A Conversation About Grieving with Director Shawn Snyder
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4 min readThe director of new feature film "To Dust" shares insights on death and grieving.
I talked to Shawn Snyder, director and co-writer of the new feature film "To Dust," about making the movie, grieving for his mother, and much more. I wanted to share some of his thoughts, because he had some great insights on death and grieving. Here's what Snyder had to say…
On the Jewish timeline for mourning
I come from a Reformed Jewish background, which certainly isn't a Hasidic background, and yet there is this baked-in approach to grief. It's timelines and guideposts. And I've always found this Jewish way of grief and mourning to be incredibly profound. While it's ancient, it's incredibly intuitive in terms of a psychological understanding of grief. It's very life-affirming in the face of loss, and it sort of understands that there needs to be this allowed-for period of extreme externalized grief before it tries to guide the mourner back to the land of the living.
There's this period called aninut. It's in the 24 hours between death and burial, where there is this understanding that you are not held responsible for your feelings, your actions, that you don't have to follow any of the rules of Judaism. You can't do the things that you're not allowed to do, but you don't have to do the things that you're usually required to do. And it's this understanding that, like, you are in another place, you're disembodied.
On how grief evolves
You know, my grief persists 10 years on, and it's not something that I feel strange about. I don't feel depressive. I don't want to repress it, or purge it, or exorcise it. It's something that I appreciate, the way in which it evolves and stays with me, insofar as that helps keeps my relationship to my mom evolving in its own way, and it keeps my own existential compass pointed in the right direction.
find our own way through, and our own personal meaning, in the cycle that demands that we keep going without the people who we love.
On wanting to understand how the decomposition process works
I've never really felt comfort at my mom's grave. I've only ever been aware of the biological entity that was once my mom. And it's not where I find her. I've probably visited five times in 10 years and I just always feel awkward.
In the aftermath of her passing, I had these very human thoughts, that I think that we all have. They're dark, and they're macabre, and they're morbid, and they're obsessive. They're sort of, you know, your imagination unleashed because we don't understand what happens to a body.
[You're not supposed to talk about that, but] if you admit to those thoughts, especially from the depths of grief, everybody just tends to say, "No, you don't need to think about that now." You're just discouraged from those thoughts, and so you feel very alone in them, and you feel very strange, and you repress them, as I repressed them. And when you repress things, they just come back with a vengeance.
I don't think, as individuals, and as a culture, and as a society, that we have a very healthy relationship with death. I don't know what that actually looks like, but I know that ours isn't. We individually and we societally repress it. Even religions that want to sort of look at it honestly, like this idea from dust to dust is a very poetic way of masking over the gruesome mechanisms through which that happens.
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