I’ve never been good at funerals. In fact, I’ve never been very good at handling death in general. You see, I’m what you might call a crybaby — blame it on being a water sign — but I have always cried at funerals. Whether I knew the deceased personally or not, the minute I see someone grieving, on come the waterworks. So, when Ghosts found a way to make me laugh while addressing such serious topics as grief, death, and even suicide, slowly my perception of grief and death started to shift. Little did I know how important this rewiring of my brain chemistry would be just a few months after becoming a fan.
While I’ve been lucky enough not to have any funerals to attend in quite some time, last month, my sweet, rotten, little old man of a cat, Kobol (yes, like the planet in Battlestar Galactica) passed away. The aftermath has been anything but easy. However, even when all I want to do is cry, Ghosts has made me laugh even in the most devastating moments. In some kind of kismet, cosmic timing, the very first episode to air, after I lost my cat, sees the ghosts adopt a “ghost pet” when they find a snail that didn’t immediately get sucked off. In “The Primary Source,” Trevor (Asher Grodman) is able to process his own pet grief in a way that has made mine just a little easier to carry.
‘Ghosts’ Laces Grief With Humor To Make It Easier To Swallow
Despite believing in an afterlife, my struggle with death is rooted in heartbreak for those left behind — living in a world without someone you loved simply feels wrong. While Ghosts is first and foremost a comedy series, the unique premise of following a found family made up of mostly dead people allows the show to address topics like death, suicide, and grief in a way that no other sitcom really can. In featuring a cast of characters that have passed on, Ghosts gives a voice to the dead, allowing for humorous stories about what happens after we’re gone. One of the earliest episodes of Ghosts sees Sam (Rose McIver) invite Pete’s (Richie Moriarty) late wife to Woodstone, and while things don’t go as planned, Pete’s wife is able to process some of her grief over his death. Meanwhile, on the other side, Pete can see how loved he is, even in his absence, when his daughter arrives with her son, named after his late grandfather.
We’ve all heard about the standard five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — but no one warns you that those stages rarely come in that order or that you won’t slip right back into one you thought you’d passed at the drop of a hat. When something happens in “stages,” you expect your experience through them to be linear, moving from one stage to another as you grow, process, and heal. But grief is anything but linear, and it doesn’t come with a timeline or a how-to guide. Ghosts has already shown there’s no statute of limitations on grief. In one of the series’ best episodes, “Holes Are Bad,” we learn that Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky) died by suicide when she reveals the cord wrapped around her neck to rescue Flower (Sheila Carrasco), who had fallen down a well. 130 years had passed before Hetty was able to talk to someone about why she killed herself, so if it takes me years to talk about Kobol without crying about him, that’s okay too.
‘Ghosts’ Makes Death Less Terrifying
In the latest episode of Ghosts, the appearance of a ghost snail prompts Trevor to confess to the decades-old grief that he’s been carrying around for his dog. While it’s a reverse of my loss, it’s easy to relate to Trevor who, 20 years after his death, is still mourning the fact that, in dying, he left his dog behind in the world of the living. After feigning disinterest in the snail, Trevor takes the little guy for himself when he decides that none of his fellow ghosts can be trusted not to eat (Thor) or lose (Hetty, Flower, and Alberta) the little guy. When Hetty and Alberta (Danielle Pinnock) confront him about his behavior, he confesses that he still feels like he let down his dog when he never came home after the night he died. It’s Hetty and Alberta’s words here that hit me the hardest. Alberta explains that Trevor didn’t abandon his dog; his death was out of his control. Death is truly life’s only inevitability — everything dies someday, and it’s rarely something we have any control over. And while that doesn’t make the loss hurt any less when it happens, there’s a weight lifted in knowing I did everything I could and the rest was out of my hands.
Hetty chases Alberta’s poignant reminder with the advice to cling to all the good times Trevor shared with his dog, as that’s what the dog would’ve remembered. I’d like to believe that Kobol’s memories are full of his favorite things: chicken, chin scritches, and endless snuggles between his two moms. Ghosts puts an appropriately waggish button on this scene to bring us through the tender moment with a laugh. As Hetty realizes she’s made a faux pas in suggesting that Trevor’s dog is likely dead now, too, she backtracks into denial on his behalf, insisting that his dog is 35 years old. What makes Ghosts such a special series is its ability to strike a consistent balance between sidesplitting humor and emotional catharsis, weaving the two together so intrinsically that even after the show brings you to tears, it will put a smile on your face mere moments later.
Regularly watching a show in which the main characters are dead, but not necessarily gone, has made the concept of an afterlife more tangible than years of church stories or the abstract notion that the dead are in a better place. Ghosts still employs the concept of both heaven and hell, but the idea that some spirits simply stick around a little longer for unknown reasons makes death feel somewhat less abrupt.Just because a life ends doesn’t mean love ends, and thanks to Ghosts, imagining that those feelings go both ways across this plane of existence makes the loss just a little easier to process. While I know my cat is gone — and I would like to imagine the little rascal got sucked off immediately despite his many kitty crimes — every time I somehow find kitty litter where it shouldn’t be, instead of crying (and sometimes while crying), I imagine that’s his ghost power, and he’s still making a mess wherever he is just to let me know he’s okay.
New episodes of Ghosts air on CBS every Thursday at 8:30 PM ET. You can watch “The Primary Source” and all previous episodes on Paramount+.
When a cash-strapped couple inherits a crumbling country estate, they soon discover it is inhabited by an eclectic group of spirits, leading to comedic encounters as they navigate cohabitation with their supernatural roommates.
- Release Date
- October 7, 2021
- Cast
- Rose McIver , Utkarsh Ambudkar , Brandon Scott Jones , Danielle Pinnock , Richie Moriarty , Asher Grodman , Rebecca Wisocky , Devan Chandler Long , Roman Zaragoza , Sheila Carrasco , John Hartman , Betsy Sodaro
- Seasons
- 2
- Network
- CBS
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