Wait! You might not be a fan of the Marvel Universe. This post is still for you. You might not subscribe to Disney+ (which, to me, is only fathomable if you don’t have two kids under 10 and haven’t endured a pandemic for the past year). This post is still for you. Because it’s deep. Deep and relevant in a way that superheroes usually aren’t.
I don’t know if Wandavision was originally intended to hold up a mirror to the COVID-stricken universe, or if it just worked out that way, or if I’m just reading way too much into what I saw last week on the season finale. But suddenly the escapism of Marvel got turned on its head, and instead of trying to find a place where good always wins, the faithful among us were cast into a more complex universe, where good isn’t always good, and where grief creates entire worlds. Warning: there will be spoilers here. If you haven’t watched the Wandavision series, bookmark this page and come back once you have.
Basic context for the uninitiated: Wanda’s a witch who creates an entire world out of some weird combination of her imagination and her grief so that she can be reunited with Vision, another superhero whom she loves, and whom she watched die twice. (It’s best not to question these things…) It turns out she has remarkable powers, stronger than even she knew, and that the depths of her grief in losing Vision caused an emotional outburst that essentially creates a world from scratch. She didn’t mean to create the world. It just sort of happened as she let out a primal scream of anguish.
And therein lies the power of Wandavision. We have all lost something this past year. Some of us have lost vacations and the ability to go grocery shopping in person. Some of us have lost loved ones. And it has all led to a form of collective grieving, a global sense of loss mirrored by the unfathomable grieving that Wanda endures after losing her parents, then her brother, then Vision.
Wanda’s solution -- maybe your solution too? -- is to wall off the grief. To shove it aside, to deny it, to live life as if everything is normal. The entire season is essentially an unravelling of this strategy, a commentary on the inevitability of confronting and moving through our grief.
So just how do we cope with the magnitude of loss we’ve endured for the past year? Without being overwhelmed by it?
There’s a line in the penultimate episode that probably belongs in a psychology textbook, or a Brene Brown video. And I think it’s probably how we start. When Wanda is talking to Vision about the loss of her brother, she says that she feels like she’s being battered by waves, and that every time she stands up, she’s just going to keep getting knocked down. She’s having trouble finding the courage to go on. Vision assures her that she will endure, and then asks, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”
What is grief, if not love persevering?
Maybe there’s a sense of what we’ve lost that remains somehow within us, first as grief, and then, as it fades, maybe loneliness or emptiness, and then maybe gratitude for the experience we were fortunate enough to have, and then maybe fondness for what it meant to us, and then maybe it just becomes integrated into our patterns of thinking and feeling, essentially transforming and living on in us. It makes me happy to think about love persevering in that way.
The trauma of this past year is unusual, because it’s not a one-and-done sort of event. It just keeps going. And so many of us, in order to keep going ourselves, have had to “compartmentalize,” or keep the sense of loss at a distance so we can perform the duties asked of us everyday.
What Wandavision reminds us is that we don’t necessarily have to wall off the grief to deal with it. There’s another path: the path of working through it, step by step -- some of them painful, but always forward. Digging through the pain and sadness to the love that lies buried beneath it. And finally, resting in the wisdom that this love is more powerful, and more enduring, than the sense of loss it produced.
Try this guided practice for more on loss and working through it.
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