As I write these words, I am within hours of processing the news of my grandmother’s death. In every way during my childhood, Grandma was someone who consistently showed up for me. It has been several years since someone close to me passed away, and even given the close relationship I had with her, I was unprepared for the wounds that would be opened in my soul when we lost her more quickly than we expected.
When we experience grief, pain, and loss as human beings—particularly when those experiences take their ultimate form in an encounter with death—we often find ourselves ill-equipped for the journey ahead.
As sensations well up in our bodies in the aftermath of the death of someone close to us, it can be difficult to know what to do with our emotions. Sometimes we just want them to go away. Sometimes, we pretend we don’t have them at all. Sometimes we have no idea why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. Other times we are no closer to naming our emotions than where they are coming from. And other times still we do not feel these sensations at all—we cannot access our emotions, so we cannot begin to process our loss, and the numbness baffles us.
I experience each of these phases (and more!) as I begin to deal with this loss. I am certain I will go through them again as the fresh wound dons the calluses of time, only to shed its hardened skin at an unforeseen moment, revealing flesh even more tender than it was at first.
Our world is full of ideas about how to respond to loss, but as many have observed, modern Western culture is one of the worst in terms of actually equipping us to engage in suffering in a healthy way. Often, we are best able to see reflections of our own soul’s tendencies in the stories told on television and in movies, and I recently returned to three stories about death and loss that are particularly poignant.
These three stories contain elements that we might call “dystopian,” meaning they envision a world in decline because a promised utopia based on a dream, solution, or technological advancement went awry. Each has its perspective on dealing with loss and grief in our modern age of unprecedented technological advancement, each with its allures that not only fall short of the kingdom of God but threaten to damage our soul even further if we embrace them in the wake of a death experience.
The Eternal Sunshine Perspective: Erase it.
The acclaimed movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is set in a world where it is possible to erase memories involving a particular person. In the narrative, protagonist Joel Barish discovers that his ex-girlfriend of two years has chosen to undergo this procedure so that she can eradicate all memories of him and their rocky relationship. Both hurting from the news and longing for a similar opportunity, Joel also chooses to have this procedure done with his memories of Clementine.
On the surface, the Eternal Sunshine solution to pain and loss appeals to us. At first glance, it appears to be a step toward no longer being bound by grief and its corollaries. Eliminating painful memories? Who wouldn’t want to be able to do that?
Even when we experience the death of a loved one, we can be pulled by the urge to forget altogether, especially if we have mixed feelings about our relationship with the person. While we have no medium for this to happen for us neurologically, we can find ourselves avoiding any thought of the person altogether. Circumventing our memories, even the good ones. Burying our emotions, even the good ones. Drowning all opportunities for contemplation in the distraction so we don’t have to deal with the loss at all.
But as in all dystopias, what appears utopic on the surface is mired in peril greater than that from which it promised to deliver. As Joel’s memories are erased, he experiences them a final time, and as he reaches the happier memories, he realizes he doesn’t want to forget Clementine at all. He would rather live with the pain of their past relationship—even their present estrangement—than live without any memory of her.
As we endure a loss as awful as death, we know that erasure of memories cannot provide true healing for us. And, of course, with the memories go the person, the very one we are grieving—both grieving their absence and also, in some cases, grieving who we wish they had been for us—in the first place.
The Severance Perspective: Divide it.
The AppleTV series Severance is set in a world similar to Eternal Sunshine in which people participate in a “severance” program whereby non-work memories are separated from their work memories. When someone who has been severed arrives at work, they have no memory of their life at home; when they arrive at home, they have no memory of their life at work. In the first episode, viewers discover that protagonist Mark S. chooses to be severed because his wife died in a car accident, and he wants to be free of his sadness at the memory of her for as much of his life as he can. Since “work Mark” does not know anything about his personal life, he does not have any recollection of his late wife while at work.
Instead of full erasure of all memories, Severance’s utopic vision is achieved by dividing yourself into the person who remembers and the person who forgets. At the very least, this approach alleviates the constancy of the burden, which may sound appealing to our weary souls. But while we don’t currently have the option to sever our memories, we can functionally “sever” by compartmentalizing our lives, living as different selves in the places we show up in our Monday worlds.
