I Didn’t Know How Much I Needed to See Different Ways of Grieving Until I Watched 'The Summer I Turned Pretty'
By sabra ismath
Image: Amazon Studios
“Does Belly really think I don’t care about Susannah’s death?” The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Steven Conklin (Sean Kaufman) asks in episode 3, when he and Taylor Jewel (Rain Spencer), stop for gas on their trip up to Cousins Beach, the fictional East Coast beach town where his family spends their summer vacations. Big brother to the show’s protagonist, Belly (Lola Tung), Steven is torn between two big emotions: grief over the death of his mother’s longtime best friend, Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), and excitement about getting into his dream school, Princeton. The idea that he’s not coping the way he’s supposed to makes him tear up. “Am I an asshole?” he wonders, the same way I did as a teen. In high school, I began to lose my father, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2011. Though he was still physically there, he slowly began slipping away when I was 15. As I reached new milestones, from getting my license on my 16th birthday to applying for college, the heavy cloud of grief loomed over me. How could I enjoy these moments in my life while I was losing my dad?
Many shows and movies tap into the realm of death. According to Death, Dying, And The Dead In Popular Culture by Keith F. Durkin, professor of sociology at Ohio Northern University, about one-third of the average TV Guide listings in the early 2000s provide a brief description of programs dealing with death and dying. Usually death and dying appear in soap operas, crime dramas, mysteries, documentaries and comedies. As Alexandra Jo, director of outreach and education at funeral startup Parting Stone explains further for The Leader, a digital publication focused on the deathcare industry, Durkin says we are obsessed with death but in a sense of why and how that person dies—the cause of death. However, it’s rare that we see a realistic approach to the aftermath and how people cope with the loss of their loved ones. But that’s exactly what I found in The Summer I Turned Pretty, which portrays each character’s grief as profound, even though they’re all reacting to this loss in different ways.
The Summer I Turned Pretty isn’t the first mainstream TV series to show the impact of grief. From NBC’s This Is Us to Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever, the process of mourning has provided fodder for some of the most affecting TV scenes I’ve ever watched. I shed tears when I watched Rebecca Pearson (Mandy Moore) walk back to the hospital bed where her husband Jack’s (Milo Ventimiglia) dead body was laying after the doctors told her he died due to cardiac arrest. I empathized with Devi’s (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) anger towards the world when she was grieving her father. But with each of these shows, something was missing: the fact that grief doesn’t follow any rules. You don’t have to lose a parent to experience grief and you don’t have to lose your mind either. Many other shows explore the idea of grief with characters who lose a parent, child or significant other, but The Summer I Turned Pretty acknowledges that grief isn’t limited to a person’s closest relatives and friends—and it’s not even limited to one type of loss. The show also acknowledges that feeling okay doesn’t mean you’re past your grief, because there’s no time limit to mourning. The way The Summer I Turned Pretty portrays grief is rare for any show, much less a teen romance.
In Season 2, Belly, Steven and their friends Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) Fisher, Susannah’s sons (and also Belly’s love interests), try to save the beach house at Cousins from being sold by Julia (Kyra Sedgwick), Susannah’s half-sister, all while enduring the awkward tension between Belly and Conrad. Though the TV series is a teen romance that focuses on the love triangle between the two Fisher brothers and Belly, this season spends a lot of time exploring life after Susannah’s death, especially for Belly, who struggles to cope with the loss of her, someone who she shared a magical connection with.
But it’s not just Susannah’s passing; Belly also feels like she’s lost both her boyfriend and her best friend, all within the span of a couple months. As a result, her grades drop and her volleyball captaincy is revoked. When her mother, Laurel (Jackie Chung), finds out, she’s disappointed and unsympathetic, saying, “You don’t get to use Susannah’s death as an excuse.” But to Belly, Susannah’s death isn’t an excuse for slacking off; it’s a real loss in what feels like a long string of losses—including that of her mother, who hasn’t been there for her, whether to talk about Susannah’s tragic death, or simply showing up to her volleyball games.
