Member-only story
What We Are Getting Wrong About Loss
And What Makes Us Human
One of my favourite movies is the Constant Gardener set in Kenya, released in 2005, a movie I used to watch every single day that year. I loved Tessa’s story, and since then, this has been one of my favourite names.
One of the most important parts of the movie is when Tessa is breastfeeding a black baby in the hospital after giving birth. She is white, and her partner, a British Diplomat, is also white, so it takes us a while to understand what happened. Later we learn that she lost her baby, and she is breastfeeding a motherless newborn.
The movie is not about this loss, but it’s this loss that is behind every decision Tessa makes further on the movie. It took me a long time to understand that, but a childless mother has nothing to lose; they have felt the most painful thing in the world, and everything else is just banal. If you haven’t watched this movie, I recommend it.
Yesterday, I was watching a video on Dodo’s Youtube Channel, a channel that helped me to keep motivated during the worst months of 2020, and that sometimes now I watch a video or two. The video was about a dog that lost all her puppies during birth, and like any mother, human or animal, she needed “to mother” to have a reason to be alive. To help this dog, they bring baby cats that lost their…
