Just before my dad died last summer, before a two-week hospital stay that was supposed to cure him of a bacterial infection, I had been looking forward to a good old fashioned TV binge-watch.
Neil Gaiman’s adaptation of his dark mythical masterpiece, The Sandman, was about to drop on Netflix. I’m a huge fan of the graphic novels. But grief for my dad killed my enthusiasm for the show — all except for episode 6, which I found myself playing multiple times as a source of solace. “The Sound of Her Wings” shows Dream tagging along with his sister, Death: a kinder, gentler grim reaper, warmly empathetic towards the departed even as she departs them.
One scene, new for the show, landed like onions in my eyes every time I watched. A man on his honeymoon tries to tell Death he needs one more minute of life, please — not for himself, but to give his wife the passcode on his phone, so she can access the plane tickets that will take her home.
My dad’s health had degraded so swiftly, he hadn’t a chance to tell my mother the passcode to his laptop, with all their financial details on it. I managed to hack into the thing while she and my sister planned a funeral that we hoped approximated his unknown wishes.
Something about seeing a similar situation play out on screen, even for the length of a scene, was profoundly helpful. We don’t often think of visual fiction as part of the treatment for grief, but perhaps we should — especially in the wake of the sudden death of über-dad Logan Roy in Succession.
Oh yes, little did I know last summer when my dad died what was coming down the pike: an hour of parental grief television that would make the tears I shed over “The Sound of Her Wings” look like the Hudson river next to the Atlantic.
More surprising: This time the emotional roller coaster would not come courtesy of an empathetic grim reaper, but some of the most unlikeable characters on TV.
By now, you probably don’t need telling that “Connor’s Wedding” (what is it with HBO and deaths during weddings?) has been universally hailed as one of the greatest episodes of the year, the decade, possibly all time. I’m hardly alone in feeling it hit home.
Anyone who lost a loved one during COVID lockdowns, and had to improvise goodbyes over speakerphones, might find the parallels in this episode too painful to bear. Anyone who has witnessed death on a plane knows that the episode has it right: the crew are legally required to continue performing chest compressions until they land or are too exhausted. And anyone who’s ever lost a parent recognizes the reality-collapsing feelings captured here.
Despite the fact that this is likely just a pause in the parade of Roy family awfulness — Kendall may yet “go on a killing spree in a 7-Eleven” and Roman could end up getting his “dick stuck in an AI jerk machine,” as Shiv recently predicted — our hearts were gutted. But why, exactly?
It’s not that “Connor’s Wedding” is the first TV episode to show in excruciating realtime the experience of suddenly losing a parent. It shares a surprising amount of DNA with its distant ancestor, “The Body,” a 2001 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which our hero loses her beloved mom not to a supernatural enemy, but to a brain aneurysm.
That episode’s use of off-kilter framing and choppy editing to convey Buffy’s sense of vertigo, after coming home to find her mom’s cold body, was innovative at the time, and still holds up on a rewatch.
So what is it that makes us feel like “Connor’s Wedding” has captured the experience of loss in a bottle like nothing before? Several reviewers, including my former colleague James Poniewozik at the New York Times, have suggested that the characters inhabit the famous stages of grief outlined by psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
I’d amend that, especially considering that the science of grief has moved on from the Kubler-Ross model. (A big part of my grieving process: research.) Rather, it shows how all of those stages smash into each other, messily and with great force, like vast ocean waves, overlapping, pulling us down with the undertow, and the only thing that can save us is to hold on to each other.
It is the particular genius of this episode to make the viewer feel this shock of conflicting emotions alongside the characters.
Start with the setup, which primes us to expect the continuity of a regular Succession episode. Nothing in last week’s trailer, nor the title, nor the cold open, seems out of the ordinary. Logan is up to his old tricks with Roman, testing his most loving son’s loyalty by asking him to fire Gerri, the highly competent CEO of his company Waystar Royco. Logan is also planning to fire the head of ATN (read: Fox) News. He flies to Sweden to renegotiate his deal with the tech giant GoJo and is, with casual cruelty, going to miss the wedding of his first son.
Each one of these narrative threads could sustain an entire season. We have no idea they are all about to be cut short in episode 3.
Yes, Logan had some wistful existential moments in episode 1 of the new series, but in episode 2 he roared like a lion in the offices of ATN, which he was set to run himself once the deal went through. He had big, if vague, plans. Yes, his death was likely to happen by the end of this, the final season of a show that has always been about which of his children would succeed him. The character is 84 years old, and has had a series of health scares going back to his stroke in the very first episode of season 1.
But that’s the thing about postponing your appointment with Death — once you do it a few times, you almost start to seem immortal. Rupert Murdoch, on whose family struggles Succession seems largely based, has literally said that about himself: “I’m now convinced of my own immortality,” he declared after beating prostate cancer decades ago.
