This Is Us and the Shadow of Death

This Is Us has definitely captured the hearts of many families in its attempt to show the complexity and joy of family life as it follows the life of three siblings and traces each one of their histories along with the history of their parents. It’s a show filled with many touching moments and deals with some aspects of family life in the raw. Nobody is perfect, each one is flawed and seeking to overcome the demons from their past, and their past gives us a deeper insight into the complexity of who these characters really are and how they became the people that they are now (reminiscent of LOST). These past memories help us sympathize and empathize with their pain, and more deeply appreciate their seemingly small victories, which, in light of their past, show us just how big these steps really are. 

So many television shows take one character at a moment in time and that is all you see of them and thus it often never enters into the true mystery of who that person is and what experiences shaped them. This Is Us, however, enters into a character’s history and explains their psychology in a way that respects their human person and has one rooting for each character to overcome their flaws one step at a time. In some ways, it teaches us to treat all of our relationships in this way. To remember that every person has a past, and that those past histories will deeply effect our outlook, our worldview, and the way that we enter into relationships with certain expectations. No one in life is a blank slate. No spouse enters a marriage without their family baggage, gifts, and traditions (No brother, sister, or priest enters a religious community without them either). Everyone is shaped by their own experiences and sometimes if we knew a little bit more about the history behind the people we interact with we would come to a much deeper love and appreciation for who they are and how far they have come, and perhaps be a little bit more patient.

But what is striking to me in this show is the shadow of death. In the show, a main character dies and it is a death that deeply affects every person on the show. The death of this person is shrouded in mystery and little by little details about their death are revealed. The audience is left wondering how exactly they died, what happened, and how did the family members react to it. In some ways, the shadow of death is found in every scene. Every memory of joy that the family experiences is joyful, but once you remember, oh yeah, that person dies. That memory becomes painful. The joy and resolution that you had hoped would last, you realize can’t. And the siblings are each grappling with this person’s death, trying to find ways to healthily grieve, to not repress, but to actually memorialize this person in a healthy way. And here’s the rub. How many of us go through life, in our relationships with our friends and our family, remembering that, “Oh yeah, this person is going to die.” 

In a sense This is Us is saying “Memento Mori,” “Remember Your Death.” 

This Is Us, in a way, reminds us of our own eventual death and the eventual death of each of our family members. And that is painful. Each character we have come to know and love on the show will themselves eventually face death, if not on the show, at least by the eventual termination of the show on television. All good things come to an end. Ten out of ten people die in life. It’s not a fact we like to keep present. It seems morbid to keep that thought present in our mind. But it’s true. In some ways it can teach us to never take a moment with a loved one for granted. It can teach us to be grateful for those few moments we do have. In other ways it can remind us to live for what is most important rather than to live in the transitory. None of us knows the details of each other’s deaths, when it will happen, how it will occur, and what the outcome will be. But it will happen. Sometimes, though, we live pretending that it won’t. It is far from our minds as we go day in and day out presuming that both we and the ones we love will be there in the morning. We say “See you later” without even thinking that there’s a possibility we won’t. Yet the hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and shootings of last year should teach us, we never really know... What then brings meaning to life? If all ends in death, how can life actually be good, as we all go one-by-one into the darkness of oblivion to be forgotten in the long line of history. But when we see the love that these characters share, there is a desire for it to last.

Each desire in life has an end in nature. Hunger – food. Thirst – drink. Tired – sleep. Boredom – creativity. Desire for sex – sex. What then of eternal love? Eternal joy? Eternal communion? That love that families share that seems stronger than death? I can only think of one solution, one end for these desires: Faith in the one who conquered death by dying and rising. Jesus is the only thing for me that makes any sense of life. Jesus is the answer. In Him, we know even with any pain that death might bring, death, itself will die. He has a “love as strong as death” (Song of Songs 8:6). For with Him…

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

“O death, where is thy victory?

O death, where is thy sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 15:55-57)

Then we too will be reunited in victory as a family to share in the love, joy, peace and reconciliation that truly lasts in Christ. The Lord is our shepherd who will guide us there. Only then will we see that the true resolution that we are all searching for lies only beyond the grave, beyond the valley of the shadow of death, not somewhere on this little island we call home. (reminiscent of LOST).