Series & Films about/for Grief – Manchester by the Sea

First, I want to confess that I have no particular agenda with these grief posts. I just wanted to write about my experience with grief and acknowledge some of the films and series about grief that I find very genuine and helpful.

In this post, we are moving from collective grief to personal one with Manchester by the Sea (2016), which is a film that is easy to label as depressing or heavy (or tung as the Danes will say). I, on the other hand, find it to be one of the most optimistic films ever made. It is one of my favorite films. I will argue why the rest of this post.

I will do my best not to reveal too much more than the film’s synopsis and trailer already reveal, but some of my comments may hint more. If you are interested in this film and want to be on the safe side, don’t read this.

Manchester by the Sea deals with grief that is triggered by the loss of family members, especially the ones that we lose too early. It starts with the lead character Lee Chandler learning the death of his older brother, who was maybe in his early 50s or younger. As a result, Lee finds himself back in his hometown to deal with the aftermath of this death, and the film reveals things about his past that hide bigger sources of grief.

When Lee arrives at the hospital his brother died in, his various reactions (face, body, and speech) is what captivated me and pulled me into the story. None of his reactions are the traditional expected dramatic movie reactions to loss. Lee stays calm and reserved upon hearing the news. He jumps into practical matters immediately like whom to inform about the death. In parallel, his face, eyes, and awkward body movements tell a completely different story, and mirror his grief. That whole hospital sequence illustrates how grief could be so silent and hidden behind everyday matters or duty after the loss of a loved one.

The film then continues with further genuine depiction of loss in family, at least a depiction of loss that I could recognize very well. On the one hand, you have to deal with the practical matters like the funeral. On the other hand, life goes on as if nothing happened and you have to function somehow as before in the society. You may even laugh or feel real joy at certain moments. In between, when you catch a break, you are left alone with your grief or sometimes your grief comes out when you least expect it. Throughout all this, if you are lucky, your support system (family and friends) gives you the biggest strength to keep going.

The realistic depiction of all these facets of life after loss is the beauty of this film. It underlines that life still goes on after loss and there is still a place for us in it no matter how much it hurts at that moment. We don’t have the power to pause either life or our grief. We may never be the same person as before. Some things may break beyond full recovery. We may grieve all our lives for certain losses. Still, we can find a way to move forward, especially with the help of our support system, even if it requires us to rebuild our broken core and transform our grief, even if it takes years of work. If this isn’t an extremely optimistic message to end with, I don’t know what is.

Completely cheerful films may have the effect of a healthy drug that makes us forget hard things. They are certainly valuable. Movies like Manchester by the Sea, on the other hand, can help us face hardship in life in a non-self-destructive way and find a way to move forward.

I watched Manchester by the Sea the week it had its wide-release in USA. It was December 2016. I didn’t know anything about its synopsis. I just knew it was supposed to be one of the highlights of the year, which was the year of La La Land and Moonlight. It was also roughly 10 days after my dad told me over Skype (I lived in Bay Area then, my parents live in Turkey) that he had a mild heart attack that summer. (He is doing alright now.) I didn’t know what to do, felt so powerless, and didn’t know whom to talk to or even how to talk about this.

My father lost two of his older brothers when I was 8 and 10, respectively. They passed away two years apart on the same age in their early 50s. When it comes to expressing his grief, my dad has been minimalist. His grief was certainly visible, especially in the early days, but also appeared sporadically over the years. Lee Chandler’s reserved nature when it comes to his grief reminded me so much of my father’s back when we were going through all the funerals and wakes. In addition, Manchester is a gloomy costal town in USA similar to the town I come from in Turkey. In short, it isn’t very difficult to pull me into Manchester by the Sea on any day. It is like looking at an old family photo album.

So that December, some months after my discovery of The Leftovers and 10 days after learning my dad’s heart attack, I got another unexpected helping hand in a movie theater helping me process my fear of potentially losing my dad and also remember my uncles joyfully.

 

P.S. After writing this post, I found this video that talks about how the music and camera angles used in this film also amplifies the realistic depiction of grief. It contains spoilers, though.

Series & Films about/for Grief – The Leftovers

“You always like watching heavy stuff. Why don’t you watch something more cheerful?” or a version of this statement is something I have been told many times in my life. It is not that I don’t watch cheerful stuff, but it is true that I do like stories that are considered heavy.

