This Is Really Us, Huh
On grief, synchronicities, God, and God TV
God spoke to me through television — he shown his face to me through the entirety of the 2016-2022 TV drama This Is Us, in increments of 106 episodes, for a whopping total of 3 days and 37 minutes of watch time.
Okay, maybe not exactly, but I am not being facetious either. I do believe that God speaks to us through the world around us, revealing to us exactly what we need to see and hear at different periods in our lives, and every once in a while, that can come through television (and other forms of media). I am not saying that This Is Us was divinely inspired (well, actually, who am I to say). It was the parallels in the show compared to what has been happening in my own family life that felt like a spiritual experience to me.
Watching the show for the past two months gave me the gift of processing my own emotions as they also related to these fictional characters’ lives. I had no idea what the show was about when I initially started it. I was sitting on my mom’s couch while a number of family members moseyed about the house, and This Is Us popped up on my Netflix recommendations, the words “heartfelt” “family” “life” and “loss” hit me and I just clicked. Most of my clicking about on the internet doesn’t feel like the result of divine guidance at all — a lot of my impulsive clicking feels more related to my experience as a recovering social media addict — but watching this show, at this time, felt divinely guided to me.
This is going to contain spoilers if you, like me, begin the show any time past two years after the final season ended. But that’s not really the point of this. The synchronicities are what really struck me.
About two months ago, my stepdad tragically, suddenly, heartbreakingly died in an accident while he was working at a power plant in Arizona. There’s news about the accident on KTVU Fox 2, and elsewhere. My family is going through a lot of grief, and I don’t really want to process the details of that loss in this medium right now. I’m just going to stick to how I have related to the show.
With the show: I quickly realize, oh my God, one of the central themes is the love of fathers, and fathers dying. What the fuck. We learn early on that the Dad we’re falling in love with is going to die, and we don’t yet know what happened. We just keep watching and loving him. After he dies, we do the same thing — we just keep watching and loving him.
No part of me at all thought, “Maybe this is too soon, I probably shouldn’t be watching this.” I felt like the show was placed before me at the exact moment I needed to process the shock and disbelief of what I am going through with my family via another family’s drama. When I realized This Is Us would be about this I just thought, wow, this couldn’t be any more timely (actually I just started sobbing, but that was the thought behind the sobbing — the movement of big ass grief within us as it alchemizes with the feeling of God reaching his hand towards us through his many ways of sending messages to us).
There were all these little details too — the crescent moon necklace the mother (Rebecca) wore throughout the entire show, and the crescent moon necklace my mom wore during my stepdad’s celebration of life; some sentiments Sylvester Stallone said about the death of loved ones during his cameo in Season 2 Episode 3, and a Rocky Balboa quote my stepdad sent to my stepsister while she was at bootcamp that she printed out for his memorial; an episode about the family purchasing a Jeep Wagoneer, and my stepsister’s family renting a Jeep Wagoneer while they were in town for the celebration of life; Rebecca’s Alzheimers diagnosis and eventual death, and my grandmother dying this year after years living with dementia; adoptions and the dual loves of adoptive and biological families, and the adoptive and biological lineage of my maternal family; synchronicities with song lyrics (like “I love my father and I love him well / I hope to see him someday soon” “If I didn't tell you I'm afraid of dying” “And as I dream I'm falling down”); happening upon the Thanksgiving episodes (okay there were a lot of Thanksgiving episodes but still) during Thanksgiving this year; landing on Christmas episodes during Christmas this year, and so many other parallels I stopped keeping track of.
There have been other synchronicities, signs, whatever you want to call them that I’ve noticed since my stepdad’s accident outside of the show too. They always feel right in my face, not subtle or cryptic at all. Something on the outside gives some kind of obvious message while on the inside I feel a spiritually meaningful kind of wind. They’re happening all around us all the time, and I’ve been feeling them more prominently lately. Grief kicks us down hard, and the death of our most significant loved ones thins the veil between the world and otherworldly a little bit more. Through experience, faith, reflection, and hope, I am coming around to believing this. Even if what I have shared doesn’t seem significant at all as I write these to you, it’s the significance of feeling, of exact right timing, that feels the most like a nudge from the great spirit of the universe that he is with us during our most trying, darkest times. And that after our loved ones’ deaths, as we carry this life-long heartbreak, we just keep watching and loving them.
