If you haven’t yet seen Carol & the End of the World, you should. It is sad and delightfully strange and will take time to seep into your system. Though the lead actress’s (Martha Kelly) nasally droning voice is perfect for Carol— its soft obnoxious rhythm is a bit meditative. I can’t say I looked forward to watching the show, but I was so confused by it I found it necessary to watch. And now, having finished it, it is not at all confusing, but rather, profound and even inspirational (if not rather sedate).
The show posits if everyone were facing a great loss, all at the same time, how humanity would act.
In the show the world is ending. And in grief, your world as you know it is ending— has ended. Carol is held up through the chaos by her choice of mundane daily pursuits. Though they have mere months to live, she waters her hanging plants. She learns how to become an executive assistant and spends time in a high rise at a small desk doing data entry. She learns people’s names and she bakes banana bread. She rides a motorcycle through a burning, partying city— think Mardi Gras meets Mad Max, and searches for ink toner. Only to find later it was in her office all along. She is not chipper, she is not even happy, she does not smile. She lives alone and tucks herself into her neatly cared for space at the same time every night.
I think about Carol a lot. Because not only does her pursuit of routine daily tasks as a balm for monumental grief ring true, her isolation is also resonant. Because in the show, since everyone on earth faces its imminent demise— everyone is utterly absorbed in executing their last wishes and society turns into a hedonistic mayhem. Even those closest to Carol— her parents and sister, become too self-absorbed to bear witness to her. Her parents live out their dream on cruises as nudists, while her sister travels the world adventuring, while Carol pretends she has taken up surfing, just to deflect concern that she might be depressed.
I went to a grief group this weekend for the first time as a participant. When I was first interning as a therapist, almost 20 years ago, I ran grief groups. You can’t be steeped in grief running a grief group. You have to have seen the other side. But Carol, in her wisdom of the power of the mundane, and the power of simple acts of saying hello and offering banana bread, creates her own sort of grief group. A tiny handful of coworkers become the group that can sit through the pain of each other’s lives.
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