If you’ve ready any of this blog or know me at all, you’ve come to find out that I’ve dealt with a lot of loss in my life. There’s no curse. My mom gave birth to me when she was two weeks shy of 50. My dad was 57. My youngest brother was 22. My oldest was around 32. It’s not a big shock that I watched most of my family die. What did come as a shock to me, maybe naively, was how lonely that would make me for the rest of my life so far.
Loss is a tough thing to deal with in conversation. You meet people and they talk about what they’re doing with their family and loved ones. I try to be the good friend and ask a lot of questions. I genuinely like people to be happily engaged in a conversation, I like to hear them be happily engaged in a conversation, and happy people make me happy. That happiness gets gut punched to a halt when it’s my turn to talk and all I got is, “Yeah…My parents are super dead.”
That shit is really isolating. I don’t want to be Sad Guy. I don’t want to come off as an Attention Ho. And, I don’t want to be Quiet-Guy-Who-Says-Nothing-What’s-Wrong-With-That-Guy-He-Creeps-Me-Out.
If you do ever meet me, please don’t avoid talking about family. I’m really happy just having any kind of conversation. I’m more worried about how I’ll make you feel when I start to drop family related emo-bombs.
In an 8 month period that ended in Mid-May of 1990, I lost my Uncle George, my Uncle Eddie, and my dad. Besides my mom, these were basically the only people that I talked too. I was 9. There was a six month period after that where my mom tried to take me to every local carnival in the city. She really tried to make me happy. And I really tried to play that part. Then she got sick. She progressively got worse until she died in early 2007. The rest of my family was a lot older than me. It was clear some shit had gone down before I was born that was still going. And they all had their own families. There would be pockets of communication, but I was basically my mom’s only caretaker. I stayed home most every day. We didn’t have money, so I didn’t play video games or have cable TV. But, we had regular TV. And I became an extreme couch potato.
I want to be clear. I’m fully grounded in the real world where real people live. I know the people and relationships I watch on TV are make-believe. But I got way into them. The earliest thing I can remember being upset about was when the authorities tried to take Punky Brewster away from the old guy from Knight Rider. I think that was the same guy. I cried over that and my mom didn’t want me to watch the show anymore. Which, made me cry more.
Theories became a big thing for me. I still connect shows I watched as a kid to shows in the current day. I believe that Whitley from A Different World left Rowan Pope from Scandal at the altar in order to run off with Dwayne Wayne. She actually left a character played by Joe Morton. A Different World was on in the late 80s through the early 90s. Scandal premiered in 2012. Joe Morton didn’t even appear till halfway through season 2. But I believe that his character from A Different World buried himself in his work and ultimately became head of the secret CIA within the CIA, B6-13. Now named Rowan Pope, he eventually did marry. But, love fucked with him again when his wife, and mother of daughter Olivia, turned out to be a super terrorist in hiding.
Scenarios like this are how I have fun.
I remember being super nervous and angst ridden when I kind of figured out that Spike, aka William the Bloody, was going to die in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was relieved when I read in the paper that William Marsters, the actor who portrayed Spike on Buffy, had signed on to join the cast of Angel the next season. It was still difficult to watch him sacrifice himself in the Buffy finale, but I knew he would return in the Fall. I would tell people how relieved I was and some were openly concerned that I had broken from reality.
“Is this Spike a friend of yours?”
“No. He’s a vampire on the television.”
How does that sound to you? Yeah. I understood the concern.
Ironically, while Buffy holds up, the character of Spike has become extremely conflicted. People, including me, loved that guy. And he was a straight up murderer and rapist. I know all evil things are, but on a show known for its parables to real life, Spike’s arc is troubling. At one point after trying to rape Buffy in season 6, he realizes that he is evil. His solution is to go get his soul restored. On the surface, this is heroic and love-based righteousness. On every other level it’s piles of yikes. Whether intended or not, it kind of points towards men who rape as being temporarily soulless people who can instantly turn back into Good Guys whenever they choose. That’s a pretty big cop-out if you ask me. Especially when you consider the ‘whenever they choose’ portion. It appears that all of the women of the #MeToo movement who were assaulted, surveilled, and silenced in real life never experienced a rapist who had decided to get his soul back. Well, of course, they didn’t. Those don’t exist.
