by Marilyn Lorehound
Origins
When David first asked me to join him and Nicole of Nevermind the Music for a podcast episode on Severance, he knew I was not watching the series. But he also thought that episode seven was something of a bottle episode, self–contained, and that it dealt with important themes: ego, spiritual practices, and grief. He did me the honor of saying he thought I would have much to say about grief. So, I watched episode seven and was confirmed in my decision not to watch the rest of the series, given how it intersected too painfully with some personal experiences around medical treatment and such! But I was truly amazed at the rich conversation the three of us could have, which can be found in the “Supply Closet” section of Severance Podcasts.
It took me a while to find a connection with religion, as there were only a few references to it. Still, the spirituality became more apparent as I took my usual afternoon walk and thought about what I had just watched. What really struck home for me, though, as David knew it would, was the grief and how it was and was not attended to. So, here are some of my thoughts about Severance, spirituality, and grief in both a religious and a non–religious context.
Concepts
My conception of spirituality has been influenced in the past five years by the writings and talks of Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation. It seems many people are leaving organized religions who still feel a strong need for a contemplative life. Even those who remain in their churches, synagogues, mosques, or temples may find that their spirituality is not attended to in the formal services or in the theology. As a result, few folks know or understand what healthy spirituality looks like and how we can connect with it outside of an enclosed spiritual order.
Richard Rohr pointed out that healthy spirituality teaches the ability to live at the circumference and at the center, not either/or but both/and. The more we can live at the center, the more we are genuinely connected to ourselves, to others, and to Love. However, we cannot live exclusively at the center; we must be able to live at the edges to reach out to others. It is a continuous spiral dance from the edge to the center and from the center to the edge.
Rohr writes that healthy spirituality consists of both good psychology and good anthropology. Hating oneself, even “just” parts of oneself, is not good psychology. Even the notion of getting rid of “bad” parts of ourselves is not healthy. It is difficult to love our neighbors as ourselves if we don’t love ourselves as we are, healthy and unhealthy. In fact, it took me till my 30s to figure out that if I had been loving my neighbors as I’d been loving myself for all that while, it was a wonder that they hadn’t risen and murdered me a long time ago! When I first heard about “kill your ego” in the late 60s and early 70s, as Western cultures were beginning to explore Eastern spiritual practices, my first thought was, “Could I please develop a healthy ego first before I think about killing it?”
And it is not good anthropology (nor good psychology, for that matter) to participate in a spirituality that identifies an in-group in an out-group, or innies and outies, if you’d like! Even hierarchies can be dangerous, depending upon how they’re used, and it seems that many organized religions set themselves up with unhealthy hierarchies or hierarchies that are used in unhealthy ways.
This also does not suit the both/and pattern of moving back and forth between the edges and the center, including them both rather than trying to live exclusively in one or the other. If a group is only defined in terms of what it is not, it will be resisted vigorously whenever a small challenge arises. For years, boys were told that they shouldn’t “throw like a girl, “cry like a girl,” or “dress like a girl” if they wanted to be “men.”
Naturally, when the second wave of feminism got going, and women were discovering their own ability to enact “mannish” qualities and were saying that men and women were far more alike than they were different, this elicited a strong negative response because it was digging at their very foundation of gender definition. If being a man means not being a woman, and you tell me that we aren’t all that different, then what am I? The both/and answer is human - yet we still cling to an “us/them” approach.
Applications
Turning to Severance, I found it striking that Gemma was having more and more flashes of her outside life with Mark at the time when Mark was recovering from being “unsevered” (if that’s the correct term). I think this could make a case for the spiritual connection of love, which is also a core tenet of most spiritual practices. However, it may be named or understood. And love is almost inevitably a foundation for grief because it is inevitable that one will lose all that one loves, whether through abandonment, the death of others, or their death.
Religious and spiritual communities have developed many rituals and practices around grief, which indicate its profound impact on most humans. Our culture is very bad at teaching us how to grieve as individuals. The existing rituals can provide a container, but the actual practice, the spiritual practice of acknowledging the pain, sitting with it, and allowing it to heal in its own time, goes on for a lifetime; it is cyclical, not linear. And it seems that many ritual practices are about separating the grieved person from the rest of the community, almost as if grief were infectious, which is a pity. At the least, it reminds us that we will all experience loss, particularly if we have been fortunate enough to experience love.
The Jewish practice of sitting Shiva* involves actions acknowledging the depth of the event that has overtaken one and ensuring communal support that, in effect, says, “Now is the time for you to mourn, to grieve. It is hard work. We will support you in that work.” The difficulty may come when one realizes that not everyone wishes to deal with their pain in the same way.
Wearing black to demarcate oneself from others seems to reflect that notion of grief as being infectious. However, it can also offer a message that one is in a different place now and cannot be expected to respond as they did before. Social isolation, often for set periods of time, with appropriate gradations of clothing color as time passes, was the meat and drink of Victorian mourning in that culture, emphasized by Queen Victoria. It would’ve been a scandal for any woman to have appeared in society for the first year after the death of her husband. She was expected to wear black for at least a year and then maybe shift into dark purple. Once again, there may be feelings of isolation and acknowledgment without any personalized approach.
Other communal rituals of mourning may offer a celebration of life, of acknowledging that losing one member of the community means a loss to the whole community because of the broken web of connection that love forms. Again, this is helpful, but it speaks little to the personal journey that one must undertake when one has suffered a loss.
All of these are spiritual practices in that they may be said to admit the existence of a spirit that is no longer part of the community in physical form. Burning bodies, burial, and other means of removing the physical manifestation from the culture are common, but one also finds cultures that treasure the skulls (or other remnants) of their ancestors. I have been watching all the seasons of Voyager for the first time and was reminded of an episode that showed how easy it is to misunderstand other cultures’ practices around death, grieving, and beliefs about a soul. These personalized practices are specific to the individual and the community; once again, that both/and movement from edges to center and back.
Outcomes
So, when Mark and Gemma are faced with the need to mourn the loss of a child, there is little or nothing in their split lives that will support them in that which I can see. Gemma weeps in the shower, the water “crying” with her. Does Mark ever weep? (I am told he does in other episodes; remember, this is the only episode I’ve seen!) That unattended sorrow, that spiritual wound, gets between them and eats at their loving connections, a not uncommon occurrence for any couple after the death of a child. It seems to me that it’s not simply their personalities and memories, but their very souls or spirits that have been split, and that seeps into the rest of their lives together, or as they may be said to be. Neither of them appears to have what could be called a “center,” lacking that wholeness impedes any genuine connection (another definition for spirituality).
And yet, even so, it was clear that they could love as outies, and that was powerful enough that their innies did not forget it, even with the ghastly treatments they were undergoing. Gemma rebels against losing her feelings. Mark has a flash of her looking at Chikhai Bardo cards, which include the notion of fighting oneself. Gemma practices tai chi in the treatment center, a physical and spiritual form of finding one’s center. She rejects the information and the training when a doctor tells her Mark is happily remarried with a daughter. Minds and memories may be severed, but the spirit remains.
*Many thanks to Nicole for describing this for us during the podcast! I hope that she will feel that I paraphrased her properly.