Game of Thones: Kubler-Ross Edition

Bargaining: “Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.”

There’s really no bargaining to do with a show that’s already wrapped. What if they did 10 episodes for seasons 7 and 8? Who knows if that would have changed anything, honestly. But I would trade the entire Walking Dead universe for one episode with as much careful consideration of sentences and character arcs as we got in the average episodes in season 1-4. Whoever wrote Sansa and the Hound’s interaction needs to take a break. Woof.

Depression: “After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.”

I definitely hit this stage quicker than most. After this most recent episode I just felt deflated. What was the point of following Bran all these years? Why did Jojen, Summer, Hodor, the Three-Eyed Raven, and the remaining Children of the Forest die? Why did Dany spend all those years growing into a progressive leader with armies of volunteers under her to just apparently go mad in like three minutes? Why did we watch Sansa go from little bird to Wolf Queen only for her to learn all the wrong things from the bad people in her life? The list goes on and on and on. In fact, I already have. I feel better after writing this. It’s helped me move on to the final stage.

Acceptance: “Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.”

As you can see, I’m not okay with what happened. But I have accepted it. The leaks in the off-season were more or less right, and it’s not a satisfying ending. I know that George R.R. Martin has said the ending with be “bittersweet,” but that’s not what I’m seeing unfold. It’s more just…bitter.

I know this article may seem like the ramblings of a crazy person, and to some degree that is true. But mostly, it’s just me going through the five stages of grief about one of my favorite shows of all time. I’m not going to complain about “subverted expectations,” because my only expectations for the show was a certain quality level in storytelling that lead to a sensical conclusion, even if it’s not the one I had hoped for as a fan. Because if I was given the ending I hoped for as a fan, Robb Stark would have defeated the Lannister’s long ago.

There’s still two episodes left, so there is still time to make it all make sense, I suppose. I said that after Episode 1 and Episode 3. Fool me once, etc. It’s time to accept that this season is the “best season ever” said with the same grimace on our face that poor Emilia Clarke had in this clip:

Those eyebrows don’t lie.

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