People may think such stories are, even if they are very good, depressing (or not hyggelig in Denmark). I think the contrary. Depending on the ending, and unless it is a Gaspar Noé movie, such stories can give you the positivity, peace, and hope you need to move forward.

In this light, I decided to briefly write about some of the films and series that helped/help me to process different forms of grief I had/have from time to time in this blog.

But first, some definition … The textbook (or the wikipedia) definition of grief is “the response to loss”. This loss can come in different forms and intensities from letting go of a beloved routine (even if it opens up room for another beloved routine) to saying goodbye to a close friend (even if you are moving to a new place that you are very excited about) to death of a loved one (even if our loved one lived a good long life). Despite being a healthy response to loss, grief is not an easy thing to process even in lighter cases like the loss of a beloved routine, because we aren’t very welcome to talk about it publicly light or heavy. This is what grief has in common with menstruation.

Now, let’s move onto the series I want to write about in this post: The Leftovers (2014-2017).

An academic brother once called this series “depression in audio-visual form”. It is true, I cannot argue with that.

On the other hand, Emily Nussbaum, the ex-TV-critic of The New Yorker, writes “But it captures the disorientation of grief in a way that is provocative and rare for television.”, which is why I love this series so much.

The Leftovers tackles grief that is triggered as a result of a collective trauma, which is due to the disappearance of two percent of the whole global population. Different individuals react to this loss differently: divorce, faith, creating/joining a cult, repeating a thrill …, while the life moves on in parallel. All these reactions depicted in a manner that feels well-thought-out and genuine instead of cheesy or just for the sake of drama.

There were already two seasons out, when I started watching The Leftovers, which was mid-August 2016. It was roughly a month after the July 15, 2016 military coup attempt in Turkey, which is an example of an event that creates collective trauma for a nation. I wrote about how I felt in those days in an earlier blog post back in early August 2016. Starting to watch The Leftovers shortly after that wasn’t a calculated choice from my side by no means. I started watching it with no particular expectations. It was just in “my watchlist” for too long. It turned out to be an unexpected helping hand. In those days, The Leftovers was one of the rare things that managed to reach me at an emotional level and broke my numbness. I am forever grateful to it.

The Leftovers is also annoyingly-fitting for the time we are going through right now, which is why I chose it to be the first thing I discussed as part of this Series & Films about/for Grief posts. If you need to watch something to process your grief of all the losses you had to experience as a result of the current pandemic, just give The Leftovers a try or re-try.

Impact

She came to pick me up from the Istanbul airport. Later that day, I had a midnight bus to Ören (a coastal town west of Turkey), where my parents were at the time. We would hang out at her place till then. She prepared menemen and fresh green beans, some of my favorite Turkish dishes, for dinner. Those are the moments I take off the 40 layers of armor I accumulated over the years living abroad and start feeling lighter.

She has always been very generous with me and she loves me very much. She was at my public defense at EPFL. She was there when I first moved to Copenhagen. She is like an older sister, one of the many I have despite being the only child of my parents. The reason she loves me, though, doesn’t have much to do with me. I know that. She loves me because she loves my mother.

My mother was one of her professors at the university. I am very well aware that she doesn’t take all her professors’ kids from the airport. She loves my mother because she values the impact my mother had and maybe still have on her life as a teacher. I value the impact both of them have on my life.

She is not the only ex-student my mother has that has been extremely generous with us as a family. In fact, there was one other ex-student of my mom at my public defense at EPFL, and shortly after I moved to Copenhagen, I met two of my mom’s ex-students who live in the area. My dad has some ex-students that are similar, though my mom would win by a landslide if it was a competition. This doesn’t mean that all her students loved her, as I also witnessed students who treated my mom as if she was a witch to be burned.

I ended up a university professor myself, just like my parents, as cliché as it is. I cannot tell you that I wanted to be professor in a computer science department as a child. At those ages, I wanted to be million things from a basketball player to a traveling hobbit. But I wished for a job that can incorporate some teaching/mentoring component, since I dreamed of having the kind of impact I observed my parents had on many of their students as well as some of my school teachers had on me. Having that type of direct impact on an individual’s life seemed like the biggest kind of impact one can have in this world to me.

