How “The Golden Girls” Allowed Me to Grieve for my Grandfather

Watching the classic sitcom finally allowed me to experience the feelings I’d kept bottled up.

I remember the first time that I cried about the death of my grandfather. I was watching an episode of The Golden Girls and, when I reached a certain point, I found myself weeping, the sort of deep, racking sobs that only come along once in a while. Admittedly, I am and have always been a crier, but most of the time it’s the sort of sniffling that you do when something mildly moves you. Only very rarely do I have those moments when I absolutely surrender control to my embodied emotions.

This was, needless to say, one of those times. It was in fact the first time since his passing that I’d really been confronted with the enormity of what I’d lost. I’d been very lucky that no one close to my had passed since I was six years old, when my other grandfather had passed away, and so this death hit me particularly hard. He’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s for several years before his death, but even so his passing had come on suddenly. On the day after New Year’s, my grandma called us saying that my grandfather wasn’t feeling at all well. Given that, despite the Alzheimer’s, he was still as strong as an ox, and given that we Appalachians are notoriously resistant…