TV Becomes Different After a Significant Loss
The collective experience of tragedy is cathartic
Grief does weird things to us, doesn’t it? It’s such a twisted mind game.
My first few months of grief were dark but somehow I developed a desire to go even darker. It was like a monster that needed to be fed.
That’s when I found myself plunging headfirst into tragedy and true-crime TV because it oddly made me feel better knowing others had been through worse.
Sounds pretty sick, doesn’t it?
If you’re looking for sadness and tragedy, Netflix and Prime know precisely which rabbit holes to drag you down into. The vastness of it is oddly cathartic.
It’s shocking how many documentaries are based on real-life trauma, tragedy, and misfortune. I’d sit for hours upon hours (upon MORE hours) watching them all.
I developed a brief addiction to tragedy.
Lord knows there’s enough of it in this world.
Whether real life stories or drama-based TV, there’s plenty to go around and when you’re dwelling in your own house of grief it completely changes the way you experience television.
Take Titanic, for instance. I’ve seen it a dozen times and it was on TV again the other night.
Before grief, Titanic was pretty much a love story to me. But during grief it became a one-on-one journey toward calamity and the inevitable demise of each and every human that plummeted to their death.
Regardless of whether the movie was a dramatization, everyone aboard the ship experienced that terror in real life.
The TV clinchers for me are true crime documentaries. Average, everyday people who suffered through violence and fear before death.
I can’t help but put myself in the position of their families knowing what the victims went through in their last moments of life. I’m not sure I’d even know where to begin dealing with that kind of grief.
Theirs makes mine seem easy.
The one thing drama-based TV can offer the bereaved is comfort.
Drama writers seem to approach death from an angle that gives us hope. Hope that the transition of our loved ones is a peaceful completion of a journey.
Just last night I watched the second last episode in the final season of This Is Us. If you don’t know the series I highly recommend it.
Without going into detail, the episode offers the suggestion that when a loved one crosses over, first they’re given the opportunity to connect with those they’re leaving behind and then with loved ones who have passed on before them.
As I watched it I could only hope my son’s transition was as peaceful and fulfilling as TV makes it out to be.
I don’t know if this is the same for everyone but for me, the way I experience TV is significantly different now.
I genuinely feel the human stories far more than I ever have in the past. Especially if bereaved parents are involved.
FYI: Do NOT watch The Shack after losing a child. You’re not ready for it (big mistake on my part!)
Yea, when I go through various kinds of loss, I used to binge watch tragedy shows after shows. I am not sure if it's due to wanting to feel I'm not alone, or trying to find some situations "worser" than I, as I knew in my head, (not heart), that gratitude is the end goal out of grief. But it takes time.
These days, I resort to watching comedy drama, or syfy stuff.
Haven't watch the Shack, been so busy and overwhelmed.. I just want to sit by the ocean all day and stare or at the white blank wall.
Boy howdy, are you right. Watching TV became a completely different experience after my husband died — especially the medical shows when someone's heart stopped and Our Heroes had to apply the paddles. I'd never before registered just how many scenes there are like that in any given week of television. For a long time I closed my eyes during those moments — but I never changed the channel. You're right; it became a way to kind of re-experience something of what I'd been through, but at a safer remove. And the calamities that continually beset TV characters make you feel, when you're going through grief, kind of normal by comparison.