The Haunting of Bly Manor and the Weight of Grief
The moral case for understanding how grief slows you down.
Grief is a painful thing to feel.
The emotions it brings out of you can make you tired and your body ache. Almost as if you're carrying around something heavy. How much usually depends on how much grief you're in and how long it takes to get through it. Carrying such a weight can slow you down. Things take longer to do and often don't feel as rewarding as they used to. You don't want to deal with the ordinary, every day issues like doing the dishes and going to work so you can pay for the basic necessities. This can even lead to feeling like you're carrying around more weight than just the grief itself. You're carrying around the responsibility to continue on and live your life. Show those around you that you can handle the weight of it all, even if it doesn't feel like you can at times.
If only you could set this weight down, it would make you feel better. But the weight isn't the physical kind, despite the fact that you can feel it in your bones. Finding a way to put it down takes a lot more effort. It's often easier if you can find people to help you carry it with you. Sharing the weight means you don't have to work as hard. Give you a way to remember what it feels like not to carry such a painful weight. Maybe even put it down. This doesn't mean leaving the person you were grieving behind necessarily. Just that the memories of your time together don't feel as heavy. They might even become happy memories again without all that weight attached.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is fundamentally about what it feels like carrying around the weight of having lost someone. Danielle Clayton, as played brilliantly by Victoria Pedretti, has been carrying around the grief of a recent loss for a while now. So much so that she goes looking for a way to leave it behind. Yet in doing so she's confronted by people who remind her of the weight she's carrying. The aches and pains of grief which slow you down are obvious on the people around her in Bly Manor. She can't escape pain and loss, even if she's gone to an entirely different country than where the loss began.
But in doing so, she sees that she doesn't have to carry her pain alone. They help her come to terms with the fact that she's lost someone by letting them carry some of the weight for her. At the same time she learns to shoulder the grief of those around her, allowing them to feel a little lighter. To move from the pain of remembering those they've lost to looking back with a happier feeling. It's a beautiful process and something that everyone will need to deal with at some point.
Do yourself a favour and take the time to explore the weight of grief by checking out The Haunting of Bly Manor as soon as you can.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is available on Netflix.
Oh man what did you think of how the story was told? It was convoluted and wrapped around Bly Manor so that made sense, but it did have me scratching my head at some points and rewinding because “I must have missed something important HOW did this happen???”
Pure and astute take on loss and grief, Andrew. That show is so heavy and haunting, but shows the many facets of mourning so well.