Not So Different After All

In the Oscar©-winning 2025 film Hamnet, two parents find themselves feeling emotionally and physically disconnected from one another after the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Their son’s passing was traumatic for both parents. But they grieved his passing very differently. The young boy’s mother Agnes, who was the emotional heart of the story, believed that her husband wasn’t grieving as much as she was. Her husband’s pain did not seem to her to be as deep and acute as hers was. It hurt her deeply and she felt utterly alone in her grief. She resented, too, that her husband Will was not at home when Hamnet died, painfully, frightened, and quickly. 

Hamnet was a real person, as were his parents. His father was none other than William Shakespeare, in many people’s minds, the greatest playwright and author who ever lived.  

The story in the movie is an imagined one. History knows very little about the young boy Hamnet, other than that he was the Shakespeare’s son who  died in 1596 and was buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. The story of the family’s immense grief is not documented. History does not record what it did to the Shakespeares’ marital relationship. But the film’s plot speculates that it could have caused the immense strains and tensions that the death of any child so often commonly causes in a marriage. 

The film also imagines that his son’s death inspired William Shakespeare to write what many literary scholars also consider his greatest play - Hamlet - several years later. Shakespeare was often absent from home before and after Hamnet’s death. He was pursuing his theater career in London, while he and Agnes’s three children were largely raised by Agnes in Stratford-upon-Avon. Those absences are also central to the deep emotional pain that Agnes was portrayed as feeling in the movie.

The emotional impact of Hamnet is devastating and searing. It’s been three-and-a-half months since I’ve originally seen it and its effects are lingering. It’s impossible to easily shake the feelings it generated. The story’s focus on a fear that every parent harbors is every parent’s worst nightmare. To lose a child is utterly, profoundly, guttingly painful. 

I was visiting my grandparents one Monday evening years ago when they received the phone call that their 56-year-old son, my mother’s oldest brother, had what appeared to be a heart attack, was unconscious, and was taken to the hospital. I drove them and my mother to the hospital, as we rode silently fearing that the news wouldn’t be good, yet hoping against hope that it would be. I witnessed my grandmother melt into the arms of one of my cousins right after we arrived in the emergency department,  when he told her that his father - her son - had died. It doesn’t matter how old the parents or their child are. The pain of losing their child hurts just as much. We believe that it’s not supposed to happen this way.  The child isn’t meant to go first, no matter their age, before their parents. 

All deaths are hard on us. Our human reactions to death are many and varied. Sometimes the emotions are so raw and rip us apart. Sometimes they are quiet and seem quirkily subdued to others. Sometimes they confound and confuse those around us. Sometimes they scare others because they are not what others expect; they are too strong, too emotional, too intense for us to witness.

Rarely are two reactions to death or loss or any other emotional human experience - whatever it may be - exactly the same. All of our reactions are nuanced and dependent on many things unique to each of us as individuals. We all react differently and in different degrees to every circumstance in our lives. Based on our relationships, experiences, circumstances, temperament, genetics, and perspectives, no two people have exactly the same response to any situation. 

But, we still can find common ground that will connect us, bonding us and enabling us to see one another as fellow human beings. Fellow human beings who are living in this world at this time in history, with many common experiences that can help us to respect and have empathy for one another’s feelings, challenges, and needs. 

In Hamnet, Agnes and William had externally different responses to the loss of their young son. Agnes’s response was primal and guttural, outwardly anguished and expressive. William’s was much quieter, seemingly more aloof and distant, in fact him being away from home working on a new play in London caused great resentment within his wife. She felt as if he didn’t care or wasn’t feeling the loss of their son as much as she did.

But in the final act of the film, when Agnes travels to London to see the mysterious (and privately resented) play - Hamlet -  that William was away working on, she sees something she had not seen before. In one of the most touching movie scenes I have ever experienced, Agnes sees that Willam’s grief was poured into the play. She realizes that the main character, Hamlet, was actually a stand-in for her son Hamnet (the two names were often interchangeable in 16th century England). She saw that her husband processed his personal grief about their son’s death through his writing, directing, and even acting on stage in the play. She realized that his grief was just as strong - and as uniquely personal - as hers was. She realized that it was different, but that it was just as human and just as painful for him. Her resentment melted away in that profoundly moving moment of realization. While it was different from hers, it was also as human as hers. Just as valid. Just as real. Just as gutting. And just as viscerally wrought. 

They were not so different after all.  There was common ground to be seen in what seemed to be vast chasm between them. 

Even in the most personal and painful of experiences, and even when our responses to those experiences can seem to be so different, we can still find common ground in them. In our humanness. In the ways we connect as feeling, caring, loving human beings.