Gosh darn it I’ve done a lot of talking about LMOE on here the past few…months? Weeks? Its tag on this blog is like 12 pages long, stuff I’ve loved for years doesn’t even have that much. (You can see me desperately trying not to fall in love with it over the course of those 12 pages, it’s pretty funny.) But I was on a TV forum the other week and the general consensus about LMOE seems to be – as deliberately immature and goofy as it is, it’s very good at portraying grief, at portraying even the selfish and problematic parts of it in a helpful/sympathetic way in fact.
The arc at the end of Series 2 – the one where Mike begs his brother to leave him so he won’t have to watch him die, y’know, that traditional sitcom fare – hit me rather hard. Because I remember (I remember quite clearly in fact) when my grandfather went to hospital for what turned out to be his final visit, I couldn’t go with the rest of my family to see him. Because I had a cold, a bad one, and that’s a pretty bad thing to bring into a hospital y’know? A virus at the wrong time. Even if this one wasn’t likely to kill off all humanity. So the rest of my family went, and I gather it wasn’t exactly fun for them – my mum’s words of “he wasn’t the same bloke” still ring in my ears even though this all took place years ago – that’s really the saddest thing, the saddest thing about death in general-
Anyway, I found the series 2 finale of Last Man On Earth oddly cathartic as well as deeply sad. I think it probably tapped into something I didn’t know was there, but it’s recently shaped a lot of my thoughts about death, and how we choose to accept it and why, and the lengths we all go to (if we’re lucky in that respect) to protect our loved ones from the worst parts of grief. Definitely shaped all that for the better I think, too.