When my dad was in the hospital dying at the end of March 2020 (though at this point he was still "possibly dying" instead of "probably dying" or even "definitely dying," which are different), one of my fellow unemployed friends decided to distract me by watching a movie together on Netflix Party, the true MVP app of the last fifteen months. We picked what we thought would be a fun rom-com that neither of us had seen: About Time.
Reader, if you have watched About Time, you know we fucked up. About Time stars Domhnall Gleeson as a man who finds out that in his family, all the men can time travel at will (there is no justification given for time travel's adherence to patriarchal lineage). He uses this power to nail his first date with Rachel McAdams after a couple tries, and eventually they fall in love and get married (and he never tells her about the time traveling, which is you could argue is anything from weird to abusive). Overall, it's one of those nice movies about idiosyncratic British people, a genre pioneered by Hugh Grant in the 90s.
And then. We find out Domhnall's dad, the always terrific Bill Nighy, is dying. The rest of the movie is about this — using time travel to cherish all their time together, and then ultimately letting go when they can't do it anymore.
I assume this would be emotional to watch under normal circumstances. I watched it when my dad was in the hospital, possibly dying, and then probably dying and then definitely dying, and also because of the global pandemic that was killing him, we could not see him or talk to him or even get a doctor on the phone every day. Unlike Domhnall Gleeson in About Time, I had no time at all to make more memories with my dad. The last time I spoke to him, he hung up because he wanted to watch the new episode of Survivor. He died in between the eighth and ninth episode of the season. I don't even know which Winner At War he was rooting for.
When your parent dies, you realize that 99 percent of movies and TV shows and books include a plotline about a parent dying. Ninety-nine percent is an a exagerration, of course, but not by as much as you would think. This is a common conversation amongst people with dead parents — how much dead parent content there is everywhere, and how we can all avoid it. The worst is suprise dead parent content, which, in my experience, is most likely to sneak into a romance novel. You're chilling in a nice little romcom world and BOOM, someone's dad is dead and the other romantic lead has to comfort them. Who the fuck decided dead parents are romantic?
Anyway, if you have good friends, which I am lucky enough to have, they will warn you before you want to watch or read something with dead parent content, or you can proactively ask them to look up the wikipedia summary and report back.
This brings us to April 27th, 2020, when Never Have I Ever, created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, premiered in Netflix. I had been extremely excited about this series for months — months when my dad had been alive! — but now my dad was dead, and apparently the main character's dad was dead too.
I turned to the group chat for guidance. My friend Sierra had famously started watching. She did not warn me that in the first three minutes of the show, her dad dies.
"Don't worry," Sierra said when I texted her. "It's just mentioned in the first couple episodes. It's not a big part of the plot." And so I began.
A couple days later, Sierra sent an update. I looked through the archives to find it. Quote, "VICTORIA DO NOT CONTINUE WATCHING NEVER HAVE I EVER." But it was too late — I already loved it very much.
So I decided to break the first rule of post-"your dad died" life — I watched something about a dead dad. And honestly? It was good for me.
Never Have I Ever stars Devi, an Indian-American Tamil girl of fifteen whose father dies of a sudden heart attack in the middle of her band concert. She does not deal with it well. The series begins a year later, when Devi — sad and horny and awkward and angry and self-destructive — is trying to become "cool." The show is funny and moving and so great. Devi's world is full of fun and interesting characters — her mom, her cousin, her best friends, the two boys who form her sort-of love triangle — and you slowly come to love all of them.
And Devi tries to navigate it all with a deep grief in her heart. She clashes with her mom and misses her dad. She refuses to listen to her therapist. She's selfish and confused and hurting. Crying for Devi and her family during the early days of my own grief helped me begin to accept that it was OK cry for myself, too.
After my dad died, I felt this pressure to not cry. I could cry for, say, a week or so, but anything after that was too much and probably shameful. Crying is for the weak. And what if I started to cry and never stopped? Sure, there were no known instances of that ever happening to anyone, ever, but what if I was the first one? Embarassing. Mostly I just didn't want to think about my dad and his death and how awful it was ever again. I wanted to feel normal, even though normal was shattered and broken and I would never be able to find it ever again. Never Have I Ever helped me unlock how fucking terrible everything was and let myself experience that grief. I am still experiencing it; unfortunately, there is no formula that after X days of feeling badly I will start to feel better (if there is a formula and you guys are holding out on me, please let me know).
Season two of Never Have I Ever hit Netflix this month, and I watched the first four episodes yesterday. It's still great. Devi still has no idea what she's doing, and neither do I. I do not feel bad because the person whose emotional journey I most relate to is a teenage girl.
With a year of dead-dad-ness under my belt, I've thought a lot about which dead parent stories resonate, and which ones are unbearably bad. I think the worst instances of the parent-dying trope are when you can tell the person writing it has no experience of what they're talking about, or has not made a major effort to understand. Both Never Have I Ever co-creators have lost a parent, and I'm sure that's part of why it's so good. They know a dead parent isn't a plotline for one or two episodes of a show, or a couple chapters of a book, but a terrible bomb in the center of your life that you desperately wish you could undo.