What Apple TV’s ‘Severance’ Teaches
Us About Grief

Note: Contained in this article are general spoilers of plot and character background for the television show Severance (although the ending is not spoiled).

The excellent series ‘Severance’, recently released on AppleTV+, is full of mysterious twists and turns as well as wry surrealist commentary on the role of the workplace in our lives. Another theme woven throughout the story of the main character, Mark (played by Adam Scott), is the experience of grief. The show poignantly illuminates the anguish of living with grief, the primary motivator behind Mark’s choice to undergo the process of “severance”.

In the show, a “severance” effectively splits the conscious mind into two distinct parts (a work “self” and a home “self”) each one oblivious to the other yet operating in the same body. At home, Mark has no knowledge or memory of his work-life whatsoever–who his coworkers are, his job satisfaction, the business he’s in, his role in the company… all of it lost to him.  At work, details of his personal life are equally absent, including the recent and tragic death of his wife.  In the eerie totality that defines the severance process, his work self is entirely unaware of ever having had a wife at all.

If we had a complicated relationship with those whom we grieve, it can intertwine with other complex and conflictual feelings. Grief alters how we relate to ourselves and the world around us in deeply personal and subjective ways, shaping us and our lives through incontrovertible absence.

As a therapist, I watch Mark and know that the core experience of his grief cannot be disappeared or “cured”. Unlike conditions like anxiety and depression for which we can learn skills to manage and even improve, grief’s main mandates are presence and openness. This is where Mark wanders astray in his own desperate search for relief from his grief–attempting to totally remove it from his life, a type of dissociation achieved by a (temporary) excising of the grief from the self. Grief might hurt in ways similar to depression; fear of anticipated grief or loss may express itself in a similar way to anxiety. But the difference is that grief is so interconnected with the object of grieving–the one who has departed from our lives–that it cannot be “managed”. It must be integrated into our lives and into our selves in such a way that allows us to continue to live healthy and fulfilling lives while at the very same time reckoning with the reality of a loved one lost.

Mark volunteered for severance because he recognized that the misery he was enduring in his daily life was not healthy. However, some of this misery may have been created by his resistance toward his grief and a scarcity of resources to cope with it, rather than by the grief itself. Instead, Mark embraces a version of himself that is absent of grief because it is absent of memory whilst continuing to be lost and overwhelmed by his pain at home. It is possible that Mark’s anguish (which so clearly hangs over him in his non-work life) could be alleviated not by futile attempts to sever from grief, but by developing internal and external resources to help him live with and understand it as a normal and organic process of being human (albeit one of the most painful parts we humans share). To create more tolerance for the necessary activities of remembrance and mourning as regular and organic emotional processes that ebb and flow, and that are inextricably linked to loving and attaching in an impermanent world; To connect with supportive people in his life, finding comfort in company;  To invite a wholeness of the self which includes a grief that does not obscure the rest of life, but rather honors love and a sense of meaning about who this person was in his life–these are the markers of integration and, for Mark as for any of us, the truest way forward.