Are you seeing how into TV I get?! None of this is helping the movement, but I ponder this shit relentlessly.
I get deep into movies, too.
I loved the Last Jedi from the first of 14 times that I saw it in the movie theater. A couple of things about Luke Skywalker: No fan who ever wrote or pondered their own fan fiction sequel trilogy had Luke surviving past the second movie. You can say you did, but you would lying. With that out of the way, I felt like I was in a unique place to understand why Luke had banished himself to Ahch-To Island. I was my mom’s chief caretaker for approximately 16 years. That’s a long time for a 9 year old kid. People would tell me I was an angel sent from heaven. I was “sent here for this purpose.” My mom was “lucky to have me.” There were problems with that assumption. I had no clue what I was doing. I know towards the end I made mistakes that led to my mom deteriorating a little faster than she should have. I own that. These weren’t major things. But they piled up. I still feel bad about it, but I always have to remind myself that my mom smoked for 54 years and died from lung cancer. This sounds harsh, but that was my mom’s deal. I’m not mad at her. I don’t hate her. I also didn’t kill her.
Luke Skywalker had one job: Balance the Force. He did that by going against Obi-Wan and Yoda’s wishes and rescuing his father, Anakin Skywalker, from his alter ego, Darth Vader. That was the point of his whole existence. When he picked up the secondary directive of ‘passing on what he had learned,’ he made a couple of small mistakes. He took on his nephew, Ben Solo, and botched the training. In a moment of weakness, he raised his sabre to Ben while his back was turned in sleep. Ben turned to the Dark Side and took up the alter ego Kylo Ren. It was something that was destined to happen, but instead of stopping it, Luke helped it along its way.
When you are told you have one job and that jobs ends, you really question your own sense of worth. Especially when you fuck up parts of the job and the person you were taking care of ends up dead. You could be in a room full of people, but you feel isolated AF. I never once thought of killing my mom, but there was one point on the night before she died that her pulse slowed. I thought that this was it. I had been there day and night for 3 days and there might finally be a resolution. Then my mom’s pulse picked back up. I felt deflated. When I realized I felt bad that my mom was not currently dying, I felt so profoundly ashamed. I walked into the bathroom in her nursing home room and sobbed while I punched the tiled walls. I felt like going far away and hiding. I just went and sat down next to my mom. She died the next morning.
I went into detail in another blog about how much I love, and care about, the character of Rey. I’m a sucker for characters who lost their parents. The denial Rey carries for her parents’ true fate is heartbreaking. Her awkwardness around social situations, her inability to make connections free of codependency, and her own self-doubt are endearing to me because I identify with them completely.
Currently, I, and quite few other fans, are having trouble saying goodbye to the character Kelly Maxwell on the STARZ Horror Comedy (or Horromedy) Ash vs. The Evil Dead (AVED). It’s a continuation of the Evil Dead Franchise that follows Ashley Joanna Williams, aka the Prophesied One, aka the Jefe, on his fight against evil deadites. The writing and symmetry of the show is something that you don’t often see in the comedy or horror genres. While cast and producers are quick to point out that the show does not follow its own rules with regards to how death and character relationships work from moment to moment within any given episode, AVED does follow proper screenplay and storytelling structure in elegant and precise ways.