Creating two (or three or four) different versions of ourselves—the one who remembers that person and the one who forgets them, the one who attends to their pain and the one who escapes it, the one who grieves their loss and the one who grits their teeth through it—we step away from the integrated, whole life we were designed to live and become an amalgamation of compartments that rarely collide or interact with one another. Eventually, we may even feel like divided persons.
As the show’s producer has said, Mark’s story is an example of how we “hide parts of ourselves from ourselves.” Over time Mark begins to discover some of the negative effects of his decision to be severed. Notably in the very first scene of the show, Mark shows up to work with puffy eyes, and his work-self has no idea why.
This is a profound nod to the idea that our bodies carry around our grief even if our minds avoid it, and sooner or later, grief will catch up to us. Perhaps a deeper reason for Mark’s severing is not just so he can forget his wife for a little bit, but also so that he can hold on to her longer. In other words, he doesn’t want to let her go; division and compartmentalization delay his ability to truly “move on.”
The “Be Right Back” Perspective: Recreate it.
Modern dystopian narratives are often set in an otherwise normal environment, enhancing the idea that such scenarios are not far from our current world order. The TV show Black Mirror is a perfect example of this technique, and one particular episode feels all too likely as artificial intelligence takes center stage.
In the episode “Be Right Back,” Martha is grieving the recent loss of her boyfriend Ash, who died suddenly and tragically. In the aftermath, her friend signs her up for a service that assimilates every text, email, and other correspondence her late boyfriend sent in order to mimic his tone of voice in an online chat. She finds short-term peace in talking to this projection of her boyfriend, but it is peace pregnant with an ominous fear.
Soon, the service offers to integrate voice samples so that Martha can talk with Ash on the phone. As Martha becomes more comfortable, it is not long before Martha agrees to the delivery of a full-bodied replica of Ash who can live with her and interact with her. The story promises no less than a utopia where you can, at face value, have the person you lost back.
And who of us has not longed for such a thing? To be able to say something to that person again? To be able to hear their voice? To see them? To touch them? To feel like their presence is with us again? And even if we know fundamentally this is not technically possible, we can all too easily live in a way that pretends the deceased isn’t really gone.
This tendency of our souls is often referred to as denial, which is a refusal to face the facts of loss. In these moments of grief, we do not allow ourselves to accept the reality of death, instead we look for ways to recreate that person’s presence among us. Perhaps we choose to live only in the memories of the past that preserve this person, unwilling to face a present or future without them. In some cases, we are thrust into such a situation by the circumstances surrounding their death which blur the lines between absence and presence.
Of course, as Martha soon discovered, she did not really have her boyfriend back. The longer the experiment went on, the more this feeling settled in, and the worse things got as she was trapped in her new life with the pseudo-Ash. And similarly, as much as we try to tell ourselves otherwise, eventually we have to come to terms with the fact that that person is really gone.
The Kingdom Perspective: Redeem it.
Into the dystopian void, the kingdom of God injects an alternative perspective that offers real, lasting hope and healing. The kingdom of God is a true utopia, neither achieved by the overzealous hands of mortals nor the robotic non-hands of computers but the humble, nail-scarred hands of the God-man, Jesus. It is a world as real as the people we lose, a future breaking into the present with the promise of redemption. It is the renewal of all things—life from death, comfort from pain, beauty from ashes, reconciliation from estrangement.
When the kingdom of God is our real and steady hope, we are emboldened to remember the person we lost with gratitude because we are equipped to be present in the pain that comes with memory by the one who endured pain because he could not bring himself to forget us. We are also emboldened to embrace every part of ourselves in the healing process—even the messy parts we would rather hide from ourselves—because we are reintegrated as whole selves by the one who holds all things together. And finally, we are emboldened to embrace the reality of death with the courage of life, because we are reanimated by the one who conquered death with the power of resurrection.
As I process the loss of my grandma, I make every effort to do so in the present availability of the kingdom among us and the future hope of the kingdom to come. I weep freely and fully, knowing that even my tears will be redeemed. I take time to cherish her memory, knowing that even my regrets will be redeemed. I work to name my emotions, knowing that even my most tender will be redeemed. I reckon with the mystery that she is really gone, knowing that even now her absence from me means her presence with Jesus. And I throw what is left of myself on the only foundation on which I have left to hope—the resurrection of our bodies in the new heavens and new earth—knowing that one day even my grandma’s body will be redeemed, and so will mine, and I can actually have her back. The real her. Indeed, a “her” more real than the one I knew.
