Late at night on every Christmas Eve, I re-watch the film “Arrival”. I do so for many reasons but I suppose chiefly because it hits dead centre on things that matter to me the most, such as time and language. But I have now seen it ten times and I have read the script at least twice.

So there are some years when I wonder why I do it and I wonder enough that I come close to stopping. Now, as it happens, every single time I watch anyway and by the end of the film I am so into it again that I actually weep. Not because it’s a sad film, although there are desperately painful moments, but for a hundred reasons including how it is just right. You are taken to a point, you’re taken by writer Eric Heisserer to an ending that you then realise every frame was heading there, every moment was building to this ending and only this ending.

I suppose that’s true of every film but when it is done so well that you don’t realise how in control the story is, it is exceptionally satisfying.

But.

The film opens with what feels like a practically ludicrous number of production company animated logos. It’s actually only five and I’ve become fond of them. But as they rattled away this Christmas Eve just before midnight, I had that doubt over why I do this, and it was a greater doubt than ever.

Because Christmas Eve was eight days after my mom died in hospital. Part of me was dreading the opening of the film because of this — it’s a deeply and immediately involving but stabbingly upsetting sequence that involves a hospital — but also I felt silly. This is what you do with your time, I thought. You’re actually going to try distracting yourself from what’s happened.

I’m not sure why I carried on this time, but I did. Maybe it took me longer to get into it than usual because of all this, but the film was distracting, it was involving, it was rich a film as it always has been.

Only, I saw something new.

It’s always been there, I’ve always seen it, but I saw it with different eyes this time. If you haven’t seen the film then I am about to spoil it – and anyway I talk about it so much that perhaps I’ll wear you down into watching but definitely I’ll send you in with such expectations that maybe it won’t work for you. One reason for it having punched me so very hard was that I knew literally nothing about it when I went to the cinema that first time. I’m not certain I even knew the title.

But if you haven’t seen it, I hope you will and that it becomes as important to you as it is to me. So let me just say that this time its themes helped me about my mother, and let me just ask you to stop reading before I spoil it.

Here’s the thing. Of all that’s happened, the absolute anvil for me has been seeing a photo of my mother as a young girl. Somehow I’ve not seen it before, and it drove a sob out of me over seeing her there with her whole life yet to come. Seeing her while I know all that would follow for her, good and bad. Seeing her then while I know how her life ends. I’ve seen the end of any and all hopes that young woman had. The one moment captured in that photo represented a lifetime and a life that is now over.

The context in Arrival is very different but there is this key moment about seeing, truly seeing every moment of a person’s life. Seeing it in its entirety with all the good and bad. Seeing it not as something episodic that begins with that photo and ends in a hospital bed, but seeing it as one whole and appreciating it all.

Then the line that has somehow helped me, even as it makes me cry just telling you, is just this:

“Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and I welcome every moment.”