On Grief and Still Believing in Happy Endings

“I think you know how to love better than any of us. That’s why you find it all so painful.” – Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag

It’s no secret that Fleabag is one of my favorite comfort shows. I relate so much to her character and the grief of losing loved ones, struggling with my self-worth, and feeling as if I’ve spent my entire life making all the wrong choices.

While I certainly have my moments of darkness, though, there is this little light inside of me that can’t quite be extinguished.

Sometimes it feels like delusion. At times it’s almost desperation.

But most days, that tiny light flickers with something more like hope.

I want to believe in the happily ever after, even if I don’t always believe I’ll ever experience it. Maybe that’s why I write them. Maybe that’s my meager attempt at keeping the little flame alight, at creating the happily ever after I’m not so sure I’ll get.

I’m sure if I admitted this to my therapist, she’d tell me this is somehow connected to my inner child and my lifelong attachment to fairytales and knights saving princesses and vilified dragons who turn out to be the real heroes of the story. I’ve never been able to stop believing in the stories where the evil is defeated and everyone finds their true love to ride off into the sunset with.

As jaded as I am, as hopeless as grief makes me feel at times, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to stop.

Or that I’ll want to.

More than that, I’m sure that Dream of Me won’t be the only story I write where a woman is putting her life back together again. Maybe that’s part of my grieving process, writing story after story of second chance love and happily ever afters until I believe it can really happen for me, too.

I just have all of this love inside of me, all this love that I feel like I give and give and give, and I desperately want someone to love me like that in return, to love me in the way I want and need to be loved.

It reminds me of another scene in Fleabag that has begun to take on a new meaning for me. It’s after the mother’s death where Fleabag is talking to her best friend, Boo, as she sobs.

Fleabag – “I don’t know what to do with it.”

Boo – “With what?”

Fleabag – “With all the love I have for her. I don’t know where to put it now.”

Boo – “I’ll take it.”

Fleabag laughs.

Boo – “No, I’m serious. It sounds lovely. I’ll have it. You have to give it to me.”

Flebag – “Okay.”

Boo – “It’s gotta go somewhere.”

I think in the past I’ve seen that as such a beautiful way to grieve and love together, something that ultimately makes Boo’s death later that much harder for Fleabag to recover from.

But I’m starting to see it differently now.

Because you can’t pour all of your love into other people. It’s simply too much, and it can’t go into the people around you. People are too impermanent to hold it all. Relationships come and go, birth and death and life happen, we all have our own capacities to manage…

The list goes on and on and on.

I think what I’m realizing is that earlier in the show, Fleabag pours all of her love into Boo. Boo becomes a lifeline for her as she grieves her mother’s death, but when Boo dies, Fleabag is left with all of that love again, so much love with no place to go. She feels an overwhelming sense of worthlessness, of a life spent getting it wrong. There’s no one left to hold all of the love she has for everyone else—for everyone else but not for herself.

When the show ends, though, I think she’s realized that the love does have to go somewhere. She has to pour it into herself. When she looks at the camera and shakes her head, telling us (the audience and her dissociation from the real world) that we can’t come with her anymore, it’s like she’s reassuring us that she’s going to be okay.

Maybe my inner child needs to be able to still believe in the fairytale. Maybe I write my romances for her.

But I think my core self, the part of me trying my best to navigate the present, needs to know that I’ll be okay, too.