The night that my mother died, I was at home, back in Massachusetts. She had been dying of cancer, taken off of chemo about three weeks prior. I flew out on her last birthday to be with her. My sister was there, along with her boyfriend, and naturally my dad. My mother was from a big family - the oldest of eight children (technically nine, she might remind me, as she had a brother who only lived about an hour after he was born,) and two of her sisters had also come to be with her, though one had to go home the morning before my mom died (I've repeatedly made a conscious effort to reassure her that she had been a wonderfully supportive presence - I think she might have felt guilty that she wasn't there to the very end).
There were two moments that really felt the worst, on either end of the moment that my mom stopped breathing. She had gone unconscious in the afternoon, and had been breathing with a death-rattle up until about fifteen minutes before midnight. The moment she actually stopped, I was in the room, and I think we were all too dumbfounded to really process it as a trauma. The earlier moment is a bit too personal for me to share here, but the latter was when, an hour or so later, I hugged my dad, crying into his shoulder, and then I let out the loudest scream I think I've done since I was a small child.
What shocked me about it was that I recognized the feeling. My voice had grown far deeper - not only had I recently turned 31, so my voice had changed about twenty years prior, but I've also got a fairly deep baritone voice anyway. But I realized that, if you just pitched it up, you would hear an infant screaming for his mother. One of the things we learn to do as adults is to contain our emotions - we hold back, at least a little. A baby doesn't have the context to understand that being a little hungry isn't the most horrible pain they've ever experienced, and so they hold absolutely nothing back.
And for the first time since I was very little, in that moment, I didn't hold anything back. It was cathartic, to be sure, but it also felt like I had concentrated all my grief into that moment - it was the worst I felt about my mother's passing, the most furious, raw, devastated.
There's a nagging snob in the back of my mind that hesitates to find something so profound in a show like the Wheel of Time. The show is entertaining, but as many have pointed out, the source material is pretty derivative.
But I am finding myself growing to like it more as I watch it - starting to feel a bit of affection for the characters.
A favorite that is emerging is Lan, the Warder for Moraine, our central Aes Sedai character. As we've learned, the magic-wielding and all-female Aes Sedai (very curious to see if they touch on the notion of a transgender Aes Sedai, something I suspect is not addressed in the source material, but would be an interesting thing to explore in a modern adaptation) are divided into several color-coded orders, and most of those orders pair up an Aes Sedai with a male Warder - who is trained as a fighter to protect the Aes Sedai. A magical bond is created between the two, allowing them to feel one another's pain (and presumably just know how the other is doing at all times.)
Like most wizards in fantasy, the Aes Sedai are usually jockeying for power within the organization (though in particular, Liandrin, who is of the red-themed magic police wing, seems to be a villain in waiting) but the Warders seem to mostly get along. And so, in the previous episode, we met Stefan, who is a charming and gregarious Warder. But, also in that episode, his charge is killed, and so this episode has him looking a lot like a man who has lost his wife - the most important person in his life.
I half-expected there to be some tradition in which a Warder whose Aes Sedai dies is expected to throw himself on her funeral pyre or otherwise off himself. But that doesn't actually seem to be the case - Lan suggests that he can bond with another Aes Sedai, or even join a group (apparently the green Aes Sedai take multiple Warders, though the reds don't take any because, at least in Liandrin's case, they've got a deep case of misandry).
It doesn't come as much of a shock, though, when Stefan's body is found kneeling, a dagger in his gut, in what appears to have essentially been an act of seppuku. He does this after drugging Lan's tea so that his friend will be too deep in sleep to prevent him from doing this.
At the funeral ritual, the watching Warders and Aes Sedai beat their chests with their fists, and Lan, the closest person Stefan had left, kneels by his body and tears his clothes and lets out a powerful scream. And boy, did I have a strong reaction to that.
I will say that one thing I find really interesting about the world building of the Wheel of Time is the introduction of a lot of Eastern philosophical conceits to a world that otherwise has a Tolkienesque western-Europe feel. For instance, the funerary garb everyone wears is white. The very idea of the Wheel of Time itself is, I think, inspired by Buddhism and other cyclical models of the universe. People talk regularly of reincarnation as the assumed future of their souls, which is, of course, where the whole notion of the Dragon Reborn comes from.
At this point, most of the characters have gotten to the initial goalpost - the White Tower and the city of Tar Valon. If we are to look at Lord of the Rings as a model, though, I imagine this is basically just Rivendell - the journey is only getting started.
But hey, I'm a sucker for this stuff, so I'm looking forward to the next episode.
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