After seven years, I found myself back in the heart of the Midwest last December, battling the daily ruthlessness of winter. I had somehow forgotten how the sky would turn pitch black by 5pm, how the black ice would form on unsuspecting roads, and how the unpredictability of weather could mean a blizzard that could shut down the city for days if we were shown no mercy. I worked in an office with lots of tall windows where I could gauge the day by light. If I hadn’t, I could’ve lived sun up to sun down without seeing the light outside of my lunch break—and that’s assuming it wasn’t cloudy and gray that day. I found myself, once again, marveling at the heartiness of Midwesterners who build their lives in a place where they are subjected to blizzards, tornados, floods, and heatwaves. The Midwest is a place that actively doesn’t want its inhabitants to comfortably make a home. I’m not sure the scientific reason for its extremities, but I do know why people stay and so often move back: their family is here.
Last December, my relationship was dissolving in Texas while my life was also imploding in Kansas City, where my father was dying of stage 4 brain cancer (glioblastoma). I didn’t know it then, but I was about to lose—and very quickly— the two men in the world I loved most and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t know that two months to the day after I pulled into my parent’s driveway, I would be holding my dad’s hand as he passed away in a coma, in a hospital bed on the seventh floor of KU Medical Center, surrounded by family and friends that adored him. And I certainly would’ve never predicted that the man I loved would lose his own father two weeks later. It’s the stuff of fiction of the worst kind, nearly comical in its cruelty.
Last night, I revisited Winter’s Bone for the first time since I had seen it in theaters back in 2010. At the time, I was attending the University of Central Missouri and had recently finished reading the book by Daniel Woodrell on which the movie is based. Woodrell was supposed to come to campus to talk about the book prior to the movie premiere, but when he caught word that a university reporter had mislabeled him as a “crime writer” he canceled the visit in light of the perceived slight. I remember I was pretty indignant about how it all went down, but now I know how many writers would cancel any public appearance for less—especially those that hate the limelight but love the work of writing.
Winter’s Bone is about an Ozark family that is trying to survive not only the harsh elements and scarcity of resources, but also a difficult social climate in which dangerous, powerful families like the Miltons can cause others to disappear without a trace. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is left to fend for her ill mother and two younger siblings (Sonny and Ashley) when her father, Jessup Dolly, an infamous local meth cook, goes missing. Her troubles double, though, when Ree is informed by a police officer that Jessup had posted the house for bail prior to his disappearance. If Jessup didn’t turn up soon, the Dollys would lose the house to the court. In order to keep her family together and maintain rights to the house, Ree must break her silence and the rules to go looking for the truth.
In hindsight, Winter’s Bone is a cultural signifier of the opioid crisis that we now face. With nearly every adult Ree encounters, she’s offered some sort of drug. And while never explicit in the film, Ree’s own mother seems to have her own complicated relationship with medication. The film also symbolizes the rural, poor sections of white America that felt overlooked by Democrats and would look to Trump for help during the 2016 election. Ree is unable to attain opportunities normally offered to those who need a way out of a small town. This seems especially poignant in a scene where Ree meets with the army recruiter at her high school but is ineligible to sign up because she’s a minor without parental permission. Without the military, without money, and without family, Ree must venture into the dark underbelly of the backwoods to find the truth to save her home.
The truth, as it turns out, would come in the form of the hardened, older matriarch of the Milton clan, Merab. During Ree and Merab’s first encounter, Merab asks:
“Ain’t you got no men who could do this?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t,” Ree replies.
In that moment, Merab realizes just how desperate Ree, who she often refers to as “child,” must be for her to show up at her door without anyone’s protection. While feminism may have become a major part of the mainstream, in certain parts of backwoods America the patriarchal structure of the traditional family is still law. In certain parts of America, family clan mentality still exists. In these areas, failure to fall in line can mean violence, and even death—especially for women, who always seems just moments away from a flying backhand throughout the film.
