I want to take a moment to briefly talk about the four movies that have most helped me process my dad's death.

Probably surprising nobody, Father's Day is not a fun day for me. My dad died because of a car accident in November 2016. He was not old. He turned 43 while he was comatose in the hospital as doctors tried to save his life.

My father is someone who cared for his family very much. There was not a day that went by that he didn't do his best to take care of us. I know that I am profoundly lucky to have had a father like that, when so many don't.

My father was also the most charismatic person in the world. He could make friends with literally anyone. He was a hotel manager, so this was a valuable skill. I, on the other hand, have struggled with being social my entire life.

My autism is something my father didn't understand at first, but after my diagnosis, he did everything he could to learn about it and help me with any issue I had. It troubled him that he sometimes had difficulty relating to his son.

But the way we always related was movies.

My dad loved movies. He took me to the theatre from the time I was a baby, and apparently, it was the best way to get me to be quiet. Something about the lights on screen got me to be still and just stare at the movie in awe, even if I had no clue what was happening.

Watching movies with my dad became not only one of the best ways for us to spend time together, but one of the best ways for us to understand each other. To empathize via a shared experience of watching a story and seeing how it reflected our own lives.

I remember him telling me that whenever I watched The Lion King as a child, I would go over to him and gently push him whenever I got to Mufasa's death, the same as Simba did.

My father's death was not expected. There was no warning. He was simply driving to work one morning and then we got a call that he had been hit by a truck. I don't remember the last words I said to him.

But I did remember that there were certain movies he was highly anticipating, movies we intended to see together and now couldn't. The first of these was Rogue One.

Star Wars was one of the father's favourite things. He was incredibly excited for the new era of Star Wars movies. He had loved The Force Awakens, and so Rogue One was right at the top of his list.

It was the first Star Wars movie I saw without him.

Rogue One was released only a little over a month after his death. I was still emotionally devastated. I still wasn't even sure that what was happening was real.

I was lost without him. I didn't know what to do. I was starting to become convinced I would never recover, that I would never accomplish the great things he told me I would.

But then I watched Jyn Erso stare at the incoming explosion on the beaches of Scarif, knowing that she was going to die, that she brought hope to a galaxy she would never see again. And in that moment, Cassian looks to her and says:

"Your father would have been proud of you."

It was a moment of startling clarity for me, even if I watched it through blubbering eyes.

That I would be able to go on, to make something of my life, even if I was heartbroken that my father wasn't here to witness it personally.

About a year after his death, I was scrolling through Netflix and stumbled upon a movie called The Meddler. I had seen (and really liked) Lorene Scafaria's previous film, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, so I decided to throw it on.

It's not exactly a direct analogue to my situation. It primarily concerns a widow, Marnie, and her strained relationship with daughter Lori sometime after the death of her husband.

Even though the film is primarily from Marnie's POV, I found myself seeing a lot of my personal relationship with my mother after dad's death in the story. How the grief isn't so much on the surface but the underlying force behind these weirdly comical moments between them.

It made me see how often we had days where we didn't talk about it. Days we could feel normal, maybe even happy. It was a reminder that I didn't always have to sad when I thought of him.

A reminder that I could still have good days.

I live fairly close to Toronto, so I go to TIFF every September. Last year, I went to the red carpet premiere for The Aeronauts, and it wound up having an unexpected impact on me.

(I'm not sure why multiple Felicity Jones movies wound up being therapy for me, but here we are)

The film is mostly centered around a hot air balloon trip with real life meteorologist James Glaisher and fictional pilot Amelia Wren. They are attempting to break the world record for a balloon's altitude so James can gather data to prove that weather can be predicted.

Amelia's backstory involves having originally gone on a previous balloon trip with her husband Pierre. When they were caught in a storm, Pierre sacrificed himself so the balloon had less weight, saving Amelia's life.

There was nothing Amelia could have done to save him. It was a freak accident and nothing more. But the incident haunts her, and it's something that had me thinking about my own "hypotheticals" in regards to my dad's death.

"If I had just called him that morning, would he have been delayed a couple minutes?"

"If I had pulled in some extra money, would he have not had to take that job a bit farther from home?"

Those types of questions.
The questions that don't have answers.

When they go too high, she has to climb to the top of the balloon and manually break open a frozen flap, or else they will freeze to death. Watching Amelia do this despite her initial hesitation to pilot again at all reminded me so much of my fear of driving since dad's accident.

She now has someone else's life in her hands, and this time, she is able to save them both by focusing on what she can control.

It made me realize that I can't ever answer those hypothetical questions, but I don't have to stop living because of them.

Far more recently, only a few weeks ago, I revisited a movie that unlike everything else on this list, is one that I had actually seen with Dad a long time ago: The Last of the Mohicans.

I didn't remember a lot of it. It was probably somewhere around 15 years ago when I first saw it with him. But even from that first watch, something always stood out in my mind: his reaction to the ending.