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The Day the Doctor Saved Me

Why Peter Capaldi Is the Real Deal

By Jerame LangPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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"A king asks a shepherd's boy 'How many seconds are there in eternity?' The shepherd boy says, 'There's this mountain of pure diamond. It takes an hour to climb it, and an hour to go around it. Every hundred years a little bird comes. It sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain. When the entire mountain has been chiseled away, the first second of eternity will have passed.' Now, you must think that's a hell of a long time. Personally, I think that's a hell of a bird." -The Doctor

Certain remarkable concurrences transcend mere coincidence. There are those who call such instances delusions of apophenia, but those who experience them first hand consider them far more synchronistic in nature. The only difference seems to be how healthy the results of your delusions are, usually measured by how much you inconvenience others with them. One might call what follows one such delusion, but they've never met The Doctor.

When asked "What is your one biggest Doctor Who memory?" the fourth incarnation of The Doctor, Tom Baker, replied "I remember a man stopping me in Oxford Street once, looking at me with absolute incredulity; he couldn't believe it. He said 'Tom Baker?' A man in his late thirties. I said 'Yes.' He said 'Tom Baker?' I said 'Yes!' And he looked at me and in his brain he catapulted back in time and he said, 'You know, when I was a boy, I was in a home for children; nobody wanted us, you know? It was terrible. And you made Saturday night good.' And I went to say something to him and I could see him so close to tears that he couldn't speak. And he shook his head as if to say 'Don't go on, don't remind me,' and he just did [a thumbs up]. Such a common thing, isn't it, but suddenly backed up with an expression on his face, through his tears, that was a knighthood. It was a knighthood. Just a thumbs up, meaning it was great and thanks. It's incredible isn't it? Just a gesture."

It's amazing how such a small gesture or chance encounter can carry more gravity, interconnectivity, and emotion than anyone is fully capable of expressing. I'm fortunate enough to say that I had one such encounter with Peter Capaldi, the twelfth incarnation of The Doctor. Capaldi was my mother's favorite incarnation. She would watch as he saved the "pudding brains" despite his dissatisfaction with them; as he distanced himself from affection with cynicism to hide his pain, loss, and vulnerability; as he endured to save as many as he could despite the odds against him and she'd say "That's you" to which I'd reply, dismissively, with "I'm not that clever, or handsome for that matter." Then she'd watch as he declared himself an 'idiot' or brought a guitar to an 'axe fight', riding a tank and making light of his inevitable doom and she'd say again "That's you." After she died in March of 2016, I had the chance to get the guitar she'd given me signed by Capaldi at a convention in DC two months later and couldn't pass up the opportunity.

Tickets to the signing had been grossly oversold, and despite his willingness to stay longer than scheduled, the resulting line was so long that the meeting was no longer guaranteed. As I wait in line, playing the guitar, somewhere in the middle of what seemed to be an endless sea of fans, a passerby approaches me and says, "That's an amazing cosplay. Take this card, it'll move you to the front of the line."

Dumbstruck, I reply "I can't take this from you, it's yours," and she says "I've got to leave, so I can't use it anyway" I thanked her, we hugged, and I was moved to the front of the line. I handed over my guitar and welcomed him to play something from his days in The Dream Boys. He politely declines because of the time constraints before I go about the business of confessing how much my mother loved him and that she'd just died. He didn't have to, he could have given me the generic "I'm sorry for your loss" and moved me along, but instead, he confided that he'd also recently lost his mother and asks, "How are you holding up?" as he looks up from signing the guitar.

I want to tell him "I'm lost. I'm broken. Despite having family and friends, I've never felt so alone. Please help me. I wish you could take me back in time so I could try to be a better son; so I could try and help her before the abuse she endured as a child put her on a path of self destruction that ultimately killed her." Instead, I swallow my grief and say, "You know, it changes you."

And he looks at me for a moment, the way that someone does when they recognize their own pain in someone else, the way The Doctor does when he's being telepathic, and he says, "You take care of yourself," as he shakes my hand; and as he does, it's as though time stops and we're standing before 'the moment' and it's the first time since she died that I didn't feel completely alone, and broken and lost; even if I was only standing with myself.

Grief is like a mountain of diamond or, more specifically, a wall of Abzantium that encapsulates you with the memories and nightmares of the past. We cannot bypass it. We are obligated to work through it or remain its prisoner, and to do so takes as long as the first second of eternity. The day I met The Doctor was the day I took my first crack at the wall. He stood there, looking at it with me and his eyes said, "You can do this," and with that, he saved me. For that, to me, he will always be The Doctor.

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