It was full of foul language, filthy jokes, drug use, suicide, sexual innuendos, lewd actions, and off color references to people who are over-weight and disadvantaged. Everything I distain, but when it was over, I sobbed and sobbed.

The description drew me in. Tony whose wife, Lisa, of 25 years died of breast cancer. He was angry at the world. He took his anger out in everyone, even those who cared and tried to help him.

He goes through the motions during the day at night he drinks and watches videos of his life with Lisa and videos she made for him before she died.

He wants to die. He tries to commit suicide but he can’t quite get up the courage and several times his dog stops him. At one point he befriends a heroin addict and asks him to introduce him to the poison in an effort to numb his grief. Later he discovers the addict is also suffering from loss and wants to die but does not have enough money to buy what it takes to end it all. Tony supplies the funds and it is unclear if he feels any regret or sorrow about his actions.

Tony is a reporter for a local small town newspaper and through that he meets a variety people with their own quirks and hardships that come in and out of his life. Each one had something to share with him.

In the mix of all this he also lost his dad to Alzheimer’s. His interactions were familiar, repeating answers to the same questions and the sadness on days his dad didn’t know who he was. I really connected to his visits with him.

He doesn’t believe in God, but he thinks about it. His wife is gone, she wanted to believe there was an afterlife, but every serious conversation was an opportunity for a tasteless joke to him. Later he wonders of he destroyed her hope.

Hopelessly lost without out his wife, his soul-mate (if only he could believe we had souls), through the 18 episodes he slowly works his way through the grief. All the music through out the series is soft, sentimental, ballad-like and it ends with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now.’

I won’t share the end, but he meets someone that puts a question to him that he struggles to answer, and he cannot answer in his usual cocky sarcastic way. He has a moment, an epiphany. That’s when my tears started.

I really disliked so much that was this movie, that listed above, the constant use of the F-word and worse but the deeper message touched me

Life, love, craziness, struggles, guilt, loss… things we all experience. Experiences I have been battling these last couple of years, perhaps I was holding more in than I thought, because the rivers of tears let loose.

After Life – Genre: Black Comedy – Written, Directed and Starring: Ricky Gervais