the Moms and sadness
‘So tonight to shush you how about if I say I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. […] I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.’ ‘You’re talking about since Himself passed away.’
Context
Midnight, lights out, Mario needling Hal about belief until Hal coughs up a joke-shaped theology — he's "anti-death," God is "pro-death," they can't get together on it. Mario, who misses nothing, names the wound the joke is built over: this is about the father. Hal goes to the ellipsis, which is his tell all through this scene. The dyad here is grief carried as argument: the son who can't say he's mourning turns it into an administrative dispute with God, and it's the brother with the oversized skull who keeps quietly returning the conversation to Himself. (The scene's other engine — why the Moms never cried, the half-mast flag — is Avril's grief and belongs to family-hamlet; what's dyad here is the two sons' own unfinished mourning, Hal's included, and his earlier admission that he "listened to Tosca over and over and cried.")