Stand by me
A few nights ago you started to cry.
I jumped up.
.
What is it baby?
Is it the pain?
I asked.
.
I just
you said
I just want
you said
I just want to watch a film.
.
I just want to feel well enough
and awake enough
to watch a film
with you.
.
I just want to watch
Stand By Me
with you.
You’ve never seen it
and it’s my favourite film.
.
So tonight
I order us a pizza to share
and we watch Stand By Me.
.
As we do
I search for hidden meaning
clues that might reveal something about you as yet unknown to me.
.
Writing your character onto the story as mine was similarly authored at 9 by the movies of the 80s:
.
Superman.
The Three Musketeers.
Ferris Buellers Day Off .
.
Although
the more the film goes on
the more I think
maybe it’s just what I knew already:
you had a crush on River Phoenix.
.
As you did on Leonardo di Caprio.
Keanu Reeves.
Kurt Cobain.
.
These slightly wild
somewhat troubled
deeply soulful
beautifully handsome
young men.
.
Christian Slater.
George Perrin…
.
But then
A line strikes me:
.
CHRIS: I’m never gonna get out of this town am I, Gordie?
GORDIE: You can do anything you want, man.
.
I can imagine you thinking the same thing to yourself
growing up on the edge of Plymouth in the 80s and 90s:
Am I ever gonna get out of this town?
.
Later in the film
Chris has indeed got out of town
and becomes a lawyer.
.
And although you came to love it later
and probably enjoyed it more at the time than you would admit
like Chris
you got out too.
.
You blazed trails
broke down barriers
smashed ceilings
paved ways
lit beacons.
.
But in my interpretation
and
from what’s poured into my ears and eyes over the past few weeks and months
in the option of many others too
you’re not Chris in this story.
.
You’re Gordie.
.
Gordie believes in Chris
perhaps more than Chris believes
in himself.
.
And that belief
maybe just maybe
plants a seed in Chris’ head
that grows into possibility
and eventually
reality.
.
Gordie’s line echoes something I have heard a lot in the past days, weeks and months.
Your gift to the world
to the lives you have touched
is your ability
to believe in people.
.
They say it to me
and to you
again and again.
.
And I know its true
because I feel it too.
.
You see
I don’t believe in much,
as you know.
.
I prefer known quantities.
.
But I do believe
in the power of belief.
.
It makes mighty things possible.
Things that are often
in fact
imaginary.
.
Money.
Corporations
Father Christmas.
.
So
‘I believe in you’
are four of the most powerful words
you can say to another human being.
.
And the act of belief in itself
transforms you into someone who lives with possibility.
.
Believe is a verb.
A doing word.
.
Faith is real;
because it is an act.
.
An act you performed countless times.
Your gift.
One that you leave behind and that lives on
in so many of us.
.
At the end of the film
Chris tries to break up a fight in a restaurant
and is stabbed to death in the process.
.
A random act of destruction
that rips him from the world
too soon.
.
I close the laptop
and look at you.
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On Coping is my story of surviving on the sidelines of cancer. It begins in 2022 with On Coping #1, written the day after my 41st birthday. The day my wife Imogen, the mother of my three children, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. It’s the story of what happened next. Read from the start.