odd grieving
Six months ago today, my sweetie came into my office, appallingly serious, and told me, "Elisabeth Sladen is dead." (Which, I noticed immediately, was a more stark and painful way of saying it than "Elisabeth Sladen died today." Why is that? Takes away her agency? Makes her more of an object than a person?) She was still working, still producing...no one but family, it seems, knew she had cancer. So it was a huge surprise to nearly all the people around her as well as to her fans around the world.
If you had asked me the previous week whose death among people I didn't actually know would so devastate me, I might not have come up with an answer. But at that instant it became obvious what my answer should always have been. In that instant, a part of my childhood died.
I spent my adolescence obsessed with Elisabeth Sladen/Sarah Jane Smith, intrepid companion of the third and fourth Doctor on the British science fiction television show Doctor Who. She was the one who didn't scream in a crisis, the one who argued, the investigative journalist who explained Women's Liberation to the queen of an alien planet. And, you know, I just ... liked her.
I cried when she left the show. To be fair, she'd actually left the show 8 years earlier, when I was four. But this was the first I knew of it, and it was completely unexpected until the last few minutes of the episode -- even by the character. (Also, the circumstances pissed me off.) A friend called me while I was crying my eyes out and, ignoring the explanation of "nothing," suggested we take a walk. When she learned that my parents weren't getting divorced but that I was crying over a TV program, she was full of indignation about her misplaced magnanimity. But it felt like loss to me.
I got over it, of course, learned to love the new companions, and reveled in reruns. I went to local Cons, meeting various other actors and writers (she never seemed to come to the East Coast), and at one point I contemplated a Thanksgiving-weekend trip halfway across the country in order to meet Elisabeth Sladen herself. (24 hours each way on the bus, however, didn't seem quite realistic for me as a 13-year-old.) Throughout middle school I would wake from dreams full of adventures with the Doctor and Sarah and rush to write them down. I was a misfit, and this world was my escape to a place I would belong.
But it became more complicated than that. This is a part of my childhood that reemerged in my adulthood when Doctor Who was reimagined and restarted, and Elisabeth Sladen guest-starred in one episode. I was pretty annoyed at the backstory she was given (she'd never moved on because she was always waiting for the Doctor to come back, and she'd always been lonely) and thus was overjoyed when she got her own show where she could reinvent herself. In the Sarah Jane Adventures, Sarah took the Doctor's mentor role, and her companions were a bunch of young teenagers.
Very complicated emotions! There I was at 35, reliving and renewing a crush I'd had from, basically, ages 12-17, a time when I was full of powerful emotions and longings but had no idea what a crush felt like. (Understanding from what everyone told me throughout high school that attraction was what one felt toward boys, I concluded -- until college -- that I just hadn't experienced attraction yet.) Renewing, because here she was again, doing all these new and cool things, and taking 13-year-olds (like the one I would have wanted to be) as her confidants. After the most highly charged episode of the first season (the one where her past is disrupted when *she* is a teenager, played, of course, by someone else, but it felt oddly real to me...), I decided to write a fan letter, the one I'd never done as a kid. It was very complicated, with all different levels of time travel (including the way my dad used to say the actors must feel when they encountered US fans ten or twenty years after they'd played the characters). So I ran through it over and over but never managed to write it down. And four years passed.
Then, six months and two days ago, I thought about that letter I never wrote and tried to reconstruct it in my head. I despaired that parts of it I'd liked were gone, and really, based on my prior record of such things, I don't really know whether I would have written it at that point (and with a 2-month-old infant), but I wanted to! I might have really done it! (Actually, I wanted to go back and have written it before.) And then two days later, it was too late. Too late to write, too late to meet her, too late to randomly run into her on the street during a visit to England...
And every so often, when I'm suddenly reminded, or during references to the old show, or sometimes even when I open my own diary ('cause, um, it's named after another, related, Doctor Who character), it hurts again like a stabbing pain, as though it were someone I really knew and loved who'd died and gone away forever. This happened again just yesterday, which is why I'm writing now.
But here's the weird thing. All this time, I've had no idea how to grieve for her loss, nor how to talk about it, even to myself.
On 4/20 I wrote a few notes:
"Not just that I never got to meet Elisabeth Sladen but also that I never got to meet Sarah Jane Smith. I wanted to be part of that world. Worth remarking that this is not a dream *actually* affected by Lis Sladen's death. But I wanted to meet her as herself too; especially now hearing [from tributes online] that it was okay to meet this hero, that she was as nice in person as a fan could want."
On 4/24 I wrote further:
"Was she an icon for me? Idol? Favorite actress? Favorite character? Hero? Hero is good, I think, but was Elisabeth Sladen a hero of mine, or was Sarah Jane Smith? Whom did I really want to meet, and was this death really the thing that made that dream impossible? There are all these dichotomies, but it's as though they're all merged dichotomies: actor vs. character, real vs. fictional, new show vs. old show, aspiration vs. crush (that is, Sarah was both the companion I wanted to be like and the one I wanted to travel with), adolescent me vs. adult me ... So how do I describe what she meant to me? I think the point is that meeting Lis isn't what I *really* wanted, but it's what I wanted (/still want) in real life -- it's close enough. And from what people have said, it sounds like it would have been particularly close in her case.
"Oh! I just thought of this -- there's a way in which Elisabeth Sladen's death suddenly makes her as remote -- almost as fictional -- as Sarah Jane Smith ever was. Thinking about Sarah was always wistful but still sort of anchored in something real. And now it all hurts. And no, it likely wouldn't have had the same effect if she'd never returned to the character at all -- the past five years have added this whole new adult reaction that's tempered by/merged with my adolescent reaction to her."
And yet it may have.
