Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. (Mt 5:4)
The annoying thing about my sister is that she’s a year younger than I am but infinitely wiser. So when she speaks, I pay attention. Especially when she has recommendations for TV shows, since she was the one who convinced me to watch Friday Light Nights in what became a seminal moment in my personal development. So when she repeatedly told me I had to watch The Pitt, I knew I was in for a multi-hour time commitment. Warning: spoilers ahead.
I binged the show in a few days and came away awed, having witnessed much more than the ER: Reboot I’d expected. Particularly impressive was that the relentless action didn’t outpace the character development: each hour’s narrative was equally plot and character driven. I could go on forever about Dr. King and her accurately neurodivergent-coded tendencies (well done to the creators for casting a neurodivergent actress in that role and in the role of her autistic sister). Then there are how things played out between Dr. Langdon and Dr. Robby.
The genius behind how these characters were drawn out lies in the space made for their own nuance; neither could be considered all bad or all good. But when the truth comes out about how each deals with struggle, their paths diverge. Langdon, it turns out, has been stealing meds from the hospital to alleviate the pain of a prior injury. He emphasizes all that he is not — namely, an addict — and cannot stop calling the hospital once he’s dismissed, his questions centering his own future before he, in a final confrontation with Dr. Robby, goes into full offensive mode and launches an attack on the latter’s stability after word gets out that Robby was seen in questionable shape in the pediatric unit.
For his part, Dr. Robby’s not accessorizing with a halo: he has a few exes lying around, an occasional a short fuse, and a dubious (but effective) method of convincing a parent to get his son treated. On the other hand, he’s still processing the death of his mentor from COVID a few years ago, and the particular day featured in this season of the show (each of the fifteen episodes covers one hour of that day) is the anniversary of the death. Cut to Robby dissolving into a puddle of grief on the floor of the pediatric unit in a moment of “weakness.”
See, Robby cries. A lot. And he instructs the rest of the team to do the same after the terrible day they’ve had (a day involving everything from rogue mice to a mass casualty event) because tears are “grief leaving the body.” Add this to what we know from WandaVision about grief — that it is “love persisting” — and I had a lot to process when hour fifteen ended.
One of the gifts my counselor Gordon gave me was the ability to mourn the space between how things are and how they should be. He talked about it constantly because, it turns out, this space is a constant reality. There was a time in my life when, without even recognizing this space, I was nonetheless angry about it: injustices abounded all around me, and most were due to things not working out the way I’d planned for myself. My outrage had to do with a future I created. I think that often, when we don’t properly grieve that space, we can’t let our plans be replaced by the reality God wants to give us — how things actually should be. Avoiding grief distances us from our own longing, and in doing so separates us from both our humanity and that of others. Avoiding grief leads us to either dehumanize or idolize others through an inaccurate assessment of that humanity. And so the distance between people grows: action in the form of distraction minus the character development provided by grieving.
When he taught me to grieve, Gordon primed my heart for everything that has come since, which has mostly consisted of everything I never planned. In other words, real life. This grieving broke down the walls around my heart that self-defense and outrage built and allowed me to be open to the beauty and pain of a full experience of grace. The vulnerability that both precedes and follows true encounters with this grace has brought me back into touch with everything that breaks God’s heart, because it now breaks mine as I grapple and grieve more now than I ever have.
In his foreword to animal behaviorist Temple Grandin’s memoir, Thinking in Pictures, Oliver Sacks refers to autistic people like Grandin as having “a special sort of insight or courage.” One thing I’ve learned from being embedded in the disabled community in general and the autism community in particular (which is something I never planned for myself) is how real that courage is. People like these, who are consistently overlooked, spoken over, and relegated to the outskirts — are well acquainted with their own longing over the space between how things are and how they should be, since that space is a gaping chasm when the world is not set up to accommodate your brain differences. My own son has heard that his existence is an epidemic, and that the differences in his brain constitute a horror show. When faced with that kind of language and perspective, everything can feel like an uphill climb in a foreign country.
When we sit with others who reside in the chasm between their God-given worth and the pain heaped on them by this world and — rather than demonizing or idolizing them — choose to grieve alongside them, grace has a channel directly through the parts of our hearts broken by grief. This grace speaks into our own wounds and knits us to those alongside whom we long for more on the pediatric unit floors of our own lives. Which means our grief is bigger and deeper than ever — but so is our capacity for joy, because recognizing together all that we don’t yet see is not just grief, but the beginning of hope.
So good ♥️