“Oftentimes, we associate grief with tragedy, and [we are] more focused on the loss of a human being to death. But, grief really is just the response to loss in all its forms,” says Zainib Abdullah, a Toronto-based psychotherapist and founder of Wellnest.
As the show pans to each character’s individual story line, it demonstrates that everyone deals with grief differently. From the moment Steven pops up on screen in Season 2, his signature smug smile and witty humour brightens the mood. Though the year held great sorrow, he has finally graduated, reaching a great milestone in his life, one that he is proud of as he confidently delivers his valedictorian speech. But that doesn’t mean he’s not grieving; in episode 1, he receives a gift that Susannah had prepared before her death. Though he doesn’t cry, or even really show his feelings, viewers realize that he is grieving, and that his way of dealing with his feelings is to honour her in every way he can—like in his valedictorian speech, which he ends with the words Susannah wrote to him, "There are times where it feels like the world is happening to you, but remember you are also happening to the world.” Belly, on the other hand, is the buzzkill at his graduation party. In her eyes, Steven’s upbeat mood is insensitive, and she goes so far as to accuse him of not caring or being sad about Susannah’s death, unlike her, who’s finding life lonelier and more miserable.
However, grief doesn’t only play out the way Belly is experiencing it. According to Abdullah, talking about grief as a series of ‘stages’—of shock, denial, anger, etc.—can be a helpful way to understand the emotions it can spark, but in reality, we go through these phases fluidly. It’s very normal to go back and forth between these emotions, so we shouldn’t try to think of grief as a process that you ‘progress’ through, especially since there is no metric for how ‘well’ someone is grieving.
It has been personally affirming to see Steven’s grief journey play out on my TV screen, because I’ve also been worried I wasn’t mourning in the ‘right’ way. Recently, an old friend died. We mostly kept in touch through likes on Instagram and the occasional comment on our respective posts, but when I heard the news, I didn’t know how to feel. Unlike when my father passed away, I questioned myself every time I felt sad, since I wasn’t that close to her. But I also felt guilty every time I was happy, because it had only been days or, eventually, weeks since her funeral. Nothing I felt made sense. I remember watching This Is Us and feeling moved by how they portrayed the loss of a father, but I longed to see the grief I was feeling over my friend shown on the screen. And that’s what I got with The Summer I Turned Pretty, which tackles a story of grief from different perspectives and through different relationships, beautifully showcasing the unconventional ways mourning plays out.
Regret is also a major theme in Season 2. As the show unfolds at the beach house, where Susannah’s presence is still deeply felt, Julia emerges as the antagonist. As she tries to sell the property, it quickly becomes clear that she’s doing so in an effort to get rid of the regret and pain she feels. Even though they shared the same dad, Julia was distant with her sister, and now time has run out and she can no longer try to make amends. “I never wrote back,” Julia says to Laurel as they talk about the former’s plan to sell. In fact, she never even got to say goodbye. It’s clear that Julia isn’t only grieving the loss of her sister, but also the relationship they may have one day been able to have.
While some stories—and people in real life—may want to rush through these uncomfortable feelings to arrive at some sort of feel-good resolution or lesson learned, regret is part of Julia’s grief, and it’s an experience that many people have.
“Having a realistic representation of grief is important because it speaks of our human experience and validates our experiences,” Abdullah says. “Some of the unrealistic, very fast, hyper toxic positivity content that we consume goes into our subconscious and because we consume things so readily, those messages get internalized.”
In fact, Abdullah says we live in a grief illiterate culture, which is why showing the incongruent ways grief plays out on screens through Belly, Steven and Julia’s stories is important, because it provides a reminder that everyone grieves differently.
“Providing education on not only normalizing, but validating the experiences, in the media and pop culture… can be a really beautiful avenue to bring that conversation to the forefront,” she says.
That’s certainly how I felt during the scene at the gas station between Steven and Taylor, who consoles him by saying, “happiness and grief can coexist.” It’s a reminder I needed, too.