Songs of the Week: Remembering and Letting Go

It wasn't all that long ago that Heath Ledger made a lasting impression, if on no one else, on many a gay man who very much understood what went on in his creation of Ennis. There isn't much that one can impart if what he captured then and there was not absorbed by the observer. Still it is universal in that what this young man who was all of twenty-five at the time was able to express.

So we'll re-post Brian's heartfelt reflection on Brokeback Mountain as a way to bid farewell to Mr. Ledger. He was more than Ennis Del Mar, but it was his creation of Ennis that brought many of us into his ambit. It is difficult to let him go, but we must as all things must pass. Hence, the songs you hear this week.


I consider myself a logical, analytical person. I approach life in a reasoned manner, assuming that, no matter what happens, I can separate the wheat from the chaff, separate what's real from what my emotions want me to believe is real.

But as it happens logic sometimes doesn't serve; sometimes only deeply-felt emotion will do. And that's the way it is with Brokeback Mountain. So rather than this being a film review, an analysis of themes, a comparison of strengths and weaknesses, it's a very personal gathering together of feelings.

In the last fifty years I've probably only cried five or six times and of those, perhaps only 2 or 3 in public. Credit, or blame, my Irish-Canadian WASP heritage and maybe the era in which I grew up, but men aren't supposed to cry, so tears do not come easily.

A death, a personal loss or some rare convergence of event and memory that tripped an emotional trigger – that's it. Otherwise I'm the rock that other people lean on, the person they come to when they want to share their innermost pain. I sympathise, I empathise, but they know I won't cry with them and that's what they want.

And yet, today . . .

Today I bawled my eyes out in a movie theatre. I managed not to cry on the subway, but I cried in the car on the way home. I cried as I started to write this. It makes no sense, it's only a film. A story told by two-dimensional characters on a screen. Nothing more than moving pictures on a wall.

And yet, today . . .

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal make the pain and longing, the frustration and helplessness, the brief days of joy and the unbearable months of separation, so immediate, so heartfelt that Ennis and Jack and the lives they lead take on an intense reality such as I have never experienced in a film before.

They come alive only when they are with each other. In existences stifled by convention and boxed in by fear, they must always hide an essential part of who they are - except from one another. Apart, they are generally detached, almost preoccupied. Following their separated lives is like seeing them through a camera that is always slightly out of focus. When they are with each other, they become whole. And eventually they are, as Annie Proulx wrote of the two shirts Ennis found in Jack's closet, "…the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one."

I cried for all kinds of reasons.

I cried because of the lives that were wasted, because Jack died, because all Ennis had was a couple of old shirts and a postcard, because they never got to say goodbye, because they could never be together, because neither got the one thing in life they deserved – to share every day with each other.

I cried because loving someone isn't always enough, because who we are, what others require us to be, can keep us from who we should be, because sometimes all we are left with is memories we can't share with anyone.

I cried because too many of us lead lives of quiet desperation, lives that we have made or that have been forced upon us, lives where we can only love in the wilderness, lives that drift and end unfulfilled, surrounded with regret.

And maybe I cried a little bit for myself. Because it reminded me that I too have a Brokeback Mountain in my past. That one person of whom I can think and say, "Maybe things would have been different, if only . . ."

Logically, I know this is just a story, that these are just fictional characters and, logically, I should be able to reject that it and they should have the power to do this to me. But as I said at the beginning, logic has nothing to do with it.


"I Will Never Let You Go" -- sung by Jackie Greene


When I feel that lonesome prairie wind
I let my soul get back to you again

And I will never let you, I will never let you,
I will never let you go

Even though this wasn't meant to be
It's gonna break my heart to watch you leave
But I will never let you, I will never let you,
I will never let you go

Why I'm feelin' so, so low
I will never let you, I will never let you,
I will never let you go

Why I'm feelin' so, so low,
I will never let you, I will never let you,
I will never let you go
Why I'm feelin' so, so low
I will never let you, I will never let you,
I will never let you go
I will never let you, I will never let you,
I will never let you go