blog: Pieces Of Us & BUFFY, the sacred text
how Buffy The Vampire Slayer has helped me process grief (SPOILERS AHEAD)
In my experience, grief never goes away. Grief changes and manifests in different aspects of your life in different ways that surprise you. In a way, life feels like a constant practice of letting go.
Each time I perform PIECES OF US, I experience it as performing that practice of letting go for the audience so that I can create space for them to safely go to that place with me. That is a privilege but also a responsibility.
When I am offstage, I am finding that my grief is taking on new meaning for me and I need space to be held for me to engage with it and feel it in new ways. That’s where BUFFY comes in.
I watched BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER & ANGEL for the first time about a year ago. It kept coming up in conversations, I was invited to theme parties, the universe clearly wanted me to watch it. In many ways, I think it helped me finish writing PIECES OF US.
As I geared up for our EdFringe run, I decided to watch the entire show again from the beginning to carry me through the run and I am still watching as I prepare to perform the show again in October.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER has become a “sacred text” for me that I can revisit again and again to make new meaning of my grief & my life. And here’s why:
SPOILERS AHEAD:
In the first 3 seasons of BUFFY, both Buffy and Angel die, both are brought back to life, they keep saving each others life, protecting each other, and making huge personal sacrifices (including sacrificing each other) to do what’s right and to be strong for others and to save the world.
In the final episode of Season 3 Angel leaves to spare them both the pain of this constant sacrifice, risk, and to give Buffy the chance at a real relationship. I SOBBED and I barely slept the first time I watched that episode.
I realised it was because Buffy & Angels relationship reminded me of my parents (not to mention the fact that the actor who plays Angel resembles my dad as a young man).
My dad was often sick or away for work when I was growing up. My parents worked very hard to try to make life better for us, but my dad kept getting sick, and my mom kept fighting for him, advocating for him with his doctors, literally saving his life. My dad kept traveling for work, he was constantly away but he would call all the time and come home whenever he could; all he wanted was to be with us but to get out of medical debt he had to keep working. All we wanted was to be together and to have a normal life, just like Buffy & Angel.
For example, when I was 8 years old, my dad spent the summer in the hospital with an abscess on his spine, relearning how to walk after major back surgery. When I was 9 my dad got a job promotion and moved across the country so we could get on top of the medical debt we were in and my family spent an entire year apart before my mom, sister, and I could join him. My mom was left to raise us on her own with my dad away or ill a lot of the time.
They both constantly had to make personal sacrifices, to be apart, and to be strong and so did we kids. The summer we all moved, we all lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a Murphy bed; my sister and I took turns sleeping on the floor. We just wanted to be together. And we finally were, but it would not last.
SPOILERS AHEAD: Two years later, my dad passed away unexpectedly from a brain aneurism. We found his body on the couch. (If you’ve seen BUFFY you might be getting chills right about now.)
In Season 5 of BUFFY, Buffy’s mom has a brain tumour, is hospitalised, has major surgery, recovers, and then one ordinary afternoon, Buffy walks into her living room and finds her mother’s dead body on the couch. No big battle with evil, no fear, no crazy odds and no sacrifice. She was just gone. Buffy walks into the living room on a random sunny afternoon without a care when she is confronted with stone cold reality. Watching that episode felt like I was watching my own life and it felt like PTSD exposure therapy. Like Buffy, I was on the phone to the ambulance trying to walk my mom through CPR who could not move my dad because he was so much bigger than she was.
And for all of Buffy’s supernatural power, there is nothing she can do to save her mom and that profound helplessness in that episode could not have touched me more deeply.
Going back to Season 3 when Angel leaves, we see Buffy & Angel standing on opposite sides of a crowded street with ambulances, fire trucks, chaos all around them, they just look at each other, say nothing and he turns and leaves. All that sacrifice, all that love, and it can’t save them. They didn’t actually say goodbye. And neither did we. And when Buffy loses her mom in Season 5, the helplessness, the shock, it is potent. How those two moments shape Buffy throughout the rest of the series, how they inform her decisions, helps her grow stronger as a person, it gave me catharsis for aspects of my grief that I did not consciously know existed.
I sobbed a lot in those two moments, and it felt like I had just experienced the loss even after 26 years since my dad passed away. I am grateful I had the opportunity to release that part of my loss, the grief I feel for my parents, for my mom, and my dad, for the time together that they did not get to have.
That is what I want PIECES OF US to be: a “sacred text” that lets you vicariously release your own sense of loss, that holds your hand through those moments, that you can revisit again and again.