The Trip to Bountiful

Death and Dying in “The Trip to Bountiful”

 The Trip to Bountiful is a vignette in the later life of Carrie Watts, an elder southern woman living out her last chapter with her son, Ludie, and daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae, in 1940’s Houston, Texas. The story unfolds as the camera peeks in on the three inhabitants, sharing cramped quarters in their one-bedroom apartment, early in the wee hours of a summer morning. One by one, the three enter the scene, restless from the heat and the gnawing undercurrent of anxiety typifying  their shared, uneventful lives. Ludie emerges first from the couple’s bedroom (separated by curtained French doors) into the common living space which doubles as a sleeping area for “Mother Watts”), followed by Jessie Mae, seemingly reluctant to permit Ludie to savor the quiet company of his mother alone. As the dialogue ensues their relationship dynamics are slowly unveiled.

Mother Watts appears on one hand as coy and child-like, yet on the other, stubborn and determined. Ludie is hen-pecked by his pushy and domineering, pestering yet sensitive wife, whose disdain knows neither boundary nor restraint. In many ways the story of their lives is a story of their deaths, particularly with regard to the subtle ways that people die from moment to moment through small gestures of concession made in good faith to alleviate tensions constraining their most intimate alliances. Living in such close quarters puts everyone on edge, but each character in this story has their own singular unresolved crisis contributing to the blanket of doleful anxiety that knits their lives together in common.

For Jessie Mae, her dying to self is packaged in the frustration she feels for having settled for far less than she felt she deserved in marrying Ludie. She likes the finery of clothing and hair styles, and the fact of the matter is there is not enough money to support her champagne tastes. Throughout the first scene she repeatedly hassles Mother Watts about the pension check that has not arrived on schedule, blaming her for losing it, or putting it somewhere and forgetting where that might be.  Though not consciously preoccupied with physical death per se, Jessie Mae’s protestations and complaints rather indicate a desire to avoid sliding down into the dreaded toothy jowls of homelessness and insecurity: a sure fire death for an ego as fragile as hers. Ludie is a defeated man, struggling to maintain his employment status while living with the unresolved pain surrounding the death of his grandfather (which is reviewed later during the film’s climactic moment).

The main theme of the movie revolves around Mother Watts’ desire to return before she dies to the hometown and the homestead she has not seen for twenty years. Bountiful, the town where she grew up, is where she buried two babies and raised her son Ludie. She dreams of the day she could go back and “get her hands into the soil again”; to visit her old childhood friend Callie Davis, and “see Bountiful one last time” before she dies. Repeated attempts to realize her dream are foiled time and again by Jessie Mae’s persistent interference, but Mother Watts finally escapes one day unimpeded. With only a small tote bag, purse, and her prized pension check tucked secretly into her bosom, she steals off to the bus station, and on to the bus. 

During the bus ride she makes the acquaintance of a young woman, Thelma, who is dealing with her own death concerns. As it turns out, she is on her way back to stay with her parents, and await her new husband’s return from a World War II tour of duty overseas. The conversation they share during the bus trip focuses on themes of loss, faith and disappointment. The dialogue leads to a tearful fugue of reminiscence of the early days growing up as a young girl in Bountiful, and how Mother Watts laments that she could not marry the man she truly loved, and who loved her, because of class differences. Because she was a poor farm girl, while he was of the merchant class, their love could not be realized and she had to settle for an untrue love. As she recounts the situation, she cries, perhaps for the first time, to release her deep dark secret to the compassionate receptive ears of someone willing to share the burden of a lifetime of grief; someone who would understand her loss and her need to mourn, freely and finally, the death of that piece of the past that occupied her heart space for so many long years.

The town nearest Bountiful is twelve miles away, and because Bountiful is so decrepit now, it is vacant, deserted. Still, since the story is relayed over the backdrop of the Spring season, its pastures, in stark contrast to the themes of loss and death, are in full blossom. These juxtaposed dynamics confirm rather than disavow the credibility of the story, because in the affect of it, we are reminded, even as death elbows its way to the forefront of consciousness, that hope is alive and well, busy springing eternal behind that shimmering veil. The bus arrives and drops her off, but by now it is early morning once again, and there is no transportation available to drive her the twelve miles to her final point of arrival. She decides to rest on the bench and wait until dawn, at which time when she plans to hire a car to drive her there. In the meantime, the local sheriff has received word about Mrs. Watts and when he locates her at the bus station, he informs her that her son and daughter-in-law are on their way to take her back to Houston. Now her anticipation is killed and her anxiety and disappoint peaks – she has come this far, only to be forced in the end to turn back. She won’t be able to realize this one last dream. She begs, pleads, and negotiates with the officer to please drive her the last twelve miles to Bountiful.  She gets herself so riled up, she has one of her ‘sinking spells’, becoming light-headed with blood pressure rising. He takes pity on her, yet feels it important to have her condition checked by the local doctor. (Considering that even at this point during the 1940’s heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States, adding the ‘weak heart’ attribute was an effective device for heightening the tension for viewers of the film). After the town doctor examines her, making certain she not at risk for heart attack or death, he gives approval, and the sheriff decides to honor her request.

