Irving’s A Widow for One Year and I was in awe of the themes espoused; that of grief and how humans cope with it. I saw a movie recently that drew parallels to these themes. And I was again in awe of the similarities of themes in different scenarios.
Based on a book by Kim Edwards, A memory keeper’s daughter is a movie about an orthopaedic surgeon husband and his pregnant wife. His wife delivered a set of twins, one was male, the other was a mongoloid female, striking a cord of memory with husband whose sister also had down syndrome and died early in life causing her mother so much pain.
In a whim of moment, and cascades of memory, he thought what was best was to spare his wife such unnecessary emotion so he planned register the child into an institution for people with Down syndrome, and then lie to his wife about her death. As fate or providence would have it, the nurse, who was to deliver the child into the Institute, kept the baby and became her foster mother. With her man she met in serendipitous circumstances, the baby also had a father.
The doctor who later received the gift of a camera from his wife processed his grief via photography. By photography, the tales of the lives are told. Their marriage was left with scars of distrust which later transformed into the wife’s infidelity, whilst the fostered daughter flourished and became a source of joy for those who kept her.
What is striking about this movie, like I said earlier, is it’s similarities with Irving’s story. The conflict although is much different—the death of two sons. What the husband resorts to is also different: philandering; the wife became a detective novelist. But what is noteworthy about this film is the effects of grief on the lives of individuals. How humans, amongst many other things, share their grief, how they process it, how they overcome it, how they surmount it, or how it surmounts them.
But one moral lesson I took away from this movie is that little (in)actions can reap the darnest of consequences. Thence we should always be sure of our actions before we perpetrate them.