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Last week, I reviewed a re-imagining of A Christmas Carol, The Afterlife of Holly Chase by Cynthia Hand. Tina liked the novella Seascraper by Benjamin Wood, set in Northern England of the 1960s.

Goodbye June, Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, had a limited release in US and UK theaters on December 12 and was released on Netflix on Christmas Eve.

This is the story of a dying matriarch surrounded by her dysfunctional family during the Christmas season.

I was excited to watch Goodbye June on Christmas Eve and post a review for British Isles Friday less than forty-eight hours later. That was a good plan, but I usually only write posts about shows and books that I like. Oops.

There are good reasons to watch Goodbye June. The actors are stars because they are always worth watching. Helen Mirren is the dying matriarch. Kate Winslet, as well as directing, played the daughter who was responsible for everything. Toni Colette played the daughter who was responsible for nothing. Timothy Spall was the bumbling husband.

In the end, though, we both agreed that the movie was predictable.

Worse than that, for me, was that it was a predictable movie about beautiful people experiencing a beautiful death. I’ve come to believe that these stories are a disservice to humanity.

I’ve experienced death up close and in person a few times. It isn’t like the movies. It comes fast, in the end, even when it’s expected. Sometimes it comes fast and is completely unexpected.

There isn’t time to orchestrate reconciliations. Sometimes relationships are too broken for reconciliation to be possible or healthy.

The dying person can be consumed with fear or anger or pain or be medicated to forestall those things.

We humans don’t say the right things at the right time. That is, we don’t do that unless we have a script.

That’s where I think movies about dying let us down. They make it look like we will know what to say and how to say it and who to say it to. They make it look like we will be aware enough and brave enough to do that when the right moment arrives, which (in the movies) it inevitably does.

The beautiful scenes surrounding death are possible in a movie because someone planned the plot and someone found the perfect location and someone designed the lighting and someone directed the action and someone delivered the dialogue.

I have experienced resentment and disappointment at death. I realized, only later, that it was because it doesn’t look like the movies.

I have another experience with life not imitating the movies. I became a cancer survivor at age 23. I felt a constant pressure to act out the experience in the ways of all the stories I had read or seen about young people encountering a deadly disease. I failed to live up to those stories. That failure increased the stress of a scary time.

So, I decided to write about Goodbye June, after all. We humans can serve each other by accepting the messiness of life and death, by normalizing what is normal instead of what is shown in scripted stories.

Every single one of us will succeed at dying. I want to quit expecting death to do things that it doesn’t do. Whether it’s my death or someone else’s, I don’t want those days to carry a sense of failure that it didn’t turn out like the movies. I want to expect a lot less of myself or others and simply accept the experience as it unfolds.