 

In my professional community, the dominant use of the word impact has a different meaning than the one I related to growing up. Most people would use it to indicate either creating a (software/hardware) product or writing code for a (software/hardware) product. While I recognize this as an extremely valuable impact one can have in life and I admire the people who accomplish it, I must confess that this has never been the main driving force in my work. When I was at IBM Research, I was in a team that designed and wrote code for a new IBM product, and I enjoyed that work and I am happy the product is out, but more than that, I enjoyed having student interns. Most of the time, I feel scared to say these things out loud at a work-related gathering, where academics tend to be mocked for not accomplishing real-world impact with a disregard of the role of advisors and mentors in someone’s life.

Of course I want to do research on things that have real-world relevance. But more than that I want to help raising the next-generation for our professional community. Even if a PhD student is working on a topic that you think have no real-world impact, it is still highly likely that he/she is actually learning the skillset that will be guiding him/her toward his/her real-world impact once on the job.

 

As the diversity & inclusion efforts are increasing in many scientific communities these days, I think we should also start thinking about valuing the different driving forces and capabilities of individuals at work leading to different forms of impact in our scientific fields.

 

In closing, I want to say that I am extremely grateful for the impact both my BSc advisor Serdar Taşıran, and my PhD advisor Natassa Ailamaki had in my life. And I am still part of the “real-world” despite my dreams of becoming a hobbit, and would be happy to prepare menemen for their kids.

Jeg beundrer Tori Amos

It is spring 2019. I am in Danish class, Module 4, the module before the last one before you take your big Danish language exam that proves your proficiency in the language. As usual, we are grouped into two-person groups for our in-class exercises. My group partner is an enthusiastic Gen-Z German who is about to finish his MSc in Denmark. Thanks to the similarities of his native language to Danish and doing his Danish homework regularly, he is almost proficient in Danish at this point. I, on the other hand, am only proficient in following Danish subtitles of movies, which is the most essential Danish language skill I must have as far as I am concerned.

The teacher gives our assignment, which is to pick a person we admire and describe who they are and why we admire them. at beundre means to admire in Danish. I learn this at this moment unlike my group partner, who did his homework and already knows what at beundre means.

The first person that pops up in my head is Tori Amos for some reason. But I think to myself, I don’t have the Danish speaking skills to express why I admire her so much and maybe it would too personal anyway, which defeats the purpose of the group exercise. Then, I think, this isn’t the best assignment to do in a group, how are we supposed to agree on one name. Isn’t this a personal thing? I wait for my group partner to take initiative and speak first instead. He says “Greta Thunberg”.

Gen-Z kid is good. Who wouldn’t admire Greta? I am maybe a stereotypical self-centered millennial. I cannot win this. I know it isn’t a competition, but still … I cannot argue for Tori now. It would be like arguing for why one of my favorite films is The Science of Sleep to someone whose favorite film is Citizen Kane … in Danish!

I tell him “Let’s go with Greta”. I let him tell the teacher why we picked Greta and why she is to be admired with his great Danish. I feel too tired anyway to talk even in English. I spent yesterday till late evening preparing my lecture for today for a course I am giving for the first time. I enjoy teaching very much, but I feel dead-tired after each class. It is the same routine every week in the life of this junior academic.

At the end of that module, my Danish teacher tells me that I shouldn’t be taking the next module since my Danish speaking level is too low in contrast to my writing and reading. Roughly one year after him telling me this, I will get an A in the speaking part of the Danish proficiency exam unlike my lower grades in reading and writing. However, at that moment, it hurts to hear this even though I know very well that he is right. I blame myself for not being more extroverted and social to have more Danish speaking friends to practice with. It adds to the frustrations of my inner Hulk.

This is a relatively mild frustration, though, for that green monster. She has a lot bigger anger and grief, the two emotions that she doesn’t know how to disentangle from each other. I sometimes wish I can release her to smash everything around me. I am aware of some of the reasons that is at the root of this, for the others probably I need way deeper and objective analysis. But, so far, I have not been a person who could commit to things like therapy, meditation, mindfulness … It is on me, not on them.

