Making a choice to live with grief
The show: The Leftovers, Season 3, Episode 2 The moment: The trampoline
Nora (Carrie Coon), who lost her entire family in the Sudden Departure (2 per cent of Earth’s population vanished without explanation), is visiting Erika (Regina King), whose daughter Evie recently died.
Nora pulls up her sleeve to display a Wu-Tang Clan tattoo, which, she admits, she got to cover another tattoo: her vanished children’s names.
“It didn’t hurt, the needle,” Nora says. “It felt good.”
But just as the artist was finishing the names, Nora flashed on the rest of her life, explaining who her children were. So she had them covered.
“How are you not going crazy?” she asks Erika.
“Evie died,” Erika says. “I got to bury her.” Beat. “I bought a trampoline.”
The Wu-Tang song “Protect Ya Neck” rises on the soundtrack (“I smoke on the mic like smoking Joe Frazier”). In super-slo-mo, the women kick off their shoes and mount the trampoline. They bounce against the twilit sky.
Yesterday, I wrote that I fiercely admire The Leftovers’ focus on grief. After Sunday’s series finale, it’s clear that the show’s other focus is grief’s corollary: love. This scene is the physical manifestation of that.
We all know we’re going to die. And yet we rise every morning, make coffee, go to work. We fall in love, raise children, knowing — knowing — that we’ll lose everything.
The Sudden Departure forced this series’ characters to confront en masse what individuals confront daily.
All considered ending their lives. All chose to keep going, to live with grief. That’s the happiest ending any of us get. We choose to bounce. The Leftovers aired on HBO Canada and is available on demand. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.