Grief. Unavoidable. Unbearable. It goes straight to our core as people, and is impossible to ignore when it rears its ugly head. Everyone thinks they have an answer, and yet when it comes for you, you find absolutely no answer will suffice especially when it comes to something truly unimaginable like suicide.

“A Song to Pass the Time” is a film about the early stages of grief in the face of a suicide, those despondent, lonely days in which questions run through one’s mind like a never ending line of train cars. What more could I have done? What could I have said? If I could only have more time. We say these lines to ourselves over and over again when facing unexplainable loss and yet never get the response we desire. It is as if we are screaming into a long, dark tunnel, only to hear the answer be the echo of our own voice.

But we must continue on. That’s the rub. But how do we? Grief brings up much in the lives of the survivors, and arguably the question it brings up the most is, how am I living my life? There is no better reminder of our own mortality than the death of a loved one, especially when that death seemingly comes from out of nowhere. We are left with another series of questions: where to now? Am I doing things right? What is the best way to live this fragile, short life? Especially when it feels like absolutely nothing makes sense anymore.

These problems race through the mind of our leading character Elizabeth Wallace like a hurricane. Her beloved Grandmother has just committed suicide leaving Elizabeth questioning everything, feeling a paralyzing indecision, combined with a desperate drive for answers, any answer. She finds that her Grandmother’s death, and the following grief make for a potent catalyst that knocks her out of her comfortable life and into a place of uncertainty that she has never quite found before in her perfectly organized life. She begins to act out, engaging in a relationship with a young man as the form of an emotional band aid. She is lost and it all begins from a place of grief.

Grief reveals truth in people, because grief is one of the few emotions that can break the flood dams of our emotional soul. All comes out in those moments of truth. It becomes a raw wound that simply will not heal, and much like the stain that Elizabeth continues to work to remove from her Grandmother’s sun porch, the wound may fade, but when it truly matters, well, it will never heal. And with that understanding, the question becomes, how do we continue to move forward in the face of a world willing to hurt us this badly?

“A Song to Pass the Time” will attempt to address these questions through the actions of one young woman in the midst of one of the pivotal moments of her life. She will try things, be reckless with her heart and others, and in the end, still be forced to face her pain and herself. It is both an extremely personal story and a universal one because everyone tries to keep things for as long as possible. We even convince ourselves at times that we will live forever. What Elizabeth finds is that she will not, and what follows is her processing that unavoidable, tragic fact.