Away from Her

no future, and which caused much harm to other people.
    Over the next few years, I kept coming back to “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” again and again. I couldn’t shake the sound of Grant and Fiona’s private jokes, the sinking, sick feeling ofGrant’s guilt, the absolute tenderness between two people who have and are in various ways failing each other and simultaneously doing everything they can. I couldn’t stop thinking about Fiona’s tender use of the word “forsaken” and how ironically and genuinely she says it to him. I couldn’t stop seeing Grant as he “skied around and around in the field behind the house as the sun went down and left the sky pink over a countryside that seemed to be bound by waves of blue-edged ice,” and the eloquent, wintry canvas that serves as the backdrop for their marriage and their loss and discovery of it. I had thought, when I’d finished reading it the first time, that with all of this fictional marriage’s failures, this was perhaps not the greatest love story I’d ever read, but the
only
love story I’d read. I made no connection between what David had said and my experience of the story, but it stayed with me in such a potent, visceral way, and despite the dust of melodrama I was kicking up around me in my own life, I couldn’t get free of its clarity.
    Something in me needed to live inside this story. I think now that it somehow lived in my subconscious for those years, and unhappy as I was in the life I had chosen for myself, I think it was my way of returning, again and again, to the idea of a life with David.
    All I knew then was that “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” had raised important questions for me, and I needed to take a good long walk around it and inside it to find out what exactly the natures of those questions were. The way I articulated all of that at the time was simply that I had to make a film out of it.
    At around this time, my grandmother’s health starting fading. She was finding that the day-to-day struggle of living alone was becoming too much for her, and as her memory began reforming itself, she began to forget basic facts of her own history, glom-ming onto passages and songs from a lifetime ago that had an elusive relevance she couldn’t finger. Once, as I sat with her at her kitchen table, looking out the high-rise window at the suburban streets below, she said, out of nowhere,
“I see the lights of the village gleam
through the rain and the mist
    And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me
that my soul cannot resist
    A feeling of sadness and longing,
that is not akin to pain
    But resembles sorrow only,
as the mist resembles the rain.”
    The look on her face as she recited this verse was one I’d never seen. I longed to know the time and thecontext in which she’d learned these lines. Whatever association she made with it seemed unfathomably sad and not of the present moment, but though her emotional memory of it was vivid, I think she was truthful when she answered that she didn’t know where it came from. This was the first moment that it occurred to me that the things you remember, not in words but in the very molecules that make up your being, can be more painful than the things that are forgotten. It’s something that I think is so beautifully illustrated in Alice Munro’s short story.
    As my grandmother’s health deteriorated, it became necessary to look for a retirement home for her to live in. It was a complicated process, and as we toured many institutions, I constantly heard the descriptions of Fiona’s retirement home, Meadow-lake, ringing in my ears. By the time she had settled in a facility I was well into the process of adapting the story and it became difficult to not be distracted by the details and idiosyncrasies of the institution itself, seeing Munro’s descriptions displayed before me, and adding details of my own. As I witnessed my reluctance to go and see her—knowing that I would likely leave with a depression hanging over me— I often thought of the line, “perhaps even the teenagers would be glad, one day, that they had come.”
    I’ve been walking around in this story for a long time now, and life has, of course, occurred in the interim. Some of it was inevitable, and other things I can’t help but feel were hugely influenced by my relationship to it.
    On the inevitable side, my grandmother—whose memory had faded to the point where I had to answer her questions about where her