310 Blog Post 3- A Monster Calls

            When I was twelve, my dad got sick. They promised me that he was probably going to be fine. They said, “If you’re gonna get cancer, this is the kind you want to get.” I don’t remember if that was comforting at the time. I do remember that it never felt quite real. I remember being upset that it was disrupting my family’s lives, and I remember feeling guilty for that. I remember crying to a friend because I knew both of my parents would be missing yet another of my events so my dad could get treatment. I remember being a child and feeling like I wasn’t allowed to just be a child anymore.

            When I was eighteen, long after the cancer had been taken out, grown back, been beaten back again, and largely faded into the background of our lives, Dad got sick again. It was worse this time, a raging infection that made him angry and delirious and very much not the man I knew. We finally realized something was really wrong shortly after my birthday, when he and I were home alone one day. He started slurring his speech and couldn’t remember the cat’s name. I called my mom in tears, begging her to come home.

            I felt horrible. I was eighteen, and I knew in the deepest part of me that I should have been able to handle it. Should have been able to be there for my mom while she was busy being there for him. Should have been able to go to the hospital and sit by his bedside without sobbing.

            More than the guilt over what I should have done, though, was the guilt over what I wished for. Secretly, in the darkest parts of the night, in the long, awful nights when my mom was at the hospital and my brother was too withdrawn and angry to speak to anyone, I wished it would be over. I wished I could stop living on the razor’s edge, afraid of every text during a school day, afraid that I would get the call that he’d died while I was sitting in Physics, too distraught to pay attention. I wished he would just go.

            That’s what A Monster Calls got so very, very right. Young children grieve, but they don’t understand grief. They don’t understand all the rules that they’re breaking by doing so. Adolescents do. Kids Connor’s age—kids my age, when I went through it—are old enough that society has already told them they’re supposed to be strong. That they have an obligation to be there for someone who’s sick, to pick up the slack when families are strained by tragedy, especially when that tragedy happens in slow motion. And maybe that’s good, in some ways. Maybe teenagers need to learn that sometimes you have to put others first even if it hurts you. But the thing about being a teenager is that you don’t know where the limits are supposed to be. You don’t understand that everyone has a breaking point, and so you think that when you reach yours it’s because you’ve failed. Matthew Tennyson did an incredible job of capturing that teenage vulnerability in his performance. He fluctuates from a competent, responsible young man who takes good care of his mother to a child plagued by incomprehensible nightmares to an achingly lonely boy who would rather face a bully’s violence than his own tangled emotions.

            It’s not just Tennyson who clearly understands adolescent grief, though. That sensitivity was woven through every aspect of this production, from the visual metaphor of ropes that feel as though they might just as easily hang Connor as help him to climb, to Stuart Goodwin’s monster, who is equally terrifying and nurturing. Even the device of having the ensemble act as silent, unseen helpers for Connor in his morning routine felt meaningful to me. The biggest thing I learned when my dad was sick? People really do want to help, even if you can’t see it.

            In the end, my dad survived, but there was a long, long time when we thought he wouldn’t. And I wish I’d read A Monster Calls when I was a kid. I wish I’d been able to look back and remember a monster willing to acknowledge that he is far from the scariest thing in the life of a boy with a dying mother. I wish I’d been able to look back and remember a monster who told that boy that it’s ok to wish for things to be over. That it doesn’t make you a villain. That it doesn’t make things your fault. That letting go is only human.