To The Leftovers: Farewell and Thank You

I don’t know how to thank a work of art, but that’s because I’ve never before been personally grateful to one. But with The Leftovers leaving my life, I find myself needing to thank it for what it has done for me, especially as I once again find myself facing the very thing that brought me to it in the first place: the sudden and unimaginable loss of someone close to me.

I came to The Leftovers because I was searching for something that might speak to me about the grief that has come to define me. I came to The Leftovers because like the people in its world I had experienced a life altering departure. I had carried my baby sister into one of the best hospitals in the world one night, wondering how long we would be there, and the next morning I left without her forever. She was there — I had thought she would always be there — and then she wasn’t, and I will never understand why she was taken.

She passed away two months after the fictional Sudden Departure date of the show. So two-and-a-half years after we lost her, I tuned in on a June night to this series that was seemingly about my very life since those early morning hours in that emergency room. The Leftovers was claiming it would tell my story, about what happens after someone is stolen from you when you don’t see it coming. I wanted to know what the show had to say, if it would feel honest and true to what I felt and had become defined by.

What I never expected was rather than speaking to me like I desperately wanted, it would speak for me. Because The Leftovers has expressed all of the pain I feel, in ways I’ve never even attempted.

There was a moment in the premiere when I knew this show was different than other works I had turned to process this grief (and I had, believe me, like lots of Greek tragedy). It was the scene where Tommy, alone, takes off all his clothes and sinks to the bottom of the pool. He sits still at first, but then he begins to scream, rage intentionally muffled and anonymous. I began to cry. It was the first time since I lost my sister that I felt like someone else knew exactly how I felt. I still walk around at times screaming in my own head, even at moments when no one would imagine anything is wrong. The reality is I am always angry and sad, but I try to keep those feelings as quiet as I can. Like someone screaming alone at the bottom of a pool.

From there every episode, which I watch alone, has hit me in very personal and specific reasons, each hour ending in tears, as though these characters and what they feel have come from me directly. Each character and every new challenge defined something about my grief. Kevin’s family was destroyed, but he was trying to hold it all together for them, even while he fell apart and felt like a coward. Nora’s terror that someone missing for just an hour meant this terrible thing might have happened again was my fear every time my fiancée came home late. Meg’s anger over the world forgetting about her pain was my anger that the world had continued on and expected me to do the same. Matt believing he had to suffer to atone for sins he didn’t fully understand was my confusion over why god had done this. And a group of silent chain smokers in white stood for my belief that the world had really ended, but my guilt over still being here never would.

And all of these emotions, along with countless others the series has explored, have been conveyed in specific moments that felt as though my broken heart had created them. Often they have far darker than some might imagine, but those were the most real to me. Like when Patti told Kevin what he had done in his sleep, and he told her through tears that he didn’t want to die. In that moment it was like I was saying that to her. I don’t want to die, I just don’t always know how to live with this. His struggle between not knowing how to exist with his pain, but not wanting to die because of it, is my struggle.

Because it’s hard to exist knowing how horrible life can be and how much sadness you can experience. The unanswered questions about why gnaw away, bite by bite, while the guilt consumes in whole gulps. Knowing that a goodbye or a final word will never be shared never stops hurting. The pain can be too much.

But yet it’s that very pain that I hold on to, afraid to let it go. I fear that to be “okay,” whatever that means, would somehow be abandoning my sister. Like when Nora went to see Holy Wayne, the scene that has meant the most to me. She asked him if she did let go of her pain would she forget her children. Nora’s fear and reluctance to move forward was mine, only I had never shared that with anyone. This show knew things about me I hadn’t told anyone.

There are moments from every single episode that capture some specific aspect of how I feel, but even having seem them for three seasons I doubt I will ever be able to fully express those feelings myself. That’s why I will never be able to fully articulate why this show means so much to me. Everything The Leftovers is about what I live with every day (even its surreal, meta-physical mysteries and craziness feel more honest than traditional narratives, because life as I knew it no longer makes sense to me), so when I watch it I know I’m not alone with my grief.

I am not alone though, quite the opposite. I am lucky because I am loved by a family that tries to protect me, blessed with a patient and understanding fiancée who is more than I deserve in this life, and surrounded by many wonderful friends who gladly listen if I need them to. But sharing this much pain feels selfish. These aren’t easy emotions to express, and they are harder to carry, so how can I burden someone I love with all of it? They know I’m hurting, but they don’t have to know how much.

My griefis never lessened by sharing it, because the rare times I do I know it hurts my loved ones to know I’m in so much pain. The people most there for me are the ones I want to protect the most, so rather then finding comfort in communicating all of this with them, I feel as though I’m harming them, the very people I am trying to fight through this grief for. I want to be better so I can be better for them.

And yet my silence goes beyond even that, and that gets to the real reason The Leftovers has meant so much to me.

I worry that to speak about all of this is to somehow seek out pity. My greatest fear in writing this now is someone thinking I want sympathy. It doesn’t matter if that’s ridiculous, or that I would never think that of any loved one that came to me (quite the opposite actually), it’s just how I feel. Sharing all of this could feel like I am inviting attention and sympathy, an even more selfish act because it would be making my sister’s death about me, when it’s about her.

She deserves your sympathy. What I want is your understanding.

All I really want is for the world to understand I am not okay, and I won’t ever be. The person that carried his sister into that emergency room never left it. He too departed with her. And the person I am now was born there, amid calm doctors and nurses trying their best in vain, baptized with quiet prayers not answered, into a world of unimaginable loss and fear.

I want the world to understand all of that when they see me, to know that although I try I am not strong. I want people to be okay with that. I don’t need a hug or a kind word, I need silent understanding when I am quiet, or forgiveness when I refuse an invitation out. I want the world to know why I stay home on holidays and can’t go to my sister’s favorite places anymore.

I just want it to be okay for me not to be okay.

And that’s what The Leftovers has given me. It told me that somewhere in the world someone does understand all of this, this pain, anger, confusion, fear, terror, sadness, and hopelessness I carry, without me ever having explained any of it. For three seasons, episode by episode, the show has unraveled layer after layer of who I am, and in doing so let me know someone really does understand my pain, which is all I want.

And now, as the show leaves me, the understanding it has comforted me with has taken on even more meaning in my life, because right when this final season began I found myself back where I had started with it. The morning after our friend’s wedding, I went to my best friend’s hotel room to wake up him up, only to find that he had passed away in his sleep. He just went to bed and never woke up. For no reason his heart simply stopped. I will never understand how one moment he was there — happy, healthy, full of love — and then he wasn’t.

It has happened again, a sudden departure. I need the world to understand what that means for me now, more than ever.

And right now, when I need it to, The Leftovers final season is telling the world the most important thing I need it to know: this will never be better — I will never be better. The pain and all that comes with this kind of loss will never go away. It’s why Kevin, Nora, Laurie, Matt, Jon, and everyone else, is still suffering. It doesn’t really get better.

But while that might seem horrible to you, and a strange thing to find comfort in, the show is providing me hope in showing that reality. Because the hope is in the fight itself, the struggle to face the world every day even though I am so weakened. I am willing to put up that fight, even though I know I will never really win.

And that fight is a little bit easier now that a strange, beautiful, haunting TV show has told me the world knows the truth about me. It has let me know that it’s okay that I am not.

The Leftovers has given me that gift, by speaking for me in ways I can’t.

That’s why even though I don’t really know how to thank a television show, I have a feeling it will understand me anyway.