The audience is reminded early on in the pilot about who Ash is. His trusty sidekick, Pablo Simon Bolivar, is revealed to have a familial Brujo connection almost as soon as he is introduced. Kelly isn’t a Prophesied One or Brujo blooded. She’s just a badass from the moment we meet her. Kelly is the most mortal character on a show jam packed with crazy dead shit bouncing off the walls. And she serves as the in for the audience. Evil brings her dead mother back to life in an attempt to lure her, Pablo, and ultimately Ash into a confrontation. In the process, we see Kelly in at-home-mode with her resurrected mom and her very much alive dad. She looks happy, at ease, and at home. When the evil inside her mom rears its ugly head, it immediately kills her dad with a fork rammed through his eye and skull. The show is funny, but we see a character we have started to care about experience profound loss. Hello! Have you been paying attention? I was thoroughly invested in her character almost immediately.
Kelly sits in the middle of the backseat of the Ash’s legendary Delta. I get it. It’s a better angle. But she sits with her legs crossed, arms folded, head cocked in sadness. We see this again season 2 when Pablo is cut in half by Baal. At first, Kelly is sitting on a stoop in the same body position. Then she’s back in the Delta and the audience is informed about exactly how she felt about Pablo.
At the beginning of season 3, Pablo has been resurrected and Kelly has left Elk Grove, Michigan for Detroit. She is forging her own path and continuing the fight against evil. Kelly is a badass warrior, but I also believe she didn’t want to be in the same zip code as Pablo during the fight. Ash’s, and a lot of narratives, rule is that people who care about each other end up dead. Kelly is conscious of this and stays away. It’s not like she’s a chicken. She’s doing the right thing. Plus she hooks up with an ancient group of knights who have been fighting evil for millennia. Kelly is still in the fight.
When Pablo briefly becomes touched by evil, Kelly keeps her shit together long enough to avoid even the notion of killing Pablo. She wants to resurrect him again. It’s obvious she loves him. When Pablo returns from the deadite, Kelly kisses him. That was a huge payoff and something that Kelly likely promised herself she’d never allow herself to feel. The cat is out of the bag. Kelly’s feelings are out in the open. That leaves her and Pablo exposed to evil. She goes, on her own, to face that evil and is ultimately killed by the show’s big bad Ruby, who, ironically, helped to rally Kelly into the warrior she is in a another carnation of herself. The show is narratively perfect and in your face.
Since then, the actor who plays Kelly, Dana DeLorenzo, has been pretty straight up with fans on social media that the version of live Kelly that we knew is gone. We’ve been teased by her returning from the dead the last few weeks, but attempts to restore her spirit to her body have failed. Her body is currently being occupied by another demon, Kaya. This has led to a dual role for DeLorenzo, who has been amazingly nuanced and identifiable in both roles. She’s the shit. DeLorenzo is warning us that things get rough for Kelly in the last two episodes and things “aren’t pretty.”
I’ve explained this in great detail because the show is currently airing and I’ve gone through most of the stages of grief over this. The denial, the bargaining, and finally acceptance. In the season premiere, Kelly is wearing leather pants and a gothic-like halter while she is separated from the group fighting evil in Detroit. Kaya/Kelly is basically wearing the same outfit now, and I’m starting to take the hint that Kelly might not be killed off the show, but she’ll have to forge her own path separately from the peoples she loves by fighting evil in the Deadlands of the Rift. Or something that keeps her separated from her real, live being. Basically, I’d take that at this point because for me a happy ending is one where there is a season 4 of the show with some role for Dana DeLorenzo to play.
So much of Kelly Maxwell is about forging your own path, fighting the good fight, and maintaining your humanity. Her choices isolate her. They are based off of experiencing profound loss. They are fueled by fear of more loss. I mean, there’s not a character on TV or in real life that I could identify with more than I do with Kelly Maxwell. I get that there are a lot of supernatural details that don’t apply, but the character, writing, and arc tracks for me.
TV, movies, and stories in general are make-believe. But I use them to stay grounded in reality. To experience and ponder life when I haven’t been able to go out and do it for real. I understand that this may be difficult for some to grasp. I’d ask that you don’t judge me for it. I won’t judge you for anything. And if you have a real issue, I’ll quote Ash Williams: “Hey, good lookin’! Get outta my jazz!”
