Grace is Gone

Great Premise:
Grace is Gone follows a man (Cusack) who, after finding out his wife was killed in the Iraq war, decides to take his two daughters on a road trip to an amusement park because he can't quite figure out how to tell them their mother has passed on.

Anecdote:
When I lived in China, there was a man named Caleb who lived and worked at the University where I was teaching. Caleb had been in the special forces of the ROK (Republic of Korea) army. The nicest guy, yet, you could tell from the way he handled situations that typical things that affect most people did not apply to him. Things such as nature, pain, and fatigue bounced off his perpetually smiling face.

We played basketball everyday. He was Dennis Rodman. Tirelessly, he would manhandle every rebound. It wasn't pretty and I made sure he got a lot of exercise by missing my shot often. Through the course of the year, he would tell me about crazy, only-in-asia, military drills. And when the Chinese landscape started turning into a frozen tundra, he told me about stories of him growing up, how cold his feet were in school because his family couldn't afford socks and because his shoes had huge holes in them.

One day, I saw him with his two kids. He looked a bit down. He told me that he had come back from a funeral. A professor's wife had died. He was outside of the funeral and saw the professor's two kids playing. Either the kids were too young to register that their mom had passed or nobody had told them. Caleb saw them and thought of his own kids and he said that it was the first time he had cried.

Now, his english isn't that great, so I'm assuming that it was the first time he cried as an adult but, at the same time, what he told me was not entirely unbelievable. He showed me the tissue he had saved.