That’s according to a shocking new profile in Vanity Fair that calls Murdoch “a nonagenarian intent on living forever” — despite, or because of, having recently suffered “a broken back, seizures, two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation, and a torn Achilles tendon.”
My family wasn’t immune to this kind of magical thinking either. My dad had his first heart attack at 40, a second in his 50s, a stroke at 60, and a cancer that he’d beaten back by 70. His second cancer diagnosis did not look good, but nobody, not even him, expected this mighty oak to be felled by a simple infection prior to chemo.
You can see something similar happening over the course of Succession’s four seasons. Compare “Connor’s Wedding” with the second episode of the show, “Shit Show at the Fuck Factory.” Post-stroke Logan is in a hospital, on a ventilator, expected to die, with his family already mourning and his executives planning for the worst.
But he bounces back from that and other health scares, more full of fury and more manipulative each time. So kids and company are caught flat-footed when Death comes calling in a bathroom at 30,000 ft. “You’re going to be OK because you’re a monster and you always win,” Roman says over the phone to a body that may or may not still have Logan’s consciousness in it.
At first we the audience are right there with him, in denial. It’s almost as if an actor has collapsed on stage in mid-speech. Wait, weren’t we watching an episode about a wedding, two firings and a key meeting? Surely they won’t derail a plot this massive. It could be a test, right? That would be so Logan, who had just one episode prior had tried to manipulate his kids with an apology of dubious sincerity.
Throwing Logan’s status into doubt allowed us to see the Roy family raging against the dying of his light — something strikingly familiar even if you’ve only struggled with a sick parent. When Kendall told his assistant Jess to put together a conference call with the world’s top experts in fields including “airplane medicine,” I couldn’t help but remember my own floundering frustration that my dad’s cancer care was not being coordinated, or moving swiftly enough, or that he wouldn’t take the supplements I’d researched.
In a world where we carry connected supercomputers in our pockets, you don’t have to have the wealth or connections of the Roys to believe science and technology can stop your loved ones from dying. Or to be furious when they can’t.
My dad, to be clear, was not Logan. His politics were the polar opposite of Murdochian, his senses of humor and moral justice were vital. He cared deeply about the environment. He was northern English, not Scottish; a local lawyer, not an international businessman; jokingly self-censoring, not sweary as fuck.
But he shared a few traits, as well as more than a few sweaters, with the fictional mogul. He was stoic on the surface and gruffly suspicious of many things outside of his world view. He could convey disapproval with a hard stare and a cold silence that I would often, well into my 30s, find myself babbling to fill like I was cousin Greg.
Weird thoughts and weird reactions permeate our grief, like Kerry’s ridiculously inappropriate smiling. We puncture the tension with dark humor, like Kendall and Roman telling each other “you are so fucked.” (Touring quirky woodland burial sites, my sister and I often found ourselves doubled up with laughter at what other inhabitants had written on their gravestones.) We try to conceal our irritation at trite but necessary social statements like “sorry for your loss.” (My loss? I often wanted to shoot back. Why isn’t it also your loss?)
Words become inadequate. Sentences collapse in on themselves. We reach for meaning but it all comes out wrong. The Roys are in the midst of a dozen high-drama plot threads, and now they matter so little their self-interest is just operating on autopilot. Nobody can think of the right thing to say, or even the right way to hug.
This, on my successive viewings of “Connor’s Wedding”, seems the most oh-so-real aspect of the script: fragments of dialogue all over the place. The last words of the episode are “Okay. Okay. So…yeah. Okay.” Just before that, Shiv begs Tom to tell her what happened, again, from the beginning, and that is one of multiple attempts by the characters to piece it all together. That’s what we do with the end of a life we’ve been watching obsessively. We recap with fellow followers like it’s an episode review.
Last words, likewise, are often muddied and messy. We’ll never know what Logan’s were. Before my father died, I’d imagined we would at least have time to say all the words so rarely said in his stoic world. But as it turned out, my last in-person words — as I was about to fly back from the UK, days before his infection sent him to the hospital — were “I’ll be back.”
“Arnie said that,” he smiled.
“And he was!”
Roman could have been with Logan on the plane had he abandoned his duty to his brother. I could have simply stayed with my dad had I abandoned my duties in the U.S. I’ll never stop regretting that I didn’t. His last text exchange with me was ten days later. The only part I’m sure he saw and understood was as follows:
“Blood pressure and oxygen level were low but now stable.”
”Texting levels also stable! Are they keeping you in?”
“Probably.”
It may not have the drama of Roman anguishing over whether the last words of his that his father heard were “are you a cunt?” But I felt it hard when, minutes later, Roman slumped to the ground, recapping everything he’d babbled into the phone, and said, “I think I said I love him, right?”
Fact check: He had not.
Take it from me, Roman: You will have to get comfortable begging Death, every day you have left, for just one more minute of time with the complicated, beloved departed.
