It’s 11:30pm on a Thursday night, and I’m hunched up on a broken couch, weeping as Frank Ocean’s cover of “Moon River” echoes through a near-empty apartment. On the laptop in front of me, a life-size, cricket-like gay bug/humanoid holds up a 13-year old-girl crying over her grandmother’s corpse. The screen cuts to black, and I reach out and pause the credits before Netflix can cut to the beginning of the next episode. In between Ghibli-worthy size tears, I let out one of those pathetic, skippy breaths that often accompany crying-your-eyes-out. I’m sad, confused, and a little angry.
This show was supposed to be about dick jokes.
Human Resources, the spin-off to the Netflix original Big Mouth, premiered at the beginning of April 2022. The series builds upon Big Mouth’s concept of anthropomorphizing human emotions into different creatures: among others, hormone monsters are responsible for sex drives (bringing in “orgasm numbers” for corporate), Love Bugs help their humans experience love (and sometimes hate), and logic rocks — big, Easter Island humanoid rock people — provide straightforward, unemotional guidance. Human Resources puts all these creatures in an office space, following their work and personal lives alongside their human clients as they experience birth, marriage, sex, and death.
Human Resources is allowed to be a more mature show than Big Mouth by virtue of not being limited to the concerns of just pre-teen characters. The toilet humor and awkwardness of puberty are largely left behind in favor of exploring how these emotion-creatures would function in other life stages, from a newborn baby, to a newlywed, to an elderly woman at the end of her life. This last story, in particular, is perhaps the most impactful, at least to the point it left me in a puddle.
In the second episode, “Training Day,” senior Love Bug, Walter (Brandon Kyle Goodman) takes the newly promoted Emmy (Aidy Bryant) on a day out to meet his clients and learn what it means to be a love bug. At the end of the day, the two go to an assisted-care home to meet Walter’s favorite client, Yara (Nidah Barber), an elderly Alzheimer’s patient. Unfortunately, Walter’s visits usually cause Yara to spiral into dementia, transporting her back to the 1972 Lebanon of her young adulthood. To Walter, these episodes are spine-tinglingly romantic, as they allow Yara to briefly reunite, albeit only in her hallucinations, with her long lost love, Safi, a poor waiter she knew as a young woman. As Walter and Emmy sit on the beach of Yara’s memory, waiting for Safi to meet up for a secret rendez-vous, Walter discloses that he and Yara have revisited this memory hundreds of times and he is addicted to it. “And it never bothers you?” Emmy asks, “the part where she’s tragically trapped in an endless loop of lost memories?” Walter dismisses her concern, saying he wishes he could stay in this memory forever, only to be interrupted moments later by the arrival of Yara’s son, Amir (Ahmed Mawas), back in reality. Suddenly, the setting begins to burn away in patches, and Yara is overtaken by Anxiety Mosquitos, (mosquito-esque manifestations of human anxiety which multiply and catastrophize their clients worry in a buzzy, high pitched voice provided by Maria Bamford) unsure of where she is in time or space. Walter, enraged by Amir breaking apart his favorite memory, begins to transform into a Hate Worm — the alternate form of Love Bugs that are triggered by heartbreak, confusion, or anger — screaming about how unfair it is that his beloved Yara has been beset by disease and age. “I fucking hate her being old!” his distorted voice echoes through the room as an emotional tornado overtakes the creatures. It is only when Amir gives his mother the same rose tea that Safi made her decades before that Walter calms down, and he and Emmy begin to feel the love between the mother and son. “And he keeps visiting even though you freak out on him?” Emmy asks Walter, “and she doesn’t know who he is half the time?” “Well,” Walter says with a smile, “he loves her.”