This week (October 16-20 in particular) is always a hard week for me -- it contains the anniversaries of the deaths of two grandparents and a terrible accident -- and it's curious to me that this has all my focus. But I seem to need it, and it seems to be helping...
If you had asked me the previous week whose death among people I didn't actually know would so devastate me, I might not have come up with an answer. But at that instant it became obvious what my answer should always have been. In that instant, a part of my childhood died.
I spent my adolescence obsessed with Elisabeth Sladen/Sarah Jane Smith, intrepid companion of the third and fourth Doctor on the British science fiction television show Doctor Who. She was the one who didn't scream in a crisis, the one who argued, the investigative journalist who explained Women's Liberation to the queen of an alien planet. And, you know, I just ... liked her.
I cried when she left the show. To be fair, she'd actually left the show 8 years earlier, when I was four. But this was the first I knew of it, and it was completely unexpected until the last few minutes of the episode -- even by the character. (Also, the circumstances pissed me off.) A friend called me while I was crying my eyes out and, ignoring the explanation of "nothing," suggested we take a walk. When she learned that my parents weren't getting divorced but that I was crying over a TV program, she was full of indignation about her misplaced magnanimity. But it felt like loss to me.
I got over it, of course, learned to love the new companions, and reveled in reruns. I went to local Cons, meeting various other actors and writers (she never seemed to come to the East Coast), and at one point I contemplated a Thanksgiving-weekend trip halfway across the country in order to meet Elisabeth Sladen herself. (24 hours each way on the bus, however, didn't seem quite realistic for me as a 13-year-old.) Throughout middle school I would wake from dreams full of adventures with the Doctor and Sarah and rush to write them down. I was a misfit, and this world was my escape to a place I would belong.
But it became more complicated than that. This is a part of my childhood that reemerged in my adulthood when Doctor Who was reimagined and restarted, and Elisabeth Sladen guest-starred in one episode. I was pretty annoyed at the backstory she was given (she'd never moved on because she was always waiting for the Doctor to come back, and she'd always been lonely) and thus was overjoyed when she got her own show where she could reinvent herself. In the Sarah Jane Adventures, Sarah took the Doctor's mentor role, and her companions were a bunch of young teenagers.
Very complicated emotions! There I was at 35, reliving and renewing a crush I'd had from, basically, ages 12-17, a time when I was full of powerful emotions and longings but had no idea what a crush felt like. (Understanding from what everyone told me throughout high school that attraction was what one felt toward boys, I concluded -- until college -- that I just hadn't experienced attraction yet.) Renewing, because here she was again, doing all these new and cool things, and taking 13-year-olds (like the one I would have wanted to be) as her confidants. After the most highly charged episode of the first season (the one where her past is disrupted when *she* is a teenager, played, of course, by someone else, but it felt oddly real to me...), I decided to write a fan letter, the one I'd never done as a kid. It was very complicated, with all different levels of time travel (including the way my dad used to say the actors must feel when they encountered US fans ten or twenty years after they'd played the characters). So I ran through it over and over but never managed to write it down. And four years passed.
Then, six months and two days ago, I thought about that letter I never wrote and tried to reconstruct it in my head. I despaired that parts of it I'd liked were gone, and really, based on my prior record of such things, I don't really know whether I would have written it at that point (and with a 2-month-old infant), but I wanted to! I might have really done it! (Actually, I wanted to go back and have written it before.) And then two days later, it was too late. Too late to write, too late to meet her, too late to randomly run into her on the street during a visit to England...
And every so often, when I'm suddenly reminded, or during references to the old show, or sometimes even when I open my own diary ('cause, um, it's named after another, related, Doctor Who character), it hurts again like a stabbing pain, as though it were someone I really knew and loved who'd died and gone away forever. This happened again just yesterday, which is why I'm writing now.
But here's the weird thing. All this time, I've had no idea how to grieve for her loss, nor how to talk about it, even to myself.
On 4/20 I wrote a few notes:
"Not just that I never got to meet Elisabeth Sladen but also that I never got to meet Sarah Jane Smith. I wanted to be part of that world. Worth remarking that this is not a dream *actually* affected by Lis Sladen's death. But I wanted to meet her as herself too; especially now hearing [from tributes online] that it was okay to meet this hero, that she was as nice in person as a fan could want."
On 4/24 I wrote further:
"Was she an icon for me? Idol? Favorite actress? Favorite character? Hero? Hero is good, I think, but was Elisabeth Sladen a hero of mine, or was Sarah Jane Smith? Whom did I really want to meet, and was this death really the thing that made that dream impossible? There are all these dichotomies, but it's as though they're all merged dichotomies: actor vs. character, real vs. fictional, new show vs. old show, aspiration vs. crush (that is, Sarah was both the companion I wanted to be like and the one I wanted to travel with), adolescent me vs. adult me ... So how do I describe what she meant to me? I think the point is that meeting Lis isn't what I *really* wanted, but it's what I wanted (/still want) in real life -- it's close enough. And from what people have said, it sounds like it would have been particularly close in her case.
"Oh! I just thought of this -- there's a way in which Elisabeth Sladen's death suddenly makes her as remote -- almost as fictional -- as Sarah Jane Smith ever was. Thinking about Sarah was always wistful but still sort of anchored in something real. And now it all hurts. And no, it likely wouldn't have had the same effect if she'd never returned to the character at all -- the past five years have added this whole new adult reaction that's tempered by/merged with my adolescent reaction to her."
And yet it may have.
This week (October 16-20 in particular) is always a hard week for me -- it contains the anniversaries of the deaths of two grandparents and a terrible accident -- and it's curious to me that this has all my focus. But I seem to need it, and it seems to be helping...