I’ve seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan more times than I can count. It’s in the running for my favorite movie of all-time (honestly, depends on which movie I’ve seen most recently — Khan or The Searchers) and it’s one of those movies I can stumble across and start watching to the end from wherever it is in the movie’s run.
This weekend, I got to see Khan on the big-screen again in celebration of its fortieth anniversary.
And the movie hit me hard in a couple of places.
Seeing Admiral Kirk facing his fiftieth birthday in the film resonated with me in a way it hasn’t really before. Probably because I’m coming up on my fiftieth birthday early next year as well.
But even more so, some of the emotional beats of the second half of the film hit me. Having lost a baby a few weeks ago, the gulf between Kirk and his son, David, and the death of Spock, really hit me hard this time around. Thinking about how we were considering naming the baby Kirk if we’d been blessed with a son hit me hard. Then, the sequence in which Kirk has to say goodbye to Spock without being able to physically connect through the glass in engineering also shattered me. The grief of never holding this baby, never knowing this baby in the way I know my daughter, and never getting a moment to say hello or goodbye hurt me as I watched. I saw the baby on an ultrasound a few weeks before the tragic news was revealed — saw his or her heartbeat on there, saw him or her forming. And while I was worried about becoming a new dad at fifty, I was instantly in more in love with this baby than I had been and super stoked about doing all that new dad stuff again.
And now, it’s gone and I’m not sure I’ve processed it all yet. Or maybe I’ve just cycled back a stage or two in the grieving process.
And hopefully, this will help me continue to heal and be a good dad and father.
Confessions of a First-Time Dad 