Anyone who has ever grown up in a Christian household can attest to the power of belief. As a child, when you go to church every Sunday, usually from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the dot, you start to internalize a lot. The spectacle of organized religion, the fervent confidence of the congregation, all of it makes it easy for someone young to take it as a guarantee. There’s a safety net of assurance; a promise made by the existence of a God – nothing happens without reason and everything is structured within a grand design.
22 years later and I still can’t find a method to the madness.
I was in high school by the time I started grappling with the weight of certain questions. There’s an itinerary of doubt for newcomers who’ve begun to question their faith; “Big Questions for New Dummies,” to put it plainly. Why does evil exist? Why do tragedies happen? Why are bad things done in the name of an all-loving Creator? Why? Why? Why?
If you aren’t careful, you can be swallowed up into a pit of existential crisis and dread, crumpling under the weight of these questions. Throughout high school and into college I wallowed in these questions, seeking answers that never came. And like many who’ve fallen out of grace with religion, I’ve recently waded back into the pool of tentative faith, choosing to once again believe in a higher power on my own accord. Yet even in the face of my attempts to redefine a belief in God, those questions remain.
Existential angst isn’t a new concept. In fact, some of the most celebrated works of art have grappled with those questions, as far back as Bresson’s sickly Country Priest. However, no work of art has quite articulated the sinking feeling of unknowingness quite like Damon Lindelof’s short-lived masterpiece, The Leftovers.
The 3-season HBO series envisions a world wracked with grief as the result of a global phenomenon known as the Great Departure. In an instant, 3% of the world’s population vanishes into thin air, leaving behind not a trace nor a clue as to their fate. Scientists try desperately to find answers and religious leaders cling to ancient texts to explain the unexplainable, but at the end of the day, no one knows exactly what happened to the Departed and no one ever will. Out of this mystery comes sheer pandemonium: families are left broken and destitute, depression and despair run rampant, and a nihilist cult rises up in the aftermath offering dangerous purpose to its followers.
Art imitates life and life imitates art. 10 months into 2020 and it’s impossible to escape mention of the COVID-19 pandemic, a deadly virus that spread across the globe with unfathomable potency. Almost in the blink of an eye, one million people have been killed, with reported cases totaling somewhere near 34 million. Scientists and medical professionals are working their hardest to find a vaccine, but still questions abound. Bumbling world leaders and overzealous religious figures offer answers and distractions, but nothing can heal the families who have been wounded or repair the way of life that has been completely demolished. A new status quo has been established, and no matter how many people cry for us to move on and open up, it’s impossible for us to forget. This pandemic has irreparably changed our lives.
I had only been home from college for two days when my Mom broke the news to me. She was a nurse, so the fear had always been there, but there’s a difference between the fear of possibility and the fear of reality. Both her and my Father had been diagnosed with COVID-19. And while most rational people understand the severity of the virus, there’s nothing quite like watching it debilitate someone right before your very eyes.
My Mother’s case wasn’t quite as severe as it could have been. The symptoms were evident in her. Shortness of breath, muscle fatigue, sore throat, most of the symptoms plagued her during the days after her diagnosis, but they were relatively mild. My Father, however, wasn’t as lucky. Growing up, he struggled with asthma throughout his childhood, and even though I was old enough to remember him bringing his inhaler with him to work, he hadn’t had a severe attack in over a decade. But as we now know, coronavirus preys on those with weaker immune systems and pre-existing conditions, and it latched onto my father like nothing I had ever seen.
Most kids assume their parents are invincible. I haven’t been a kid in years, but that belief still foolishly persisted in me. We all want to believe that our parents are immortal; everlasting pillars of strength and wisdom for us to lean on whenever we need them. It only took a week for reality to decimate that belief before my very eyes. The virus ravaged my father’s body, rendering the strongest man I’ve ever known into an unmoving and hollow shell, torn apart by fits of ragged breathing and bouts of unexpected seizures. My parents are both devout Christians, and throughout it all they clung to the faith that they’d known all their lives, but the morning I woke up to an EMS truck carting my father away to the sterility of an emergency room, there were fits of sobs interspersed in-between my Mother’s prayers. I had nothing to offer her save for hugs and empty platitudes, and in the days following his hospitalization, those old familiar questions came back.
Like many of us who experienced the timeless, formless haze of experience that was the height of quarantine, I turned to television to ease my mind. And The Leftovers beckoned me. I’d tried to watch it before, but I couldn’t quite crack the density of the first season. This time was different. Lindelof’s Watchmen had enamored me from start to finish just a couple months earlier, and there was something about the unfathomability of the Great Departure that I felt drawn to this time. In the face of such a vast and all-consuming mystery, Lindelof’s decision to center the story around small-town sheriff Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) and his close circle of family and friends felt accessible; cosmic existentialism boiled down to a personal drama. There was something comforting about watching such small characters grapple with such a large dilemma.
