Note: this was written before the Buffy revival was canceled and before Nicholas Brendan’s passing.
“Mom? Mom? Mommy?”
25 years ago, these three words kicked off one of the saddest episodes of TV—Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5’s ‘The Body.’
Our beloved Slayer, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), comes home to find her mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland), dead on the couch in the living room. We spend so much of the season prior to that moment watching Joyce deal with a brain tumor—which caused her to lash out and often become unstable. The show stressed that Joyce’s death was not supernatural, it was natural—an unexpected, sudden brain aneurysm due to her surgery. It’s heartbreaking and one of the most real moments of the series. One of the best-acted episodes of the series. One of the best-written episodes of TV.
About three years ago, I lost my mom. She died on the exact day, 8 years later, that I found my ex-boyfriend dead in his bed. I can remember watching the clock as we sat in the hospital room watching my mom take her last breath, thinking she couldn’t possibly die on the same day as my ex. It felt supernatural—if it happened on a show, I would’ve called it bad writing. It would feel like a convenient plot device on a show, but, in real life, it’s just a weirdly sad coincidence.
Nine years ago, I started a Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch podcast called Slayerfest98. It has since become more of a general pop-culture podcast, covering everything and anything I love, but we still mostly focus on the Slayer in question. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not only my favorite show, but it was a big part of my relationship with my mom. We’d often watch it together—she’d call Buffy’s vampire boyfriends all “hunks” and constantly comment on how much she loved the fashion. When I told her I was interviewing her favorite of the Slayer’s boyfriends, Spike himself, James Marsters, she said, “Tell him your mother loves him! And that she would give him a big kiss on the lips.” When I told her I was interviewing Charisma Carpenter, who played her favorite character Cordelia Chase, she said, “Tell her your mother loves her! Tell her she’s gorgeous!”
My mom also had strong opinions on the characters. To her, Buffy Summers could do no wrong—so whenever a character crossed her, my mom hated that character forever. So, the first time my mom watched "The Body" with me, she made sure to remind me that she never forgave Joyce for kicking Buffy out of the house at the end of season 2.
This year, after interviewing coutnless folks from Buffy, I finally nabbed an interview with Kristine Sutherland (Joyce Summers). It was in honor of the 25th anniversary of her character’s heartbreaking exit from the show (although she’d appear in some form or another for the duration of the show, in dreams or as apparitions).
During the interview, Kristine was warm and sweet—she felt like Joyce Summers, but way more chill. Like Joyce Summers if she smoked some weed every once in a while. Maternal and welcoming—and easy to talk to. Interviewing her felt like a culmination of all the things that happened to me over the last few decades. She talked about losing a boyfriend early on in her life and then her mother a few years later—so I told her about my ex and mom passing on the same day 8 years apart and, in her warmest mom-voice, told me she was so sorry for my loss. My face got a little red and I bit my lip so I didn’t start crying in front of this woman. I’m sure she’s had enough gay men crying at her, probably while calling her mother, and I’m, thankfully, a semi-professional so I kept it together. But, as soon as I closed out the zoom call, as I text my best friend, to tell her how surprisingly lovely the interview was, I started weeping. All my Buffy-related dead mom feelings and personal dead mom feelings combined to create one big super Dead Mom Feeling.
"The Body" still stands as a feat in both filmmaking and in grief. The single shot of Gellar’s Slayer scrambling around the house to try and save her mother is so well acted, well written, and well directed that 25 years later it still feels like a crime it didn’t win the show or one of its actors an Emmy. You feel the panic in Buffy’s voice, you see it in her face, you feel it in the physicality of her performance. She conveys every emotion—panic, sadness, anger, and everything else—with barely any dialogue.
Buffy’s friends, her aptly named Scooby Gang, all represent different stages of grief, wildly accurately portrayed by the cast. Every actor is at the top of their game—the standouts being Alyson Hannigan's portrayal of Willow Rosenberg, obsessively changing clothes while crying, a vignette that ends in the first onscreen kiss between her character and Amber Benson’s Tara; and Emma Caulfield’s former-demon Anya’s heartwrenching monologue about not understanding death.
In the last decade, I’ve lost three of my favorite people—my ex/best-friend, my mom, and my grandma. My grandma died in July, but not on the same date as the other two. I’ve seen myself as Buffy, scrambling to call 911 while staring at the dead body of a loved one. I’ve seen myself as Nicholas Brendan’s Xander, hurting myself by stupidly punching something, just to feel, just to have some control over my feelings. I’ve been Willow getting changed over and over again, wanting to make sure I looked good for a loved one. I’ve seen myself as Michelle Trachtenberg’s Dawn, just fully collapsing on the floor.
Every loss is different. And everyone reacts differently to loss.
After finding my ex, I was diagnosed with PTSD. A friend recently asked me how often I think of him, and I honestly told my friend that not a day goes by where his dead body doesn’t flash across my brain and make me wince. My grandma’s death was a long process—she had an oxygen tank helping her breathe for the last 12 years of her life and, when she did go, we were all at my parents’ house, waiting for the end. And when she went, it was peacefully in her sleep—still, I wept so hard I threw up. After nearly a year of caretaking, I can remember being in the hospital room watching my mom take her last breath, realizing she was dying the exact same day eight years after my ex had passed and thinking how can this be happening again.
There is no correct way to grieve, either. I’m sure anyone who knows me could recite all three of the above stories from memory because I talk about them so much. I never know what to do with my grief—I’m often looking for comfort or someone to magically say the words that makes the pain go away. But, like most things, it doesn’t just go away.
I remember feeling so irrationally jealous when the friend who found my ex with me seemed to be coping with his grief better than I was. I remember thinking how weird it was that my mom didn’t cry at her mother’s funeral. I remember after my mother passed, my sister-in-law told me at least my mom and ex were together in Heaven, since they died on the same day, and me replying, “They didn’t even like each other.”
I’ve thought of "The Body" during each of these deaths. The episode has been relatable during every loss. The episode is a masterclass in grief, acting, loss, and filmmaking. The care taken with the episode—Sarah Michelle Gellar deserves a retroactive award, all the retroactive awards, for her performance in every episode Buffy, but especially for this one. In the finale of that same season, as the gang prepares for battle, Buffy says, “I don't know how to live in this world if these are the choices. If everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point. I just wish that—I just wish my mom was here.” And since my mom passed, the line hits me like a god damned cartoon anvil.
I had actually missed "The Body" when it first aired and only caught it when it re-aired on FX. I had every episode of Buffy taped on VHS and I remember checking the FX website’s schedule to see when this episode would re-air. I woke up at 7am the morning it was airing and had a terrible case of strep throat. Let me tell you, watching that episode while also sick only makes you feel worse. I remember weeping in my bed, in my pajamas, with a stack of snotty tissues in my lap. I cried so hard I got a headache.
So, oddly, interviewing Kristine Sutherland felt cathartic. It felt like a full circle moment. My TV mom treating me with such care and being so welcoming was healing. I still don’t enjoy watching ‘The Body’ but, anyone who has seen it, knows it’s a truly impressive episode of television.
Towards the end of the interview, I told Kristine how my Latin mother forever held a grudge against Joyce Summers for kicking Buffy out at the end of Season 2, because Latin mother’s hold lifetime grudges.
Kristine just sweetly laughed and I smiled.
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