Grief Is Love

This is going to be a soft story. The softest one I'm going to tell you. So let's slow everything down. Take a breath in. Take a breath out. Maybe snuggle in a little closer. Are you ready?

Sometimes the most important stories aren't the loud ones with the punching and the explosions. Sometimes the most important stories are the quiet ones, where two people hold hands in a living room while everything else slowly dissolves around them.

This is one of those.

The big red Hex bubble over Westview, New Jersey, was coming to an end. Wanda Maximoff's magic — which had built this whole impossible week, with Vision alive again and two beautiful sons named Tommy and Billy — was finally running out. You could see it happening if you watched carefully. The walls of the houses were flickering at the edges. The wallpaper was curling. The sky outside the windows blinked, sometimes, from sunny blue to staticky gray and back to sunny blue again. The sitcom couldn't hold on anymore.

Outside the red wall, the people of Westview were waiting to get their real lives back. A clever and dangerous witch named Agatha Harkness was lurking nearby, trying to take Wanda's magic for herself. The S.W.O.R.D. agents were arguing about what to do. The clock was ticking.

Inside the house at 2800 Sherwood Drive, it was very quiet.

Pink Vision — the gentle, magic-made husband who had read bedtime stories to the boys every single night that week, the one who flipped pancakes on Saturday and rode a bicycle to work in a sweater vest — found Wanda standing alone in the living room. The sun coming through the curtains was a little crooked. The clock on the mantel was tick-tocking in slightly the wrong rhythm. Wanda was just standing there, very still, with both her hands at her sides.

Vision walked over to her. He didn't say anything for a minute. He just stood next to her. And then he took her hand.

He just took it.

The way he had taken it once, a very long time ago, on a quiet bench in Scotland, on the evening they had decided to try to be brave together.

Tommy and Billy were upstairs in their pajamas. The boys had brushed their teeth. They had their stuffed animals. They were sitting at the top of the stairs, peeking through the wooden railings, watching their mom and dad in the living room down below. Quiet as mice. They knew something important was happening. They didn't quite know what.

Now — let me back up a few days, because there's a moment from earlier in the week you have to know about. It's the moment the whole story hinges on.

A few nights before, at bedtime, Tommy and Billy had asked their dad a question. They had been lying in their twin beds, in their twin pajamas, looking up at the ceiling. And Billy — the thoughtful one, the one with the little red sparkles in his hands — had asked, "Dad. Why does Mom seem so sad sometimes? Even when she's smiling?"

Vision had sat down on the edge of the bed. He had thought for a moment. And then he had given an answer that turned out to be one of the kindest, most important sentences in any Marvel story ever told.

He said: "What is grief, if not love persevering?"

OK. We have to slow down here. Because that's a big sentence, and it deserves a little unpacking. Let's take it word by word.

Grief — that is the sad feeling you get when you miss somebody you love. When you miss them so much it almost hurts inside. Maybe you've felt grief before. Maybe you've missed a grandparent, or a friend who moved away, or a pet, or a person you loved very much who isn't here anymore. That feeling — that big, heavy, quiet feeling — is grief.

Persevering — that's a long word that means "keeps going." It keeps showing up. It doesn't give up. Like a little candle flame in a window that just won't blow out, no matter how hard the wind blows.

So what Vision was saying to his two little sons — and through them, to Wanda, and through Wanda, to all of us — was this:

Being sad about missing somebody is not weakness. It is not brokenness. It is not anything wrong with you. It is just LOVE. Love that has nowhere to go. Love that keeps loving, even after the person you loved is gone. The sadness is the love itself. The sadness is the love still trying to find its way out.

What is grief, if not love persevering?

It is just love, all the way down.

Wanda had heard him say it from the next room. And she had cried. Not because she was sad, exactly. But because she had been carrying that love — that big, heavy, beautiful love for Vision — for a very long time without knowing what to call it. And now she had a name for it. It was just love. The whole time. It had always just been love.

OK. Back to the living room.

The walls were flickering. The Hex was almost gone. The boys were peeking through the railings upstairs. Vision was holding Wanda's hand.

He smiled at her. That calm, patient, pink Vision smile she knew so well — the one he had given her on the bench in Scotland, the one he had given her in Shuri's lab in Wakanda, the one he had given her every morning for a whole impossible week in Westview.

"Wanda," he said softly. "We have said goodbye before."

She nodded. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she was smiling too.

"So it stands to reason — " he began.

And Wanda — brave and quiet and shining — finished his sentence for him.

"— we'll say hello again."

Vision nodded. He kissed her forehead. He looked up the stairs, just for a second, at the two little faces peeking through the railings, and he gave them the tiniest, most loving nod a dad has ever given his children.

Then the Hex came down.

WHOOOSH.

The red walls dissolved into the air. The sitcom dissolved. The little house at 2800 Sherwood Drive dissolved. The neighbors and the picket fences and the groovy yellow wallpaper all gently melted back into the empty lot they had risen from. And Tommy and Billy — quietly, peacefully, no scary noises, no sad endings — faded back into the gentle red magic they had been made of, with their stuffed animals still tucked under their arms.

And Vision — Pink Vision, the husband, the dad, the magic-made gentleman — faded too. Still smiling. Still holding Wanda's hand. Right until the very last second.

Then it was just Wanda. Standing alone in an empty lot in Westview, New Jersey, with the real world coming back around her. Cars. Sky. Birds. The faint sound of S.W.O.R.D. trucks pulling up at the edge of town.

She was empty-handed. But she was not empty.

Because the thing she carried out of Westview — the one thing she took with her into the rest of her life — was that small, perfect, almost-too-quiet sentence.

What is grief, if not love persevering?

She put it in her pocket like a candle. And she carried it everywhere she went after that. And every time the sadness came back — and it did, because of course it did — she touched the candle in her pocket, and she remembered.

It wasn't sadness. Not really.

It was love. The whole time. Just love.

That was Vision's last gift to her. Not the bedtime stories. Not the pancakes on Saturday. Not even the calm British voice or the gentle pink smile. His last gift was a single sentence — a tiny candle — that turns out to be true for everyone who has ever loved anyone they have ever missed.

And now you know it too. So you can carry it in your pocket forever.

What is grief, if not love persevering?

Just love.

Sweet dreams.