I considered myself to be a strong woman who could manage whatever happened to her. My father had raised me to be that woman. But the ripple effect of the grief dislodged me from my world and the ways I knew for navigating it. When my father died, my mother and I became more diligent about locking the front door. We changed the garage code. I offered to walk her to her car when it was dark whenever we were anywhere far from home. While my two younger brothers were healthy and alive elsewhere, we were without men now. And that was new to both of us. I had felt fairly invincible up until my 31st birthday, and now so much scared me. A new fear entered my life: there seemed no end to the bad things that could happen now. While my father wasn’t a large man, he was a passionate man. He could put the fear of God into anyone he felt had crossed a line, and he was fiercely protective of us. But now? Who knows what would lay in wait for us now that he was gone. I had mistaken my own exercise of freedom for courage, rather than realizing that it was my father’s presence—even from afar—that had always made my venturing safe (even if it was just in my head). One night, a few weeks after my father passed, a question came to me. What if my father’s passing was the beginning of tragedies, rather than the end? How would we shoulder that? Were there certain things you couldn’t come back from—and if so, was his death one of them? I have witnessed, firsthand, the ways certain experiences warp the core of a person, but I had never imagined it might happen to me. It feels rather melodramatic now—a year later—but in hindsight, the grief of losing my father completely and totally altered my reality.
If Winter’s Bone teaches anything, it’s how truly gritty survival is. Throughout the film, Ree teaches her younger siblings survival skills. The most poignant lesson comes in the form of the killing and cleaning a squirrel carcass. Ree is teaching Sonny how to clean the squirrel in order to cook and eat it. Once she slices the squirrel open, Ree tells Sonny, “Now get in there and get them guts out.” To which Sonny pauses and says, “I don’t want to.” Time seems to stop as Ree recognizes that unless she is able to coach Sonny through this moment of discomfort, he and his little sister may not be able to survive without her. She says slowly and firmly, “Sonny, there’s a bunch of stuff that you’re going to have to get over being scared of.”
Unbeknownst to Ree, this is a lesson that she would have to re-learn when Merab and her sister take her out on a boat to retrieve proof of her father’s death. For the first time in the entire film, Ree is gripped with fear—nearly catatonic—and is crying from what she is tasked to do: retrieve her father’s hands from his dead body. Retrieving her father’s fingerprints is the only way that Ree can show proof of his death without also revealing to the authorities, at her peril, the people that killed him. At the urging of Merab, Ree plunges her hands into the murky, cold water in order to find his body.
When she finds his hands, Merab says, “Here take this,” handing her a chainsaw.
Ree replies, “What?”
Merab: “Well how else are you gonna get his hands?”
Ree: “No.”
Merab: “Com’on, Child. Your daddy would want you do to this. Now here take the saw.”
At my father’s funeral, my best friend from childhood gifted me a framed photo that I had taken of my father’s hands in mine. His body was so bloated from the medicine that had kept him sedated and out of the wake of seizures, a byproduct of the cancer he battled. I wanted to be able to document his last days in a way that felt tasteful and non-invasive. I posted the photo on Instagram after he had passed. It felt important to not look away from him or his pain in the midst of his final days. Taking a picture of his hands made the most sense. I was surprised and comforted to see my own photo in the frame.
“Your daddy would want you to do this.”
I live under the weight of that line now, in my own way. I wonder now if the dead ask more of us than the living, if only because they’re not here to always correct us when we’re wrong about what they would want. How would my father want his life commemorated? What should I do on the anniversary of his passing? How do we maintain his legacy? I have some educated guesses, but no concrete way of knowing. And yet, every time I write his name on the page, he is with me again, restored. I don’t know how else to keep him with me.
Perhaps, as I head into the new year, my father would prefer that I plunge my own hands into the murky waters of the unknown to find something new, and whole. It would require me to get over the new fears that have entered my life, to become something even more barbaric, but also truly brave.