- A family finally comes to terms with the grief over their son's suicide 25 years earlier.
- What would happen if you couldnt save someone you loved, no matter how hard you tried? How would you live with knowing that? How would you mourn their loss?
JAMIE was only 16 years old when he took an overdose of pills and stepped off the end of the dock at his familys summer home. No explanation could explain the terrible choice he made. Like the path of a stone, fiercely thrown, his death damaged all that it touched. A family history forever shattered into before and after. Those left behind- his mother PEG, 40s, his father ROBERT, 40s and his sister SHELLY, 19.
Now, 25 years after Jamies death, SHELLY, 45- is a successful doctor and a good single mother to her 16-year-old son NOAH, finally returns to the familys summer home to help Peg recover from minor heart surgery. Although Peg has come to terms with her grief over her son, the years have not brought closure for Shelly or her father, Robert. Both believe that they were to blame for Jamies death. Unable to witness the others grief, father and daughter once close, became estranged. Peg hopes her daughters visit will bring Robert and Shelly finally back together again.
When she arrives at the house at dawn, Shelly is flooded with memories both imagined and true. Like ghosts on fire they come back to her burning her skin-- the price paid for leaving grief unexamined and unresolved. Her presence conjures up Jamies ghost. He is everywhere. On a swing by the lake, in the corner of an old tram they played in as kids, in the feel of the rocks he once collected, left behind on a shelf in his room. Photographs, home movies, sound and even touch trigger memories and flashbacks that move the story of what happened forward in time revealing all that led up to the moment of Jamies death.
THOSE LEFT BEHIND is the story of a family confronting the hard work of mourning with the courage required to face the jagged edge of grief. To be sure this is a story about loss and the price that is paid. But it is also a story about how we move forward from that loss, when we finally accept that we cannot change what has happened. At the heart of THOSE LEFT BEHIND is the question: What would you do with the past, once you have rediscovered it?
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