On the other hand, I have never had a problem committing to films, books, TV, songs …, especially to understand myself, other people, and the world better. I highly recommend this as a cheaper form of therapy. The first time I remember doing this was using ET trying to process the first big death in my life when I was 8.

I admire Tori Amos, because her songs help me process my anger and grief in a way that is neither self-destructive nor based on denial of emotions and transform them to be constructive forces in my life in the long run. Listening to her is a practice that sometimes I have to take on every day, and some other times I visit after taking a break for a few months. But it works every time, and I wish I had the power to help another person the way her songs has helped me over the years. 

I finished her new book Resistance last weekend. Reading the book was a similar experience to listening to her songs, and also made me remember this memory from Danish class last year. At the end, it also reminded me I haven’t committed to writing since I moved to Denmark and kicked my butt to write again.

Moving On

Last year I reviewed ~40 papers, published a book, got involved in shipping an IBM product, did a SIGMOD tutorial, mentored two interns and a post-doc, interviewed at 8 places, applied for a Schengen visa 3 times, I dreamed about potentially moving to 6 different cities … I know I should consider it a pretty good year. Going through it, though, was quite messy.

It is no secret that I am not a big fan of Bay Area. It is a great place for many people. It makes me want to sing Martha Wainwright’s Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole. I liked working at IBM Research Almaden, but I never felt like I could live in Bay Area long term. I constantly thought of possibilities outside Bay Area, entertained some options in the US, mostly failed. Until early 2017, though, I didn’t really take serious action to go on another interview cycle.

This interview process felt very different than the one I did toward the end of my PhD. The following was what I tweeted after my interview cycle back in spring 2014.

a month of interviews, finally done. feels like a post-rock-music-festival; physically wasted and super tired but it was extremely fun.

I remember feeling like a champ after those interviews despite the fact that some of those interviews were failures as well. In contrast, last year, after some of my interviews, I felt like maybe I should quit computer science altogether, and do something else with my life. 

The biggest difference was that when you are interviewing as a last-year PhD student, it is something that everyone expects you to do. It is public knowledge that you are interviewing. Your PhD advisor and academic siblings support the time you spend for your interviews. When you interview as an adult, most of the time, you have to do this in secret, and you have to still keep doing your current job. At the end of the week, it feels like you have 1.5 jobs.

The other difference was inertia. As we get older, we accumulate more of it. I understood the meaning of Massive Attack’s Inertia Creeps last year as well. In Switzerland, I was living like I would leave the place from almost day one. Here, I kind of knew I didn’t want to live in Bay Area in the long term. However, I still wanted to give it a chance and feel less detached compared to my time in Switzerland. I spent some effort to make San Jose feel like home. In addition, I do have some really close friends and colleagues in Bay Area (some of whom I know from Switzerland) who are family to me at this point. As a result, it was harder to break some daily routine to allocate serious time and energy to prepare for and go through the interviews.

The final difference was most of the interviews I did were pure industry interviews this time rather than academic and research lab interviews. I didn’t want to restrict my options since there aren’t tons of options if you want to do something related to core database systems in English in Europe outside UK. :) I am not as good at pure industry interviews mainly due to the coding interviews. I should have prepared better for them. However, I remember at several of those interviews I was asked what my favorite part of my job at IBM was. In each of them I think I gave an answer similar to “dealing with the interns”. Maybe academia is just a better fit for me anyways.

I would like to thank all the folks who has shown me constant support this year despite me sometimes acting like the character described in Green Day’s Basket Case. Especially, Fellow Musketeers, Twin Sister, Academic Sister, Partner in Crime, Greek Bro, Queen Bear, and Illegitimate Daughter.

I also would like to thank my ex-managers at IBM, Guy Lohman and Fatma Özcan, for prioritizing the happiness and growth of the people manage. I let both of them know my feelings toward Bay Area. They both did their best to guide me while trying to find a solution that would be good both location- and career-wise.

If you had told me in January 2017 that I would be preparing a year later to move to Copenhagen as a prof, I would have thought you were joking. I initially didn’t think about moving back to Europe. After all, it is easier to be an immigrant for me (someone who carries a Turkish passport) in the US than in EU (even under Trump’s rule :)). So spending some effort to figure out where I can relocate within the US made sense. I wasn’t initially looking for academic positions either since my previous attempts were neither successful nor encouraging. After I expanded my search to Europe, I also was initially just looking at Central Europe since it is more familiar territory to me. Today, I am extremely happy with this much unexpected end result. 

