Call me morbid, but I’ve imagined my funeral as oftens as my wedding day. Not the casket, the decorations or the music. At my funeral, I think about the people. I wonder how they’ll find out I’ve died. Who will find out first and who will pass it on to others? And who will come to say goodbye?

I think about the pictures in their heads—the me they see as they say goodbye. I think about how varied those pictures will be, how different people bring out so many different sides of me, different aspects of the same whole, and how this will quite possibly be the only moment in time when the complete array of who I am is all together in one place.

As Catch and Release opens, the friends and family of Grady Douglas have come to say goodbye. Invitations told them to save the date. Plane tickets were bought in advance. Blocks of hotel rooms were saved. But they all expected Grady to be there, to stand at an altar, look into the audience, and give them a glance at his new role of husband and best friend to Gray Wheeler (Jennifer Garner).

But even before the movie opens, Grady is gone. He does not appear in flashbacks. The only glimpses of his image we see are momentary and unclear. Still, the movie is very much about him. It is about his dearest friends learning to go on without him. And about recognizing who he was and letting his past help them into their futures.

For Gray, the loss of Grady is the loss of her future--the disintegration of who she was and all she had planned to do. With him, her life was as it was supposed to be. Without him, she just does not know.

But Gray soon finds out that Grady was more than just the man of her dreams and the center of her future.

To Grady’s friends Sam and Dennis, he was the doer and the motivator. He led their expeditions and made life happen. Without him, Sam crumbles, unmotivated and hopeless. Without Grady’s lead, they are lost.

At the same time, there is guilt and regret. Grady was the doer, but look what it brought him and his friends to. What if they had encouraged him to slow down every once in a while, take it easy, not always go for the extreme? What if they had stepped up and taken charge? Stood up for what they wanted? Maybe he would still be there. Maybe Gray would not be so hurt and confused.

And then there is Fritz. Grady’s best friend that Gray never liked. Mr. Yummy. Mr. Los Angeles himself. And Grady’s ticket to getting away from it all and having fun.

Gray never understood why Fritz and Grady were such good friends. The match just was not there. But as a mysterious bank account, a massage therapist from a LA, and a young boy appear on her doorstep, Gray is faced with the reality of a Grady that Fritz may have known much better than she.

Grady was a man who loved Gray and his friends in Boulder very much, but he was also a man who liked to let it all go like a kid on vacation, maybe not always lead, maybe not always be the one with everything all together. He was a man who was not as perfect and capable as he may have appeared. But Grady was also a person who took his connections with people to heart and made it his responsibility and desire to bring help and happiness to the people with whom he shared his life.

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