Ode to Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman died two days after my pregnancy was terminated. It was Super Bowl Sunday. I was standing in the bathroom, still high on pain medication from my operation, and my husband had opened the laptop in the living room to find the news of his death announced to the world, amidst all this excitement about football and food. My husband said some kind of “oh no” that alerted me to the fact that something was wrong and I had no patience to find out what it was, seeing as I had just weeks before sat in an ultrasound room, wherein the technician left us and returned with a doctor, just as we had confirmed that our son’s name would be Clark, just as we started talking about camping and Star Wars and all of the things we would teach him, wherein the doctor handed me a box of Kleenex and said, “Oh God, this is so hard” and started crying before she could even spit out the news. I had the feeling that nothing could surprise me since the worst had already happened, but if something was wrong I needed to know and I needed to know immediately.

I sat on the sofa and Robert held me as I sobbed. I was wearing a dark purple dress with gold buttons, a maternity dress that had reminded me of something Princess Diana might have worn in the 80’s. I had purchased it at the Salvation Army anticipating a growing baby, and although the baby was gone, I had worn it that morning to church. Although it sounds narcissistic for me to say it out loud, somehow losing my child and my favorite actor within days of each other felt like a personal attack, a cruel joke, that the universe was out to get me, and although I’d known many who claimed to love Philip Seymour Hoffman, I didn’t believe anyone could possibly love him like I did.

I was a late bloomer, and it took me a long time before I really started appreciating good film. All of my celebrity crushes were the typical pretty boys like Chris O’Donnell (when he married Caroline Fentress in 1997, I was a sophomore in high school and I remember reading about it in a newspaper at an airport in California and crying because my chances were over). I came from that special time in the 1990’s when Jared Leto’s blue, blue eyes first appeared on My So Called Life and Leonardo DiCaprio’s face was posted on the bedroom wall of every girl I knew. It was later, after college, after living in Seattle, when I started writing seriously and looking to everything around me, that I really allowed myself to enter completely into a film and let it actually break my heart. It was around this time when I watched all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, and started seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman everywhere. I was living in Idaho when the movie Doubt was released in theaters, and went to see it with a good friend of mine whose voice actually sounds like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s, which was one of the reasons I wanted to befriend him in the first place. I was in a poetry workshop with him and I knew nothing about poetry, but my heart stopped when I first heard him read a poem because I felt like I already knew him. When Philip Seymour Hoffman spoke onscreen, it was always a freezing of time and space moment for me. There was something beautiful and complicated about him, something I felt I understood in my soul, and although it’s ridiculous to feel like we know celebrities on a personal level, and impossible to imagine they could know us, I always found myself waiting with bated breath for his next film to come and save me.

I dreaded that moment at the Academy Awards (the show aired exactly one month after Philip Seymour Hoffman's death) where they pay homage to celebrities lost. As the faces scanned slow and painful on the screen, his was the final one, as I knew it would be. There was also a tribute to Judy Garland and The Wizard of Oz, and while cherished scenes from the movie and that legendary yellow brick road rolled, and that perfect rose of a nose of the young Judy Garland appeared, I started crying and couldn’t stop, and I didn’t know why until the next morning when my mother and I met for coffee, and she told me she had cried while watching the Judy Garland tribute because during our time in Seattle for my hospital visits, she had heard Somewhere Over the Rainbow playing in a drugstore and it had reminded her of Clark. It will forevermore be the song that reminds me of the baby I lost, and of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and as a human on this earth I know the possibilities of the afterlife are infinite and there is no way for my mind to comprehend what may or may not be, but it gives me some peace to imagine they’ve somehow met up there, and I just have to wait a little bit longer.

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow why oh why can’t I?