I was recently gifted a book: Make Your Art No Matter What by Beth Pickens. The subtitle is “Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles” and the book is intended to assist artists of all mediums and levels to find more confidence in their art. In a chapter about working through and with grief, Pickens writes:
I think of grief not as a looming threat, waiting for an in-between moment to finally nab us, but rather as a sorrowful companion, a wave returning us to the reality and conditions of our interior. Our capacity to grieve is connected to our capacity to love.
That last line resonated with me. I underlined it and dogeared the page. I closed the book and wondered if I could recall the first time I ever felt grief; the first time I ever registered permanent loss. It took a bit of time and staring out a window, but one event came sharply and quickly into my mind’s focus. The Rugrats, I Remember Melville.
In the 1994 episode, Chuckie acquires a pet bug (a roly poly as the kids call them, Armadillidiidae if you’re a scientist), grows instantly fond of it and names it Melville. From what I remember, Chuckie leaves Melville with his friends while he goes off to find something and, in his brief absence, Melville dies. The rest of the episode has Chuckie pretending Melville is not dead and then crying uncontrollably and declaring he’ll never be happy again. The babies hold a funeral for Melville and Chuckie gets what any therapist would call “closure” — suddenly thinking of Melville starts to make him smile instead of sob.
That’s a lot to pack into one 13-minute-ish television show for children. I remember watching this episode intently. I don’t think I cried, but I recall a deep sense of empathy. Of understanding that there would be my own Melvilles in life and that, like Chuckie, it might take me a second to admit they’re not with me anymore. That I might regret the loss as much as not saying goodbye. Later, when a friend lost a long and extremely unfair battle with cancer at the age of 18, I had to verbally repeat that he had died over and over again about 10 times before it finally sunk in and I crumbled into a heap on my family’s kitchen floor. I never said goodbye to him either and crying with friends at the funeral (my first funeral) felt both terrible and deeply rewarding.
When I think about Chuckie and Melville in relation to Pickens’ last line, I also think about his friends. Tommy and the twins, Phil and Lil. I don’t remember there being any adults or older kids in the episode — it was just the babies figuring it out for themselves. I’m sure this was intentional. Grief isn’t about authority telling us how to overcome, it’s about finding our own ways forward. As much as the plot was about Chuckie grieving Melville, it was also about Tommy, Phil and Lil finding out how to support their friend through something they weren’t particularly affected by. They conjured grief for Melville because of their love for Chuckie.
For Chuckie himself, his capacity to grieve for Melville was directly proportional to his love for Melville. To his faith in the future that they had together. We can’t be angry at the memory of something that we determined was supposed to be. Grief is that confusion of “I know it’s not anyone’s fault, but I still need someone to blame...someone responsible for this injustice.” It’s the knowing this occurrence will never be neatly tied, but we need to put it to rest as best we can so that something, anything can happen to us again. In allowing for the grief to be deep and in letting the tears flow, Chuckie’s love was calibrated. If a grief is all-encompassing, the love must have been as well. Perhaps our emotions are also governed by the laws of physics.
This all might seem grandiose for an animated series involving babies and toddlers, but story is how we make sense of the world. While the show was performed by fictional, 2-D characters, it was written by adults who were actively thinking of the best way to convey this sensation to children. They did so in a way that stuck with one viewer, at least, some three decades later. When we create characters, we imbue them with our learnings. As artists, it’s what we do. Or attempt to anyway: get everyone closer to the realities of our interior, to understand our own capacities.