My dad was a man who loved nature. I think that was why we both shared a love for Robin Hood, for that prince of the Greenwood. We spent the night before he died in a canoe, just the two of us, wordlessly floating in the middle of a remote lake, watching the sun go down. It’s hard to instill an appreciation of the silent beauty of the natural world in a nine year old, but he did it with grace and love. The next day, we saw the other side of nature. The winds were brutal, and it took all our effort to canoe back to civilization before nightfall. It was a grand adventure. But by then the hotels were all booked up, and we had to make the long drive back home in the middle of the night. The winds had delayed us enough that he was driving through a remote intersection at just the right moment to be t-boned by a pickup.

Nature is always a hair’s breadth away from both death and the divine. We do not overcome one to get to the other, but rather find a way to integrate both as universal realities. I knew with The Death of Robin Hood, I could not shy away from the brutality, could not sugar-coat it. And I could not shy away from that stillness, that patience of observing and existing in the silence and the transcendent.

It is fitting that the week before shooting, Storm Éowyn broke records and decimated our locations and schedule. But we embraced it. We built roads to untouched mountaintops, trudged through foot-deep mud in the pouring rain. And we stood in silence on ancient cliffs and looked out at dolphins playing at sunset. We captured this movie through the brutal beauty of those Northern Irish landscapes.

I first came to the tale of Robin Hood’s death just after that canoe trip with my dad. That was when my neighbor, Harvey, gave me his childhood copy of Robin Hood that he had read as a boy in the 1940s. I marveled at the adventures, and then got to the final chapter, where Robin dies a quiet, human death in a sunlit church bedchamber. It didn’t compute. That this immortal, iconic man should fade away, should die such a simple, human death. I remained fascinated by this incongruity as I tried to reconcile the same feelings about my father.

I often think about why Harvey gave me that book. As a boy it simply seemed like a kind way to support an interest of mine, maybe to distract me from grief. But looking back, I think he was trying to tell me that the people we have lost live on in the space between us, in the stories we tell ourselves and each other, if we’re willing to listen. I wish I could ask Harvey about that, and thank him for a gesture that changed a boy’s life. But he too passed away last year, and now lives on in our stories, unknowable, but deeply felt.

I wish I could sit in that canoe with my dad again, and tell him the tales of everything I’ve seen and learned in the last thirty years, and how much I appreciate the lessons and peace he instilled in me. But mostly I wish I could just sit wordlessly and share in the beautiful calm before that storm I’ll never forget.

I remember the violent winds, but I remember that sunset even more.

Yours in our stories,

Michael Sarnoski