Booker's monologue really worked for me in terms of getting across the horror of the situation. "And they will tell you that you don't love them, that your love is weak or selfish. And you will never forget the hate and despair in their eyes."
It's true that if Booker had been sixty or eighty and aging normally, he still might have outlived a son who died of cancer in his forties. But three major differences that stood out to me watching that scene:
1) If Booker had been mortal, he would have lived with the memory of his family's death and the ugliness of their goodbyes for a finite amount of time and known that he would only have to bear the pain of it for a finite amount of time. Depending on his religious beliefs, he may have also have had hope of being reunited with them someday.
2) While people often blame their loved ones for not being able to save them or someone else, there is more room for forgiveness and accepting the eventuality of death in a world where death is an absolute. When you open the door not just to the possibility of living a few more years or decades but to eternal health and youth, that fundamentally changes how desperate a person might become. Not everyone makes peace with death, but it's easier to when it's a question of "when" and not "if".
3) Booker may not have known how to save his son, but he also doesn't know for certain that there wasn't a way. He doesn't know why he is the way he is, and the others are too small a sample size to really guess beyond thinking it likely has to do with dying in wartime - but war is a common enough cause of death that who can be sure? For all he knows, there is something he could have done to make sure his son came back to life like he did. And not only does he have eternity in front of him to think about what that might have been, but he's also living long enough to learn about all the medical ways his son's life might have been prolonged or his suffering reduced. It has to make for a profound sense of helplessness, one compounded by the fact that he doesn't even have the basic control of knowing that he could end his own life.
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Date: 2020-09-06 04:05 am (UTC)It's true that if Booker had been sixty or eighty and aging normally, he still might have outlived a son who died of cancer in his forties. But three major differences that stood out to me watching that scene:
1) If Booker had been mortal, he would have lived with the memory of his family's death and the ugliness of their goodbyes for a finite amount of time and known that he would only have to bear the pain of it for a finite amount of time. Depending on his religious beliefs, he may have also have had hope of being reunited with them someday.
2) While people often blame their loved ones for not being able to save them or someone else, there is more room for forgiveness and accepting the eventuality of death in a world where death is an absolute. When you open the door not just to the possibility of living a few more years or decades but to eternal health and youth, that fundamentally changes how desperate a person might become. Not everyone makes peace with death, but it's easier to when it's a question of "when" and not "if".
3) Booker may not have known how to save his son, but he also doesn't know for certain that there wasn't a way. He doesn't know why he is the way he is, and the others are too small a sample size to really guess beyond thinking it likely has to do with dying in wartime - but war is a common enough cause of death that who can be sure? For all he knows, there is something he could have done to make sure his son came back to life like he did. And not only does he have eternity in front of him to think about what that might have been, but he's also living long enough to learn about all the medical ways his son's life might have been prolonged or his suffering reduced. It has to make for a profound sense of helplessness, one compounded by the fact that he doesn't even have the basic control of knowing that he could end his own life.