What The Sitcoms of my Youth Taught me About Grief

The Denver Nuggets fired Michael Malone, and I'm crying in my bed on a Tuesday night because of it. The Nuggets fired their head coach, which means that everything is changing and nothing will ever be the same and I very well may never be happy again.

But to be honest, the Denver Nuggets firing Michael Malone isn't the real reason I'm crying. I'm crying because, during this period of involuntary unemployment, I decided to rewatch one of my favorite TV shows again. The question was, which one?

I get extremely emotionally attached to pretty much any piece of media I consume. I never watched the last episode of New Girl, because I didn't want it to end, and when David Lynch died I cried on my way to the dentist. I read the same middle-grade novel once a year just because it's comforting to me, and any 1970s science fiction film will forever remind me of when I was in sixth grade, and my dad showed my sister and I Logan's Run for the first time.

So despite potential emotional damage and nostalgia-induced tears, I chose a sitcom to rewatch. It was one I'd failed to rewatch before, and one that was just sitting on my Hulu "continue watching" page, haunting me from when my friend and I watched every Christmas episode we could find after I finished my last ever final exam: How I Met Your Mother. And today, I watched the series finale, and I've pretty much been crying ever since. (This is also not an entirely honest account of why I'm crying, but stay tuned for a big reveal.)

To understand why a sitcom finale has had me in tears for upwards of four hours, you have to understand the story of the sitcoms that ruled my adolescence. Between the ages of 13 and 18, my sister, our best friend, and I were catching up on all the sitcoms that aired just a little too early for us to watch them on TV, and just a little too late for us to be too young for the one allotted f-bomb per season. Every weekend we would gather around the TV, put the Netflix disc into the Wii, and let the world fade away as the familiar ba ba ba ba ba's of the How I Met Your Mother theme song began.

For a show that took up so much of our adolescent time, I'm surprised I don't have the same nostalgic attachment to it as I do to the other shows we watched. The three of us watched the show in the way it was intended, with many laughs, a few tears, and no immediate need to call our therapists and discuss any tendencies to place emotional value on fictional characters. And though I can't name a single particular moment that justifies my present emotional attachment to this show, throughout the years, subconsciously, it became a weapon in my mind's arsenal of nostalgia-fueled emotional destruction.

But this isn't just a story about How I Met Your Mother. It's a story about all the sitcoms that helped us pass those teenage Saturdays. Before HIMYM, there was Futurama, which my sister and I started watching with our older brothers, after they finally won the battle over TV choice, and our parents stopped caring whether or not we heard an animated robot make fart jokes and talk about beer. By age twelve, we had introduced our best friend, Sloane, to Futurama, and it found its spot on our Netflix queue. Next was Parks and Recreation, brought to us by my brother and his high school girlfriend watching it too loudly in the living room on a school night. We got on board just in time for Netflix to acquire its final season, and we watched the whole show over the course of one summer. To this day, we each have matching Lil' Sebastion t-shirts.

As we left middle school and entered high school, we discovered New Girl, and with it, a brand new fictional world to keep us occupied as our lives changed. My sister and Sloane even enjoyed the dark side of network television: the hour long drama. More than once Grey's Anatomy was picked as the entertainment of choice for us, and more than once I dramatically complained about how blood makes me woozy. They would watch various doctors and firefighters save various bleeding or burning (or both) victims in various cities. But we also each got busier, and our teenage lives took different paths, and we couldn't always be there to watch these shows with each other. And when we were, we wanted the predictability of something we'd already seen. We wanted to cherry pick our favorite episodes of our favorite TV shows, and curate a viewing experience that was as comforting as it was entertaining.

The age of streaming gave us a superpower: pick any episode of any sitcom at any time. But with great power, comes great responsibility. Or, if you're me, previously unforeseen emotional attachments. The thing is, it wasn't until my (still very early) adulthood that I have come to understand where these emotional attachments come from.

I suppose now would be a good time to make the big reveal, which is that I'm not crying about the Nuggets firing Michael Malone, nor am I crying because I watched the emotional series finale of How I Met Your Mother. I'm crying because for almost ten years, I have been the sibling of a cancer patient, and for three years, that cancer patient has been dead. My twin sister, Martha, was battling cancer during our most formative years, which is why we spent so much of our free time watching TV. Though she often felt well enough to go mountain biking in the summer, or skiing in the winter (both activities which I dislike despite my Colorado roots), there were times when all we wanted was a reliable laugh. After a summer day spent at the hospital, getting either bad news or not bad news (after a while there was no such thing as "good news" on the cancer floor of a children's hospital), the three of us would settle down in the living room and watch the predictable antics of Neil Patrick Harriss playing a womanizing finance bro, or Amy Poehler saving a fictional midwestern town.

I am sentimental and emotional, yes, but the reason sitcoms hold such a special place in my heart is because I associate them so strongly with the laughter and relaxation that we held onto during the years of treatment, remission, relapse, and clinical trials.

So as I sat on my bed, rewatching the famously disliked ending of an otherwise well-liked sitcom, an ending which involved a person dying too young of an unnamed (but probably cancer) disease, I started to sob. Not because it was devastating to watch a fictional character die, which it absolutely was, but because by rewatching this show, in a way I rewatched my memories of adolescence. When a familiar joke was told, I was transported back to the moment we first heard it, on the old gray couch in our living room, or sitting on the giant teddy bear in Sloane's basement. As the show came to an end, this window to my younger self, to a time when my sister was still alive, suddenly closed.