What is grief, if not love persevering?
The line comes during a flashback in which Vision and Wanda are discussing her mourning the death of her brother Pietro:
Wanda: It’s like this wave washing over me again and again. It knocks me down, and it just comes for me again when I try to stand up. And I can’t… It’s going to drown me.
Vision: No. No, Wanda.
Wanda: How do you know?
Vision: Because it can’t be all sorrow, can it? I’ve always been alone, so I don’t feel a lack. It’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve never experienced loss because I’ve never had a loved one to lose. What is grief if not love persevering?
When I heard this for the first time from the Disney+ show WandaVision, it struck a deep chord within me. What exactly did Vision mean by saying that?
Then I watched Andrew Garfield’s interview with Stephen Colbert, where he spoke about the loss of his mother.
Garfield replied when asked about grief, “I love talking about it, by the way, so if I cry, it’s…only a beautiful thing.” He continued, “This is all the unexpressed love. The grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, right? No matter if someone lives until 60, 15, or 99. So I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her. And I told her every day! We all told her every day she was the best of us.”
This hits you deep. It makes you feel like it’s okay to mourn, cry, and feel pain because it means you loved the people you have lost. Why do we mourn the loss of the people we love? We love some people so much that the love has to take a new form to survive.
The show WandaVision is about how Wanda has to deal with her grief of losing all the people she loved — her parents, her brother Pietro and Vision. Beneath the super-powered beings, the cosmic entities, and magic, WandaVision is a show about grief. The emotions she feels are real and relatable and make her more human than any of us. It makes us realize that no matter how powerful she is, she was still a human being of flesh and blood who felt pain and suffering just like the rest of us.
WandaVision is a story about love, and it’s about loss, it’s about grief, it’s about how we move on from loss. When Wanda explains what loss is like to her, Vision is able to suggest a way forward. He made her realize that love is the way through that. Despite not being human, Vision proves that he is far more human than us.
So many people have asked me why I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe(MCU) so much. They think that the MCU is just a formulaic, slapstick comedy with a lack of real emotions. But, the MCU has so many such emotional moments that make you realize that superheroes have the same problems that ordinary people do beneath all the glamour.
We always feel like grief is something we must push through and move past. With this line, Vision validates Wanda’s grief and allows her to sit and process it. It will enable us always to embrace grief as love still exists.
Grief is love persevering hits home because it’s a poetic way of saying love endures even in the face of loss and sorrow & the proof is the sorrow itself. Sorrow and sadness, instead of being something negative to eradicate, are confirmation of an ineffable spirit.
