To Be or Not To Be—And Then What?
Week one of my sabbatical arrived with a small but significant milestone: I went to a movie alone. It may sound unremarkable, but in my early fifties it was a first. Over the past eighteen months, I’ve been collecting these quiet initiations into solitude—living alone for the first time, traveling for pleasure on my own, eating out solo. This matinee became another deliberate step forward.
I chose a film about Shakespeare and, spoiler alert, the death of his beloved son. As a former high school English teacher who spent years immersed in Shakespeare and British history, I knew what was coming. (That’s historical dramatic irony, for those keeping score.) What I didn’t know was how the story would be told, or how Shakespeare and his family would be rendered in a narrative built largely from imagination. The documented facts of Shakespeare’s life could fit on a single Post-it note, and yet here was an entire film inspired by one haunting absence: a child who died too soon. I knew I was walking into a tragedy.
Why choose something so devastating while on sabbatical? Because my soul knew there was more grief to tend. Not the sharp, crashing waves I’ve learned to recognize over the last two years, but something denser—residue settled deep at the bottom of the barrel. I’ve come to understand my own rhythms of grief well enough to name the hardest days “high-grieving days,” when the only faithful response is gentleness: rest, water, sunshine, movement, conversation, and above all, permission to feel what is there. Ride the wave. Don’t deny the ocean.
And yet, away from my usual routines, I sensed something still untouched—a place I hadn’t been able to reach, let alone release. A facilitator in my divorce recovery class had suggested this film as an unflinching portrayal of grief, and I found myself wondering whether the very thing I once taught—art of true literary merit—might once again do its ancient work. Shakespearean tragedy exists for a reason: catharsis. A purging of emotion through witnessing the unbearable truths of love, loss, and calamity. Could the Bard bring me home to myself?
So I went to a quiet matinee attended by only seven other souls and found myself riveted. Maggie O’Farrell’s source novel and Chloé Zhao’s direction reveal a profound understanding of Hamlet’s emotional core, weaving the play’s themes into the imagined interior life of Shakespeare’s family. While many have noted the historical echo between Hamnet’s death and the play Hamlet, this film breathes new life into that connection, honoring both the art and the human cost behind it.
The film also did exactly what Aristotle said tragedy should do. The hero of stature, the fatal flaw entwined with the hero’s greatest gift, the devastating loss, the banishment—emotional if not literal—and finally, catharsis. Shakespeare’s genius, his consuming devotion to language and creation, is portrayed as both gift and fracture. The death of his son and the rupture in his marriage follow, and the audience is left to reckon with the terrible beauty of it all. As Ram Dass wrote, we are invited to “learn to reverence the horrible beauty that is life.”
I knew the ending, and still I wept. Quietly, fiercely, five tissues deep, feeling it not only in my heart but in my body. The unbearable truth at the center of the story is one we all know: sometimes people do their absolute best and tragedy still strikes. Love does not always save us from loss. That is life in its rawest form.
The film turns, inevitably, to Hamlet’s most enduring question: To be, or not to be. When life becomes almost unendurable, do we continue or do we surrender to despair? Unlike the play, the film offers a more contemporary resolution. Though Hamlet faces death, Shakespeare and his wife choose life. No grand speech, just a shared, wordless understanding between them. They choose to be.
Watching that choice unfold, I felt my own reflection sharpen. I am standing at the threshold between volumes of my life—chapter feels far too small a word. The previous volume ended painfully, and while the details need not be recounted to be honored, the loss was real: a marriage that could not be sustained, a family configuration profoundly altered, a sense of banishment from what once felt like home. Grief, here too, has been merciless.
In Aristotle’s terms, I can now see my own tragic flaw braided tightly with my best qualities. I have been deeply giving, deeply committed to my loved ones, sometimes to the point of erasing myself. What once felt like virtue became unsustainable. A reckoning followed. I take responsibility for my part, without taking on what was never mine to carry alone. The rest I place in the hands of Divine mystery, trusting a longer arc than I can currently see.
After much grief and soul-searching, I know my answer to the Hamlet’s question. I choose to be. The next, more nuanced question is the one that follows: How to be? For me, that answer is still unfolding, but it includes radical acceptance, faith in a long and unseen healing, and permission to live freely. It also includes releasing what I cannot fix, loving from a distance, and returning again and again to that quiet inner ground to be guided by grace.
I don’t yet know where the next plot will lead, but I do know this—I am finally the protagonist of my own story. Years ago, I taught the Hero’s Journey and asked my students whether they believed they were the hero of their own journey. I can now answer that question myself, without hesitation. I am living from the inside out, grounded, authentic, and no longer writing my script around everyone else.
This feels like a healthier collaboration: me, the Divine, and the unfolding story. Tragedies may still arise—they are part of the human condition—but I am better equipped now to meet them with my own character and courage. This is how wisdom is earned. This is where grace takes root. And these are the revelations I pray will shape the volume yet to come.
And you, dear friend?
Where might grief still be asking for your attention, not to overwhelm you, but to be witnessed?
What does to be mean in this season of your life—and what might “how to be” invite you to learn next?
In what ways are you being called to step fully into your own story as its rightful protagonist?