S6E4: Aftermath
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Thank you to guest writer, Ben, for this week’s post. Ben's first daughter, Elowyn, was born unresponsive in March 2021, after an otherwise normal full-term pregnancy and labor. She was resuscitated but suffered catastrophic brain damage during the time her heart was stopped. She died six days later. Ben is astounded and awed by the way that everything can change in a moment. Ben and his wife have a second daughter, Juniper. They make sure that everyone knows they are a family of four.
The fourth episode of the sixth season of “The Crown” is called “Aftermath.” I do not think it counts as a spoiler to let you know that the event of which we are seeing the “aftermath” is the death in a car accident, in a tunnel under Paris in August of 1997, of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed. I suppose it is possible that there exists, somewhere out there, someone who is watching “The Crown” and who does not know that Diana and Dodi died in a car accident. If that was you, then I suppose I spoiled it, but to be fair, like everything else this season, it was really the newspapers’ fault. They told me first.
In the fourth episode of the sixth season, in the aftermath, the living speak with the dead. Diana comes to Charles on a plane; Dodi comes to his father, Mohamed, in the older man’s office. They converse. I watch Mohamed carefully. I recognize his grief. I recognize his loss. Dodi tells him what he ought to have done differently. Dodi is sitting at the table, as big as life – until he isn’t, until Mohamed is again forced to acknowledge the reality that he isn’t. His disappearance reminds us that the conversation is entirely inside Mohamed, that if Mohamed is hearing Dodi say it, then he never really needed to be told. I recognize his regret. I recognize his loneliness.
I never had these conversations with my daughter. Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Diana, explained in an interview that “when you lose a person, the first thing you would give anything to do is speak to them again.” There’s the difference between me and Mohamed — again. Mohamed wants to speak to Dodi again. He imagines Dodi talking, just as Dodi did; imagines how Dodi would have reacted by extrapolating forty-two years of life, forty-two years of their sometimes strained relationship. I have had these conversations with my father, only he is the dead one; but I do not get these conversations with my daughter, because there is no talking to her again.
There is so much I recognize in Mohamed, and yet somehow, surprisingly, I find myself jealous. I watch him collapse when Dodi vanishes. I recognize that heartbreak and could not wish it on anyone, and yet somehow, I find myself thinking, at least you can hear him talk whenever you want. I talk to my daughter all the time, but what I can’t do is hear her voice, converse with her like Mohamed does with Dodi. We never heard her voice. We don’t know what she would sound like.
Do you ever find yourself feeling jealous of someone else’s grief/loss/process?