In the text The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying (DeSpalder and Strickland) the authors quote a source stating “one of the most important and unique aspects of human experience is the awareness of one’s own mortality” (p. 24).  This seems to be true of Carrie Watts who appears to have resolved the tensions one would naturally encounter in their final life stage. Having arrived at a point of realizing her fullest potential while honoring her life’s limitations, she accepts the fact that her resources, now spent, are beyond revival, and what’s left to accomplish is a panning review of her life efforts. Having justified the moral quality of her existence, she now desires to make peace with the ghosts of her past. Her attempt to return to Bountiful is a curtain call of sorts, beckoning her return to her roots, back to the same dust that was the substance and sum of her entire life, and in this sense she is already ‘living with an awareness of death’. Bountiful was the place that framed her most relevant life episodes, and encapsulated all her life seasons and cycles. It was the source of her psychic birth, and for her to come full circle, she needed for it to become the place of her psychic death. A return to Bountiful would provide her with the perfect place to ‘contemplate the basic questions’ of her existence that humans face as they near the end of life’s road (p. 25).

            Relevant to religious elements of thanatology in ‘The Trip to Bountiful’, Mrs. Watts, as a devout Christian formed in her youth by Bible Belt culture, has a strong devotion to hymns. The director chose the hymn “Softly and Tenderly”, weaving it like a strand throughout as a backdrop of the movie:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, Calling for you and for me;
See, on the portals He’s waiting and watching, Watching for you and for me.

Come home, come home, You who are weary, come home;
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, Calling, O sinner, come home!

Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing, Passing from you and from me;
Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming, Coming for you and for me.

This hymn parenthetically frames the context for the entire movie, and underscores its themes of homecoming, shadows gathering, deathbeds coming, and this is precisely brought to bear in the movie’s final scene.

            Contentedly, Mother Watts arrives at the doorstep of her precious Bountiful. She stands in front of it, assessing its current status: doors and windows now gone, empty of furniture, leaving a mere skeleton of a structure. Stepping into the empty house, Mother Watts surveys the now bare floors and walls. With her finger she retraces old scratches in the woodwork, and slides her palm across the dusty shelf of the mantle ledge imagining earlier times and remembering the objects that used to occupy the now empty spaces.

            Jostled from her reverie by the sound of Ludie’s voice calling ‘Mama! Mama!, Mother Watts goes to the porch and greets her son with sheepish face of a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “How do you feel?”, Ludie asks. “I feel much better son …. I got my wish!”. Once apologies are offered, the conversation turns to topics of the day, and Mother Watts, through misty eyes and averted glance relays how she just found out her young girlhood friend Callie Davis died the other day before she arrived. The funeral had been held the day before. Ludie apologies for not having brought his mother to Bountiful much sooner, stating that he just ‘thought it would be easier if we didn’t see the house again’. Mother Watts pushes past his denial saying, “Now that you’re here, don’t you want to come inside and have a look around?” Ludie declines saying “I don’t see much use in it; I’d rather remember it like it was”, implying that there was something unresolved from the past that he’d rather leave buried there. When Mother Watts asks Ludie if he remembers her father, Ludie launches into a tirade about how he remembers at age ten when he died and his grandfather’s best friend took him to his knee and told Ludie how his grandfather’s life was a real example to follow. Ludie’s grieving grandmother made him promise that when he grew up he would have a son and name him after his grandfather. However, Ludie did not have any children and he felt both ashamed that he was never able to keep that promise and that he never had any children at all, even though his friends went on to raise families themselves. This underscores the disappointment he must have carried throughout his entire life that he failed to measure up to an expectation set upon him at an earlier time of his life. However, a young boy could never predict how the vicissitudes of life would serve to interfere with even the best of intentions to fulfill those expectations. And so in this regard, the trip to Bountiful not only served Mother Watt’s need to find closure, but also the need for her son to find resolution and reconciliation, two themes that are present in thanatology as requirements for resolving the anxiety that surrounds death, ultimately leading to new paths of healing and hope.

            The story of The Trip to Bountiful was a shining example of Robert Kastenbaum’s Edge Theory and its Continuum of Awareness and Denial. Mother Watts, wanting to embrace the past, was situated on the Awareness pole of the spectrum, while Ludie leaned more toward the Denial end, as evidenced by his desire to avoid facing the past. What this movie shows us is that it is futile to resist the inevitability of death. That the sooner we recognize and accept that life, as the song says, is ‘fleeting, its moments passing from you and from me’, the sooner we can learn to welcome the inevitability of our own demise, and begin to cooperate and make peace with the process, rather than treat it as an eventuality to be denied and avoided.