The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss

by Mary-Frances O'Connor

In the 1993 movie Fearless, Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez portray strangers who survive an airplane crash. Both of their lives unravel as they grapple with what it means to have survived. One night as they sit in his car, Perez reveals that she believes she killed her infant son by letting go of him during the crash. Bridges responds initially with utter frustration. When she completely comes apart, sobbing and praying to the Virgin Mary for forgiveness, Bridges is overwhelmed with what it must be like to believe what she believes, to feel like the murderer of the child given to you to protect. He gets out of the car, and with unclear intentions, tells Perez to get in the backseat and buckles her seatbelt. From the trunk, he retrieves an oblong, rusty toolbox and puts it in Perez’s arms, telling her to hold on to it and that it is her baby. In what might be a suicide attempt, Bridges gets behind the wheel and drives them through an empty alley toward a concrete wall, with the speedometer ticking upward. He tells Perez this is her chance to hold on tight, to save her baby. Completely immersed in the scene that resembles the plane crash, she kisses the toolbox. The speeding car crashes into the wall, and the rusty orange toolbox flies like a rocket through the front windshield of the car and into the cinderblock wall, its steel metal crumpling. For Perez, it is immediately and palpably clear that there was no way she could ever have held on to her baby, no way she could have ...