I am well-aware that it is going to be difficult initially. I am changing both countries and the type of job I am doing. I don’t have any best friends in Denmark yet. In addition, I do know that I have my fair share of integration problems. I didn’t ever ski in Switzerland, I never bought/leased a car in Bay Area, I don’t like hiking still … I am amazed how some people adapt to the habits of the local people easily. I am quite stubborn. I don’t like changing my habits much based on where I live or other people. I rather search for things and people that allow me to be my existing self. I had the same issue back in Turkey as well, so this isn’t related to being a foreigner. I wonder how this would play out in Denmark. We will see.

This reminds me the following from Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep.

“There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.”

Moving on gives you another chance to retry with whatever you learned from the previous move, though. 

My Girls

It is natural for us to like the stories that have elements we can relate to more. Since I am a female myself, it is easier for me to find elements I can relate to in a story if it is either built around leading female characters or has very substantial supporting female characters. Therefore, I have a special interest in series that focus mainly on females: Xena, Gilmore Girls, Sex and the City, The L Word, Orange is the New Black …

When Girls started in 2012, because of this interest, I was super excited to have a new series with four female leads to follow. However, watching the first two episodes was a total fiasco for me. None of the characters were relatable even though their ages were close to mine. They were too immature and selfish to the point of being obnoxious. I don’t mean that my friends and I act like maester Aemon from Game of Thrones. Something just didn’t feel right. Maybe this is due to not being an American or the writers exaggerating the behavior of the characters in the series for the sake of comedy, which happens very frequently in TV series.

To sum up, our first couple dates with Girls didn’t go so well, I decided to split after that. It wasn’t love at first sight like Mad Men, or wasn’t like meeting one of your best friends like Six Feet Under, or didn’t feel like adopting a new religion like Gilmore Girls. (Some of you might be thinking I should be institutionalized for writing that last sentence, but this is who I am. I live through books, movies, and series.)

It was around the time of its second season premiere my Illegitimate Daughter encouraged me to give Girls a second chance. So I did. This time I was more determined to go forward even if I can’t relate to it, and it payed off. All I had to do was to be patient till the end of the third episode.

The ending scene of Girls’ third episode is one of my favorite scenes from a TV series ever and it is the one that attached me forever to this series. In the scene Marnie returns home from an awkward encounter with the guy she is falling for to find Hannah dancing in her room to Dancing on my Own. Hannah reveals that she learned her ex-boyfriend was gay. Then, they start dancing together. The scene (and the episode) ends with Hannah and Marnie hugging. 

This scene sent me right back to my college days in Istanbul where I was sharing a dorm-room with Illegitimate Daughter. After the episode ended, I wrote to her immediately something along the lines of “this is our scene”.

You don’t think about that person you share most of your life with as you live through your college days. You are used to her being there when you come back to your room after a very tiring day, and spending quality time with her naturally without putting much effort. What worries you mostly is your classes, future goals, getting the best of this magnificent city that you live in, the boy you wake up next to from time to time … But today what really remains from all that beautiful mess to you is that girl you shared your room with. She is the one you still talk to almost every day. You remember her wedding day as one of the happiest days of your life. You realize now that she was actually the best thing you had in those college days.

If life has been generous with you like it has been with me, you will have several more girls like that. One will be the person that you share some of your lowest moments during your PhD days, and she will still love you and help you keep going. Another one will be the most fruitful outcome of a summer internship and feed your fearless side. You will reconnect with one more strongly years later after life temporarily throws you in different directions. Seeing an email from one first thing in the morning will make your day. Some will be the only ones you would like to see during a work related event full of men when you are having your period. Some you will know that are always there even if you don’t talk that often.

In the following years (and seasons) Girls did the same thing for me over and over. I still don’t relate to the characters themselves much. However, when it comes to the dynamics of female friendship, Girls reflects it very well and smartly. With each season, I loved the show more and more. Now we have come to its end (the final season starts airing this Sunday). Even though we had a shaky start, now watching it feels like having a girl’s night out with my girls. And I will miss it.