That dilemma is inherent to all of us. At some point or another, every soul on this planet will experience the gaping void of tragedy. Illness, trauma, and death are inescapable and humanity has been forced to wrestle with them for the entirety of our existence. The struggle against existential despair is not new, and in my opinion, it is not a struggle that can be won in any concrete sense. The void of existence forever casts a shadow over human life, constantly forcing us to ask questions we can’t hope to know the answers to.
So how do we move on? It might seem easy to give in to the blackness. It was certainly easy for me to fall into sorrow as my father’s condition worsened, forcing myself to dwell on the helplessness of the situation. But what drives us to get up every day and venture out into the uncertainty of life? What compels individuals to brave the unfathomable forces that shape life’s many twists and turns?
That question drives the heart of The Leftovers, and throughout the show’s three seasons, it manages to answer that question with surprising certainty: each other. Individually, the characters within the show succumb to their own inner demons: Kevin’s mental illness and toxic masculinity, Nora’s (Carrie Coon) depression and PTSD, Laurie’s (Amy Brenneman) gnawing emptiness, Matt’s (Christopher Eccleston) disillusionment with his faith. Each of them grasp at solutions to fix the lack of security in their lives, until they all slowly realize that the only security they can rely on is the commonality of their own experiences. There’s comfort to be found in the idea that all we have is each other. Human empathy is a powerful thing, and in the face of tragedy, there’s no greater weapon than compassion and understanding.
I was fortunate enough to experience this firsthand. My father’s situation rekindled an unspoken connectivity between my family. My mother, myself, and my three brothers all found comfort within each other, because at the time, we were all we had. Our shared experience allowed us to care for ourselves with tenderness and empathy; whether it was reminding each other to eat when we had no appetite, or simply sharing words of encouragement when things looked bleak.
And it wasn’t just my immediate family whom we could rely on. Throughout the entire experience, we received an outpouring of support from members of our own extended family, friends, and even my Mom’s coworkers. People brought us groceries, sent us cards, and called to check in on us constantly. Every day my Mom spent hours on the phone just talking to people who wanted to know how we were doing, and those same people became crucial to her whenever we’d get bad news.
For six days, my father’s condition declined. Despite constant supervision from doctors and nurses along with assisted breathing, his respiratory system was unable to regulate itself without outside help. I remember the fear in my Mom’s voice the morning she got the call that they were considering having him put on a ventilator. I remember how her face dropped, how somber the atmosphere was throughout the house as we waited with bated breath. At the time, only 1 out of 3 patients who underwent intubation successfully recovered. Despair, a frequent visitor to our house at the time, seemed poised to settle in for good.
There is no certainty promised in this life. Nothing is guaranteed; not love, not happiness, not life. Nor death. That night, as we waited hopelessly for a call we’d rather not come, we received one with a much different context. Shockingly, literal moments before the hospital staff made the decision to intubate my father, his breathing began to regulate. There was a genuine sense of awe in the doctor’s voice, as if he’d just witnessed a miracle. To us, he had. In fact, in just a week, my father’s condition did a complete 180, an outcome that seemed nearly impossible days earlier. After two long weeks, the day he walked through our front door from his extended stay in the emergency room was one filled with an energy I’ll never forget.
While The Leftovers has moments of overwhelming cynicism and despair, it’s also contrasted by moments of genuine awe. There’s a storyline in season 2 in which Matt Jamison, an aloof and seemingly naïve Christian pastor, suddenly believes that his comatose and paraplegic wife Mary (Janel Moloney) woke up one night and laid in bed with him. Naturally, no one believes him. Why would they? His story defies all logic except his own. Matt’s belief in a higher power is misguided and borderline obsessive, at least to the people around him. The first season of the show leads us to believe that the world is cruel and uncaring; there’s absolutely no reason why the universe would give when it could take.
Shockingly, Lindelof defies expectations and pulls the rug out from under us. During the middle of a sudden earthquake, Mary wakes up and stands up out of her chair, to the complete and utter shock of Nora Durst, Matt’s sister. It’s a miracle in the purest sense of the word. The point? The vast uncertainty of existence isn’t necessarily bleak. Life is filled with unexplained tragedies, but it’s also filled with unexplainable miracles. The very nature of existence is a miracle in and of itself; trillions of independent variables had to coalesce in order for life on Earth to become a reality, and yet somehow, it did. We might never know whether or not it’s the result of intelligent design or simple chance, but regardless, it’s breathtaking and unfathomable all at once.
Every day that we wake up, we stare down into a pit of uncertainty and existential anxiety. Nothing is certain; everything is possible. Those two statements neatly bookend the entirety of human existence; every death, every birth, every tragedy, and every triumph. For many, myself included, the fact that we may never fully understand all of the universe’s mysteries can sometimes induce a special kind of dread. But there’s solace to be found in that. No matter our differences, every human being on this planet lives within the same state of existential ignorance.
In spite of the Great Departure, an earth-shaking tragedy that completely decimated the status quo of the lives, Kevin Garvey and Nora Durst found comfort and compassion within their shared circumstances. In the face of life’s greatest mysteries, the only answer we can truly cling to is our empathy for each other.
