The end.

 https://www.joinobit.com//obituaries/8644-heavenly-alpha-centauri-windsor-mountbatten-1958_07_22-2026_04_25

27 April 2026.

Mama is gone. I searched for her yesterday, in the all-absorbing white light, this version of heaven I’ve always envisioned. I imagined some part of her would remain here, tokens of her found in bird song and breeze. But at night, as I lay in bed, imagining her essence crossing into eternity, forcing illusory fuchsia optics to decorate the darkness, as much as I tried to envision her in this dream, I could not erase the awareness of a certain absence. 

Mama is gone. She is not here. I cannot feel her anywhere. And all that I’ve believed about the end is different now. In this version, death is final, and pragmatic, and natural.  

Her body is still at the hospital, grafts of skin and eyes and other parts aside from her organs, which are not usable anymore, are being harvested to help someone else. But her spirit—it did not stay here a moment longer. And why would it? After the life she experienced, if given the chance to escape it all, why wouldn’t she choose that release, that final freedom?

In bursts of intermittent grief and relief, I wonder what I could have done differently. I would have liked to hold her hand in her final breaths, if she wanted me there. I would have liked to eat fried chicken with her one more time, and maybe my son would be there too, and he would hear her laugh in person, and only know her as that, not the way I knew her, as someone the opposite of laughter. I grieve the person and the dream. 

I’m arranging for her disposition, alone. My sister wants no part of it. She has built a fortress of boundaries around her that hardly anyone can penetrate. And my Dad has yet to learn of his ex-wife’s passing. Likely, the reality will frighten him, will shake the ideas he has about his own vitality and mortality. But when I receive the ashes and am holding Mama’s remains, I wonder if I will still feel this absence. Will a hint of her spirit still be there, one I can usher into the great mysteriousness, or will it just be a vessel filled with the dust of bone?

Hamnet

Directed, Edited, Co-written, and Co-produced by Chloé Zhao
Adapted from the novel by Maggie O’Farrell
Starring Jessie Buckley and Jacobi Jupe

*

Existence. Mother. The natural world. Sacrifices made for Love. How differently grief is experienced. The inevitable suffering and joy of the human condition. The dichotomy of life. To dream, to be, to live, to create, to hurt, to heal, to die, to be reborn, to live again... 

At its heart, Hamnet is a deeply emotive exploration of the enduring question: to be or not to be.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to
[…] 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

The Perfect Neighbor

Rest in Peace Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens

A novel form of documentary filmmaking. “The tragedy plays like a grim miniature of American life, shaped by fear, suspicion, and easy access to violence.” Jessica Winter, The New Yorker 

The Alabama Solution

Directed by Andrew Jarecki & Charlotte Kaufman
Featuring: Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, Sandy Ray...

The prison system in Alabama functions as a prison industrial complex, using taxpayer money to build and maintain a network of facilities that perpetuate involuntary labor, inhumane conditions, and systemic abuse. Parole denials and punitive retaliation ensure continued exploitation, while deaths and violence occur with minimal oversight. This system fosters black-market economies within prisons, contributes to the ongoing drug crisis, and continues to expand beyond state lines with the rapid expansion of ICE. Its corruption is rooted in entrenched racism and prioritizing profit and institutional growth over human life, safety, and rehabilitation.

The Apprentice

A portrait of moral erosion that extends beyond individual corruption into the system itself, showing how the relentless pursuit of power can ultimately dismantle the foundations of democracy. A horror story that reflects the American tragedy unfolding before our eyes.

Weapons

 written & directed by Zach Cregger

A classroom absent of students. How haunting an intrusion can be. In its allegory, the film carries real-world weight, invoking the terror of destructive forces invading spaces meant to be safe. It's a wild ride and a cautionary meditation on guarding our children and our homes, both physically and spiritually. 

THE LOST CHILDREN

 "The measure of our humanity is found in how we stand together to care for the youngest among us, whose well-being holds the hope of a better tomorrow." - J.A.

Tell Me Everything

 By Elizabeth Strout

"Love is Listening,
Listening is Love." 

- T.

Ghostlight

 

written and co-directed by: Kelly O'Sullivan

Goodness & the Individual

“The theme [in “Lord of the Flies”] is an attempt to trace the defects of society to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable."

—William Golding

Society of the Snow

Numa Turcatti: Don't lose faith.

Arturo Nogueira: I have more faith than I ever had in my whole life.

Numa Turcatti: What, are you an altar boy now?

Arturo Nogueira: Don't laugh at me. But my faith—sorry, Numa—isn't in your god. Because that god tells me what I'm supposed to do at home. But he doesn't tell me what to do on the mountain. What's happening here is a completely different situation. Numa. This is my heaven. I believe in another god. I believe in the god that Roberto keeps inside his head when he comes to heal each of my wounds. In the god that Nando keeps in his legs and that lets him continue walking no matter what. I believe in Daniel's hands when he cuts the meat. And Fito, when he gives it to us without saying which of our friends it belonged to. That way, we can eat it without... without having to remember their faces. That's the god I believe in.

 

The Second Tree from The Corner

 "Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted.  “What do you want”” he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep formless enduring and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the bars, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of their glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it.  

Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of those things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor’s office would fall flat on his face.

Trexler felt invigorated.  Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,” he said answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away."

—E.B. White 

The Swimmers

 

Directed & Screenplay by Sally El-Hosaini

based on the true story of sisters, Sara and Yusra Mardini

TÁR

 

“But there are other kinds of plagues that visit us […]power, true power."

Directed, Produced, Edited by Todd Field, Starring Cate Blanchett

THE WHALE

 "People are incapable of not caring."

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Starring Brendan Fraser

Tobias Wolff

The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is. 

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

 

DUNE

Jamis: The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve…but a reality to experience. A process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it. [Ghostly voice: Let go.]

Based on Dune by Frank Herbert / Directed by Denis Villeneuve / Screenplay by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, Eric Roth

Produced by Mary Parent, Denis Villeneuve, Cale Boyter, Joe Caracciolo Jr.

Starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac

Cinematography Greig Fraser

Edited by Joe Walker

Music by Hans Zimmer

Production companies Legendary Pictures

What the Thunder Said

                                    I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Tree

Trees and their indifferent majesty [...] teaches us how [insignificant we are] and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.

- Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of a Hedgehog