Pet Sematary: A Guide to Crappy Parenting and the Coping of Loss

I had one dog growing up named Dusty, (named after Chevy Chase's character Dusty Bottoms in the Three Amigos). I had got him when he was just a puppy when I was in kindergarten. When I came home for Thanksgiving break my freshman year of college, I was saddened to learn that he had passed on. I was actually pretty upset, it's true when people talk about pets becoming part of your family, I had grown to love him just as much as my brother.

Since I was at college, my fifteen year old brother was charged with the task of helping my mother bury our dog. My uncle had lived on a lake and there was a woods behind their house that led to the lake and my mother thought this was would be a nice place to bury him, (I still struggle with this line of thought).

So, my mother and brother wrapped my dog up in a bag, (he was golden retriever-lab, so this task was not easy) placed him in a cardboard box and together they carried him into the woods to look for his final resting place (this honestly sounds like the intro to a shitty horror film). What happened was, my dog had broken through the box and fell on the ground and unwrapped, freaking my younger brother out intensely. Apparently, he went into hysterics for ten minutes, thinking they hurt him, or maybe just seeing our dog lying their lifeless was enough to frighten him. After a while, he was at least able to help my mom carry our dog a little ways into the woods so that he could be buried, the entire time he was crying from what I understand and ranting about how angry our dog must be.

That was twelve years ago and my brother still gets a bit shaky reliving that story. My brother was a teenager when this happened, and I imagine for younger children, the loss of the family pet probably has as much if not more of a saddened impact. For younger children, it could be their first experience with death, and if they are given the duty of burying the family dog/cat/rabbit, it could be quite traumatic, as it was for my brother.

It's a delicate situation for parents, who are tasked with trying to explain death to a child, when most of the time, they themselves don't understand death. Everyone has different beliefs, but no one knows for sure what happens when we pass on. Kids always want definitive answers, so parents have an option, they could either explain their belief system now and hope that their child understands, or they could tell them we all go to a magical place and make death seem not so scary for kids (this conversation must be extremely difficult for atheists).

The reason I say this has to be difficult for parents is because everyone reacts to death differently when it is someone close to us that dies. To a parent, the family pet doesn't have the same impact as their mother, father, sibling, or god forbid their own children. Adults understand that people and things die and move on, but they don't necessarily understand it, till they live it. Once this happens, they either take two roads, they will hold true to their faith or belief system about what happens when you die. Or, and this road is honestly seldom traveled  they will reject everything they have held, and there is a small chance they will go bat-shit crazy, which is what happened to Louis Creed.

Louis Creed is the main character in the 1989 film Pet Sematary that was based on the same titled novel from Stephen King that was published in 1983. If you have never seen the film before the synopsis is eerie. A young family from Chicago moves out to Maine (go figure a Stephen King story based in Maine) and behind their home is a trail that leads to a Pet Cemetary that was started by children dating back as early as the 1920's.

The reason why this cemetery exists is because the road in front of the Creed's new house is synonymous with truckers blazing down the road at top speed and creating road kill out of any poor hapless pet that happens to get in the way. The Creed's have a cat named Winston Churchill, “Church” for short, and you guessed it, decides to play in the road and gets clobbered. The old man across the street, Judd Crandall, played by Fred Gwynne (he was Herman from the Munsters, or the Judge in My Cousin Vinny) takes Louis and the dead cat past the Pet Cemetary and leads him to an old Micmac burial ground where they bury Church.

The next day Church shows up in the garage and scares the crap out of Louis, believing they just buried the cat.  Church has become a bit ornery (which would be natural if I got nailed by a semi going 90 mph) and doesn't seem quite right. Judd than tells Louis that the Indians used the burial ground to bring back the dead, however, the ground had gone “sour” or turned evil and that when things come back, they don't come back good. However, Judd explains that the reason he had Louis bury the cat there, was because he felt that Louis's seven year old daughter was not ready to lose her pet.

Which is true, for some reason, Ellie has become obsessed with asking her parents what happens when we die and if God wanted to he could make them not die. Louis who is a doctor has a pretty pragmatic approach and attempts to tell Ellie the truth...that no one knows what happens. However, his wife (played by Deniese Crosby, who was the only main character ever killed in Star Trek: The Next Generation) has a hard time talking about death and dying, and forces Louis to tell her that we live on. The reason, she has troubles dealing with death is that as a child she was left alone in the house with her dying sister Zelda, who had spinal meningitis and was more than likely clinically insane. Zelda died in front of Rachel, and she still carries the guilt with her.

The next Creed family member to be taken by a semi is the two-year old son Gage. The family is having a picnic outside and (this part of the movie really pisses me off) Gage somehow wanders far enough away from the ENTIRE FAMILY, and get splattered across the road.

It causes Louis to mentally lose it. He rejects his belief system about what happens when you die (not sure if it's guilt, trauma, or the knowledge of the resurrection playground, or maybe all three), he digs up his son and buries him in the Micmac burial ground, despite warnings from both Judd and the friendly ghost Pascow (a young man that died earlier in the film that Louis tried to save). Once, Gage comes back things get even worse, and you'll have to see the movie to see the ending.

