With Mother’s Day around the corner, I’m once again left thinking about my late Mum. She passed away when I was 18, and much like many others, processing the grief of losing such a central figure in my life seemed like a Sisyphean task. There are so many books, podcasts, and movies on the topic and advice ranging from helpful to useless platitudes, but ultimately, what helped me to move through one of the most difficult periods of my life was gaming. As we get closer to the second Sunday of May, the fateful and difficult Mother’s Day, I thought I’d share my experience with you.
I’ve previously written ad-nauseam about the gamification of grief and learning how to say goodbye through games from a mostly objective perspective. In all honesty, I was unsure whether putting myself fully into the picture would cloud my ability to properly explain just how video game worlds and stories can help people learn how to deal with losing something (or someone). However, it would be remiss of me not to explain just how I fit into this picture, one story amongst the millions of similar ones. I feel pretty lucky to have had amazing real-life support through it all, but I also owe so much of my own healing to the virtual worlds and stories I’ve been privileged enough to experience in the last eight years.
I’ve always been in love with video games from a young age, a hobby and passion readily encouraged by my Mum. As such, gaming has been a constant in my life where many other things have not. When my Mum passed away at the start of 2016, this didn’t change. The grief of losing my best friend was all-encompassing, and for those first few weeks (and months), I felt like I navigated the world in a dream-like state. Everything felt slightly off-kilter and hazy as if it wasn’t real. Blearily thanking well-wishers as they passed by in a revolving-door style procession to offer their condolences, I turned back to my constant once more: gaming.
I’m not quite sure what aspect of gaming I found the most comfort in during this period of my life. There is, of course, the most common answer – escapism – and I’m certain part of it comes from this. Being able to forget the world around you, even if only momentarily, is one of the joys of gaming that draws many in, regardless of circumstance. Booting up Skyrim for the thousandth time and jumping right into a fantasy world entirely unlike my own was like a balm for the soul. There was no funeral to plan, no admin calls to make, no uninhabited bedroom, the bed still made just-so, to linger at the doorway of. There were only dragons, giants, and seemingly unending mountain vistas to explore, and a clear-cut task at hand to forge ahead on.
If not the escapism, then perhaps it was the constancy of it all. The save of Skyrim I first loaded up is the same playthrough I began in 2013 and have lingered on across the years. My last save before my Mum passed away, likely untouched for months prior, was still there and my Dragonborn still looked the same – Whiterun still stood in the same way it always had. While my whole world around me felt like it was crumbling inwards and shifting in ways I, barely an adult, couldn’t quite fathom, Tamriel stayed the same.
But beyond the constancy or the escapism, perhaps it was the feeling of control that really did it. I could make choices in Life Is Strange and Fallout 4 that impacted the game world in tangible ways, and I was empowered to do so: choice and control are literally designed into the very fibre of these kinds of games. Where I had no control over my real life circumstances, here, locked away and immersed in various game worlds, I was the one driving narratives forward, going where I wanted, and making the decisions.
It’s likely all of these things and more.
During that first year after losing my Mum, the games I played were mostly returns to games I’d played before, likely seeking the same comfort people gain from watching the same formulaic show over and over again. As time spanned on, and the world expected me to have well and truly moved on (I hadn’t), those game choices did begin to change.
I began to choose new games with stories that aligned with my experiences in some form or another. What Remains of Edith Finch and Spiritfarer stand out as two titles that explored grief and loss in ways that allowed me to engage with the topic in a safe, controlled environment. I got to see how characters navigated the topic, without having to perform the sometimes insurmountable task of asking a real person who could respond in ways I wouldn’t expect. If I cried, which I often did, the game wasn’t going to react negatively or in ways I wasn’t prepared for.
After some time, I finally tackled one game I’d been avoiding due to just how parallel it felt to my situation: That Dragon, Cancer. It initially launched just days after Mum died, but I couldn’t bring myself to even consider playing it for many years. Seeing a story so similar yet so abstracted was an experience I don’t think I’ve had in gaming since. The game is a labour of love from parents who lost their own child to cancer, and while it’s the inverse of my own experiences, its core resonated with me. I cried, I reflected, and I felt feelings I had been locking away for fear of being judged for how I was processing my own grief, even years on.
Even now, I still use video games as a means of processing loss as my journey with grief continues, facing my own realities in the alternate ones presented to me on screen. This journey, unlike many of the adventures I’ve been through in games, is a lifelong one – while the quests and challenge level may vary at differing points of my life as I learn to live with grief, it will remain with me forever. Losing someone you love fiercely isn’t something that just goes away – after all, is grief not love persisting?
This Mother’s Day, I’ll be booting up Skyrim on my old PS4 again. I’ll be watching as my now 11-year-old Khajit avatar stares back at me, with the same look she had when I was 15 and unaware of what was to come. The same look she had when I was 18, and my world shifted forever on its axis. She was there for me through it all, even if she didn’t have to live through the loss like I did. I take some sort of comfort in that.
Image: Numinous Games, Bethesda
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