Grief chores – part 3

(Not sure what I’m on about? Check out part 1 and part 2.)

I haven’t watched Star Trek in nearly six months.

That may not seem like much, but it’s probably the longest stretch in my life since the age of six, when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987. (That wasn’t 35 years ago. No, you’re old.) I’m not the dress-up-as-a-Klingon kind of fan, but I’ve caught every episode since then—and in the Netflix era it’s been one of my go-to shows to have on in the background when I’m doing housework. My wife and I watched every new episode together, starting with the last few episodes of Enterprise in 2005, and then moving on to Discovery and Picard as they aired in the last few years, with binges of every older series in between.

Both of those series have now started airing new episodes for the first time since she died. And although I really want to see them, I also really, really don’t want to watch them. It’s “our show”, which we’d never watch by ourselves; we’d always record the episodes and wait for the other person to be free. It might seem silly, but it’s not a trivial thing—I just can’t watch them by myself.

Which brings me to Worden’s third task of grief: adjusting to a reality without your loved one. It’s a subtle distinction from “accepting the reality of the loss” (task the first), but experiences like my Star Trek conundrum really highlight the difference. I’m under no illusions that my late wife will be showing up to binge watch the latest season with me, but still, there’s an internal conflict there. I have to either give up Star Trek (not going to happen) or get used to a new way of watching it (grumble).

I’ve been thinking about Worden’s tasks of grief in the context of my kid’s grief, looking at them as “grief chores” for both of us to work on together. His “Star Trek” is a Nintendo Switch game, “Yoshi’s Crafted World”, which he and his mom used to play together all the time while she was on palliative care. At first I thought (with, I admit, mild irritation) that he was doing way better on this grief chore than me: he still loves to play the game, now with me picking up the second controller. He’s having a great time replaying the levels that weren’t his mom’s favourites, and tackling some of the bosses that she didn’t enjoy, as they didn’t play those levels as often.

Ay, but there’s the rub: it dawned on me that he hasn’t played any of her favourite levels since she died. They could spend a solid hour running around that one level with the train, or the one where you ride on the back of a giant puppy. He would collect the same flowers over and over while the two of them cackled with glee as they tossed eggs at each other. (Virtual eggs, of course. We don’t get that competitive with our gaming.) However, the train and puppy haven’t made an appearance in six months.

So there’s one of his grief chores hiding in plain sight. It serves as a good reminder to me that I can’t take his grief at face value: it’s complicated and it’s mixed right in with all of his healing. Eventually, he’ll fire up the train level again, and a little more progress will have been made on grief chore #3. And eventually, I’ll check out the last season of Discovery. Maybe I’ll start with 1987’s “Encounter at Farpoint” and work my way back through all the various series again – that’ll only give me 656 episodes to get used to this, but it’s worth a shot.