"What is grief, if not love persevering?" This quote from Marvel's television series "WandaVision" has resonated throughout social media. On Slate, Dan Kois has a thoughtful essay comparing it to the depiction of grief in "Nomadland," a front-runner for this year's Oscars and already a multiple award winner.
The same weekend that Nomadland won its Golden Globes, a particular quote from Wandavision was making its way across Twitter. It’s a flashback from Friday’s episode, “Previously On,” in which Wanda and Vision sit in Avengers headquarters and discuss the death of Wanda’s brother. Vision notes that he can’t truly understand Wanda’s grief, but asks, “It can’t all be sorrow, can it?” Then he says the line that launched a thousand memes. It’s easy to either belittle the line or laud it as poetry, but what is the line saying, exactly? What is grief? Is it, in fact, love persevering? In a year in which over half a million Americans have died of COVID, it’s a subject much on all our minds.