I have a theory about animation — let’s call it Granberry’s Theory — that as an inherently absurd medium, it is therefore the best medium for conveying absurdity, such as the heights of human emotion. Alzheimer’s runs in my family — at the end of both of my grandmothers’ lives, they had been lost in their dementia for quite some time. Both sides of my family had warned me that I would get asked the same questions over and over, that they would think they were in a different time period, that they may forget my name, that I had to be patient. I like to think I was. I avoided using a baby voice with them whenever I coaxed them back into our reality because I thought it was insulting. I told them my news, over and over again, even though it never stuck. I was very familiar with how Alzheimers could shatter a person’s psyche, but I never really considered how that break manifested in the patient. I never considered how, when my grandmother would get up in the middle of the night, wandering through the house and asking if all of her daughters were in bed, that she thought she was in the 1960s, and her own elderly children were, in her mind, teenagers who needed to be chased after. I never thought of the reality my father’s mother was in, either, when she didn’t recognize her own husband, the man she had met as a teenager and defied her parents to marry. Suddenly, to her, she was a teenager again, somewhere in the dusty South Texas of the 1950s, looking for her boyfriend and instead finding a strange, elderly man doing her dishes. Somehow, this episode, which also features Gavin the hormone monster repeatedly suggesting someone chop his penis off, made me empathize with two women who, at the time of this writing, have been dead for eleven and two years, respectively.
That’s the other tragedy this series really crystallized for me — how, when we lose someone, we also lose their entire world. Like Yara, my grandmothers had memories, secrets, and experiences that slowly faded from their minds, parts of them that were forever lost to me. Because of their age, because of their disease, and because, unfortunately, we can never fully know someone, they went into their last years of life losing these small, intimate snippets of themselves before I was old enough to appreciate how precious those pieces are to constructing a whole person. We see this happen in the penultimate episode of season one, the aptly titled “It’s Almost Over.” Walter learns from a co-worker that Yara, having been moved into her son Amir’s home after breaking her hip, is in the last days of her life. Refusing to believe his favorite client is dying, he rushes to her home to find Keith from Grief (Henry Winkler), a cashmere-sweater creature, waiting in the family home, ready to help Yara’s family begin the grieving process. Walter and Pete (Randall Park), Amir’s Logic Rock, reject Keith’s help, with Walter claiming Yara is in fit condition and Pete denouncing the illogical emotion of the grieving process. In response, Keith begins to break things around the house, threatening that grief only gets worse when you ignore it. Walter and Pete make a quick escape, still convinced they and their clients can avoid grief.
The next time we see Walter he is brushing Yara’s hair, telling her that she obviously has so much more life left in her. They are interrupted by Natalie (Josie Totah), Yara’s granddaughter, who offers to sneak Yara out of the house to get her candy, something the older woman has asked for and been denied the entire episode. At the convenience store, Natalie uses her grandmother’s age to buy vape pens, scratch offs, and some White Claws before they both go to the park to enjoy their spoils. As the two relax on the bench, Yara mentions that she has to go meet Safi at the beach. “What?” Natalie asks, but before Yara can explain to Natalie who Safi is and where she has to go, Walter lights up, telling the elderly woman “visiting your memories always makes you feel so alive,” before projecting him and Yara into his favorite memory of Safi on the beach. As Natalie continues to wheel her grandmother through the park, Yara and Walter reminisce, the setting changing with each new memory — of meeting her husband, getting married, having children. The two bond over Yara’s amazing life, full of love and fun, before the ominous happens: her memory begins to glitch, as if there is a break in the digital projection of her memory. The small and great moments that made Yara who she was one by one fall victim to her disease and to time. In his desperation, Walter takes her back to the last time she saw Safi on the beach, trying to make her remember even as the memory around them glitches out. Walter, tearing up, begs Yara — “This is my favorite memory…we can’t let this one go.” He takes Yara’s hand as the backdrop flickers. “Please! Just hold onto them a little longer,” he cries. It’s all in vain — a moment later, the glitching overtakes the memory and it all cuts to black. Yara passes out and Natalie calls for help.