From a scary movie standpoint, the movie is decent. The scenes containing Zelda are quite unnerving and leave you with chills. As well as anytime Pascow, who yes is a good guy, shows up. His character is quite creepy and seems to take an odd pleasure in trying to help the Creed's in their time of need. For the most part though, this is psychological horror film that challenges your thoughts on death and would you still accept those beliefs if someone close to you was taken from you? As well as, how far would you go to bring back the loved ones that were taken from you, even if know they won't come back the same? However, a theme that I find more upsetting, is the shitty parenting displayed throughout the film.

Like I said, the part that infuriates me off the most in the film is Gage's death. If I had two small children, we would not be kite flying and having a picnic near a road with killer semi-trucks. That's like taking your family for a swim in shark infested waters, you're just asking for something terrible to happen. The other thing that infuriates me off about the scene is that there are three adults who seem to lose track of the youngest person there, how does that happen? I am not a parent, but no matter where I was and if I had a small child charged to me, I would be watching them like a hawk. They wouldn't be more than a few feet away, and certainly not near any road, regardless of how dangerous it is.

Another example of shitty parenting in this film is during Rachel's flashback sequence with her sister Zelda. What kind of parents leave a daughter in charge of taking care of a handicapped sister? Shitty ones, is the answer yes, and I realize that Rachel's parents are not painted in a delightful way, highlighted by a scene in which Rachel's father blames Louis for Gage's death at the funeral, and proceeds to start a fist fight, knocking over Gage's casket. But it's blatantly morbid and cruel to ask a ten year old girl to be feeding and caring for her dying sister, regardless of mental state. It also looked like the folks had money, why didn't they just get a nurse?

Rachel is frustrating simply because she allowed her experiences as a child to carry over into her adult life.  She doesn't seem to blame her parents for her state of trauma at all. She accepts unreasonable responsibility for her sisters death, and is torn between feelings of guilt and alleviation that her sister died. In reality her psychological state and her inability to communicate with her daughter on the subject of death, is her parents fault. Yet, she still seems to want to have a relationship with them and is perfectly okay with her children being around such awful people, and still seeks approval from her parents about her marriage to Louis (this is an extremely underdeveloped story-line and when I say that, we have no real idea why her parents don't like Louis, however the novel delves deeper into this story).

The novel written by King happens to be on a personal nature, but I wonder if it stems even deeper. The inspiration came from his daughters family cat that was run over by a truck and they had to bury the animal. The novel however, was apparently shelved for a few years because his family and friends did not care for it. King was an alcoholic and I have to wonder if some of the shitty parenting was maybe a little to personal for King's family. King wrote the screenplay for the movie and was very demanding that it be held faithfully to his novel, (probably because his earlier stories adapted to the screen were not).  So, maybe, in a weird sense for King, this was therapeutic? Maybe admitting some of his faults as a parent, but that is a large stretch.

Pet Sematary is a film that I imagine strikes a chord with parents. The daunting task of having to explain death, the dreadful thought of losing your child and the aftermath that follows. I connected with these adult themed fears on a semi-personal level. I say semi-personal because I don't have children, I am dating a woman that is 99 percent sure she doesn't want to have children, so therefore, if our relationship progresses, I more than likely will not have children. I am okay with this, I have accepted the factor I probably won't have kids. I don't have a disdain for children, nor do I feel I would make a terrible father, it's just a part of life I feel I won't experience (maybe someone will make me a godfather). Due to this, I feel like I have dodged a bullet so to speak, I will never have to have a conversation with my child about what happens when you die, (which would be trying since my girlfriend and I have different beliefs on the subject) I never have to have "the sex talk."  I also will never have to worry sick if my kids don't come home at curfew and rack my mind with the endless amount of terrible things that could have happened, only than to have them walk in the door at 12:30 am with a bag Taco Bell, and the excuse that the "drive-thru took forever."

However, at the age of 30, and due to Facebook being a constant source of updated information about people I went to high school and college with, people that I know on some sort of level are having or have kids. Now my core group of friends, those who I actually spend time with, are just sort of in the beginning process of this having children thing. So these concerns will eventually hit them, but as of now most of them are getting up a lot in the middle of the night and trying to make sure their children don't climb on the dining chairs.

When watching Pet Semetary, I couldn't help but think, how would any of my male friends with children react to losing their son or daughter?  Would they be able to keep it together, how long would the grief process take, would they go insane and become alcoholics or drug addicts detached from reality? All of these things I couldn't answer, and I am sure they would all handle it differently, hopefully not negatively of course.  It's an awful thing to think about, so I am not going to even try to speculate how each of my friends who have kids would react to such an event, but watching Louis in the film go from a mild-mannered seemingly normal human being, into an unreasonable, irrational shell, it's the scariest part about the movie, because it reflects what could happen in real life, from a mental or psychological state.

There' a line that Louis states when he is attempting to shed logic onto the idea of burying Gage in the Micmac buriel ground, “if he comes back bad, I'll just put him back into the ground.” He has gone so far over the deep end, that he is willing to end his son's life if he comes back evil. But he was so distraught with his son's death the first time around, what made him think that he could actually pull the proverbial trigger a possible second time?