On Gilmore Girls and Grief

I recently binged Gilmore Girls, and if I was still going to therapy, watching the show would be considered a breakthrough moment. Do you remember the revival? Ten years after the series finale, Netflix and the original creators put together a four-part limited series.

It was entitled “Gilmore Girls: A year in the life.“ The show premiered on November 25, 2016, it was a Friday. I was working that day, I remember having cases on but staying late in the office calling insurance companies to see if it would be possible to airlift someone from a rural hospital in Haiti to a hospital in South Florida. The answer was no. Even in the best of times the answer would have been no, but weeks after a major hurricane had ravaged the city where I was born turning both runways at the airport into swamps, the answers was a strong no. On Saturday November 26th, I was in the middle of watching the first episode, at the precise scene with Richard’s (the beloved if stodgy grandfather to to Rory) funeral when I got the call that my dad died.

My father's death came as a surprise. He never felt indestructible, but had the precise air of a survivor woven into his skin. He was the kind of guy who might lose a fight but he would always go down swinging. When I thought of him dying, it was always after he had grandkids to spoil. Little girls he would teach how to fold their fists into punches, making sure to use their other hand to guard their face. If they were small, he would teach them how to fight dirty like he taught me. When in doubt, go for the eyes, it's hard to hit what you can't see. I imagined my father being a jovial grandfather who would bribe his grandkids with candy and stories to pluck the gray hairs from his head, before giving up and finally shaving it bald. Instead, he got sick on a Tuesday and made it to the ancestral plane by Saturday morning.

I got the call while grieving with the Gilmore family that I so loved in my adolescence, and found myself caught up in an irony. So I never finished the episode or watched the rest of the revival, or any of the seasons for that matter since that day in 2016. Avoiding anything Gilmore Girls—and the accompanying grief it triggered—was like skipping a crack in the sidewalk. At first it was a deep and wide trench, and now it remains a deep but now a much thinner crack.

So over the past few days I have been weirdly thinking of my pops.

And water.

My pops had a country-ass Haitian habit of driving to the beach to swim at sunrise. And the love of the sun casting a pink sky as it rises from the ocean must have been genetic. This is the first summer in a very long time that I haven’t spent at least a bit of time with my feet in a body of water—a dilemma to be rectified soon—and that’s had me thinking of my dad. That feeling finally led me to watching Gilmore girls for the first time since I needed to rely on his memories instead of his presence.

So I binge watched Gilmore girls, and I thought of 2006 And my sister going away to college & how quiet life sounded that summer. I remembered sitting in my dad’s Mazda on the way home from the beach, listening to a Norah Jones cd he permanently “borrowed” from me. The windows were down, there was a pink sky and a breeze blowing through the palm trees on A1A. It’s funny the things you remember. How love and grief both move in waves. How they can lick at the edge of the sand, or come crashing at the banks. How sometimes standing still in the howling winds, watching the tides come in, can remind you why you’re here.