I don’t know what my grandmothers’ favorite memories were. I wish I did. I wish I knew what they held onto until the very end, what their consciousness fought from fizzling out so that they could go into death gently. I know at the end, my father’s mother was telling stories about her first dates with my grandfather, back when they were teenagers and running stop signs in their small town. I know my mother’s mother was sitting in the hospital, still asking after everyone, probably imagining herself at her old vanity she had for years, preparing her face before she descended down her back steps and onto the porch where she thought people were waiting for afternoon wine and conversation. Still, these are only glimpses into who they were, and there are millions of little moments that I will never know, that I never got to ask them about, which faded from their minds like a glitch in programming. There is something beautifully sad about this feeling, the simultaneous awareness that these women I loved, who are a part of me, are, along with their memories, forever lost to history. That they died with these little secrets, that they, like all humans, had something that was just theirs, that seemed so ordinary to them but are lost treasures to me. I wish I could have a glimpse of those mundane moments – the grocery store trips with my parents when they were children, the worried walks through the hallways of their houses to check that their babies were tucked in and asleep, the first, twentieth, or thousandth time they reached out to take their husbands’ hands. They’re all gone now, just when I am old enough to appreciate how much I would have liked to at least try to keep them for myself.
In the end, Keith from Grief is right. As Yara’s family stands around her bedside, Amir finally breaks. After an episode of running from an ever-growing, destructive cashmere sweater monster, he finally lets go. As he cries, he tells his family: “I love my mama so much, but she is dying…” Keith, now gentler, begins to wrap himself around Amir, who hugs him to his body. Walter, finally accepting he, too, is losing Yara, begins to cry, before Pete, the literal embodiment of human logic, breaks down. “Nothing makes any sense!” he weeps. And, he’s right — what in grief makes any sense? Does it have to?
I lost my grandmothers before I lost them. Their diseases coinciding with my young age meant I didn’t realize what I’d had, and once I got to a point where I wanted to know everything, they were already gone, lost in their own loops of memory and confused reality. Even now, years after their deaths, I watch this episode and cry. I cry at the absurdity of how I feel, and how I want what I nor any other person can have — to go back in time, to ask questions, to know what is bound to fade away. I cry at how humans, with our dumb little animal brains, try to run from grief, afraid to be so raw and vulnerable in the face of our own mortality and those of the people we love. I especially cry hard, angry, ugly tears when, after her family has come to say goodbye, it is Natalie, the youngest granddaughter, who comes to her grandmother’s side at the end, who is the first human other than her grandmother to see Walter as he glows in his love for Yara. “Who are you?” she asks. “I’m Walter, your grandma’s love bug,” he says. “Hey Walter…I’m really gonna to miss her.” “I am too, but she had a pretty amazing life.” he says through tears. “I…” Natalie chokes up. “I could really use a Love Bug right now.” Walter smiles. “Bitch, you got one.” The two embrace, crying, as they watch Yara let out her final breath. Yara’s ghost exits her body, giving Walter a final smile. “I’ll take care of her,” he promises, to which Yara nods — “I know,” she says before she transforms back into a young woman and floats into the white light, greeting the two loves of her life on the other side. The screen fades to white, and the credits roll.
I don’t know if my grandmothers remembered me at the end. Truthfully, I don’t even know how they felt about me when they were alive outside of the basic, obligatory family love. That’s okay, though, because it’s only as I’ve gotten older I’ve been able to see them outside of that same framework. To think of them as individual human beings who laughed and cried and felt just as deeply as I have. My desire to know them is not really born out of a desire to know myself better, but out of mourning the fact that this realization of their humanity came too late. That I had these women I could have really known taken away from me before I realized how much I would long for this later. But, in another way, I am heartened by this absence. Because I do believe there is something beautiful about the more isolated, personal part of the human experience — something, to quote Walter, “so fucking precious” about life and the fact that some moments and memories will always be our own. There’s something brutal and wonderful about the idea that I could have granddaughters, and they may never fully know the extent of my heartache as a lovesick teenager, my thrill as twenty something jumping in a foreign ocean for the first time, or my agony as I cry in my near empty apartment, late at night as I watch a cartoon that triggers my own grief. Those moments made me, they are mine, and they will be mine even after my own time comes, and I fade into whatever comes next.
One can only hope for a Frank Ocean accompaniment.
