glisters

To what extent is there a recognised link between grief and nostalgia?

I'm nearly 40 and for a long time have suffered from painful nostalgia for my life as a child - to the extent that trips back to my childhood home can be upsetting because it makes me dwell on the the time I spent there as a child and I can never have it again.

My father died rather suddenly when I was 20, which was shortly before I moved permanently away from home. It's only in the last few months that I've realised what I'm actually yearning for is a time when he was still alive as opposed to the places and things for which I thought I was feeling nostalgic.

20 years feels like quite a long time for this to have persisted, but at least in the shorter term is what I have experienced something that is recognised more widely?

That's a really great question - I hope it's answered!

Personally (just as a viewer) I don't mind this so much if the edits are realistic and used to enhance the original footage. I think that's very different to writing a storyline and then chopping together footage to create it, which I hate.

For example, some of the footage in the Blue Planet series was filmed in tanks because it's just not practical to capture it with such clarity 'in the wild'. So the shrimp you see scuttling across the ocean floor isn't necessarily the same shrimp whose mouth you then see in close-up when it has stopped to eat. I don't have a problem with footage from an artificial environment being spliced into 'wild' scenes to provide shots that just aren't realistically possible, or footage from similar 'wild' scenes being presented as a single event if that's done to fill in gaps and better convey what's happening, rather than to create an entirely new scenario that just didn't happen.

Thanks to both of you. It's reassuring to hear since this is something I've only recently started to understand.

I think you're right, Seth, about the long-term nature of the feelings. I don't feel like this all the time, it's less frequently when something reminds me of my childhood. Obviously I'd be sad if someone were to say "Think about how much you liked going for walks with your Dad - you can't do that now", but what I hadn't realised is that moving away from the places that we would walk would mean that thinking about those places will inevitably make me thing on some level about the walks with him because I don't have more recent memories of them. I hope that makes sense.