The pilot episode of “The Bear,” FX’s frenetic series about a high-end chef who takes over his family’s blue-collar sandwich shop, opens with an unsettling image. In the dead of night in Chicago, a man in an apron — we later learn that this is Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White, the series’s main character — walks over a fog-enshrouded bridge, cautiously approaching a large cage. Inside it, something is growling. The man swings the door open wide and confronts a great, angry bear. At first, he tries to soothe the beast, whispering, “I know.” But the bear lunges at him. The man wakes — it’s a dream and, we suspect, not the first time he’s had it — and heads off to face the suffocating anxiety that marks his daily life.
The bear is clearly important, but its meaning is at first ambiguous. Does it represent ambition? Fear? Regret? By the time the season ended, the symbol was obvious, at least to me. The bear is grief. To be honest, I always recognized it. Because I know that beast all too well.
A few years ago, I lost my life partner, Kate, after she was diagnosed with a terminal brain illness that rapidly leads to dementia. When we got the diagnosis, I’d just been laid off from one job and had accepted a new one in a new city. My legs were already wobbly beneath me. When Kate got sick, the ground vanished from beneath us both. She moved in with her family. I crawled off toward my new city and my new job, whereupon I quickly lost my mind.
The kind of trauma that grief imposes has become a popular subject on buzzy TV shows. On “Severance,” a widower, played by Adam Scott, opts to undergo a surgical procedure that severs his consciousness while he’s at work from his consciousness in his home life, allowing him eight hours a day without the grief he feels for his lost wife. On “Shrinking,” a therapist, played by Jason Segel, has his life upended when his wife dies. On “Ted Lasso,” the American football coach played by Jason Sudeikis at first seems to be irrepressibly chipper but later turns out to be grieving a failed marriage. “The White Lotus” presented a more caustic take, as a neurotic, despondent tourist played by Jennifer Coolidge tries to assuage her grief by bringing her mother’s ashes to a luxury resort to scatter them in the sea. (Things do not go as planned.) “Dear Edward” on Apple TV+, about a boy, played by Colin O’Brien, who is the lone survivor of a plane crash, even takes us inside a grief counseling group — the kind with which I have personally grown familiar.