If you haven’t watched WandaVision and intend to – spoiler alert. It picks up right when Avengers: Endgame is over, and the character Vision is dead (among many other losses along the way). Except here is the kicker – in the first episode of WandaVision, Wanda and Vision are alive and well. Along the way, we discover Wanda is experiencing complicated grief. She has trapped a whole town in her idealistic world where she has children. Where they live in the suburbs and have friends. Where there isn’t good versus evil. Where Vision isn’t dead. Grief is love persevering. Wanda never stopped loving Vision, nor should we expect her to. She experienced a loss like no other, and didn’t know how to manage it.

Aren’t we similar, though? Grief hits us in weird ways, at inopportune times, and for a variety of reasons. We grieve a loved one lost, an opportunity vanished. It’s also rather tricky – I mean it is for me. In this journey of recovery, past grief can come back up at any time and new grief can trigger our struggles. Some of us can brush it off and move forward knowing it’s in the past. Others can get stuck and it can wreak havoc on life around us while we find our way back – kind of like Wanda.

What can we learn from these experiences? Life is hard. Grief is something that happens to all of us and we cannot plan ahead for it. All we can do it take it in stride and choose how to respond to it in battle.

Kristen Ellis

Kristen has worked in the mental health field since 2013, with a focus on crisis work, substance use services, and bringing a voice to lived experience. Her ambition is to change the way mental health care and recovery is seen and achieved, so to redefine what it means to defeat adversity.