Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

On The Bear Season 2

We are so small

Warning: Spoilers for The Bear seasons 1 & 2

I was all set to send out the post in my drafts, something I’d written in January, when I gave it a final read-through and came across this metaphor: Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

My daughter had burned her hand, and I told the story of sitting, holding her as she cried herself to sleep, waiting to see how bad the burn was, waiting to see if this was the other shoe, dropping. I sat and held her, unable to hold the family of a friend who’d recently killed himself. I sat and cursed myself for not protecting my child, for not being able to prevent pain for those I love.

I gave birth the day before season two of The Bear premiered, and this baby’s newborn time will always be connected to this show. In the first episode, Carmy (the protagonist, but not the only main character), sits in a support group and says he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The other shoe has dropped for me, many times, and come down hard on people I love. I’m left grieving, caring, after a fatal overdose, a fatal shooting, injury, job loss, custody battle outcome, diagnosis, estrangement, betrayal.

Carmy is grieving his older brother’s suicide, and dealing with all that grief does to a family that already had issues (I.e. all families.)

I watch The Bear with my husband, whose older brother died of a fatal overdose in 2019. When I wrote about my daughter’s (minor) burn, we was days removed from learning about the death of my husband’s high school friend. We went to the cabin because it was already planned and there was nothing else to do beside take care of each other. Grieving someone you knew well years ago is different than a sibling, there’s less to “do” when the grieving family is already being cared for.

Episode six of Season 2, which Alicia Kennedy accurately calls “its fulcrum,” was hard to watch because it felt like a phantom of my past. My parents are both from Northeastern Pennsylvania, which shares some of the same feel as Chicago. They grew up in families who had gatherings like the one in the episode: volatile and alcoholic.

I remember my grandmother’s dining room feeling dark and claustrophobic, but I never experienced the behavior that made my parents pack up and move to the west coast. Instead, I experience the longing that comes with estrangement. The feeling of missing pieces of my own history. When people talk about healing generational wounds (like alcoholism), they don’t often talk about the losses it can bring. If the whole family isn’t onboard with healing, the family splinters. It’s not that I wish I was at the family table with my parents, grandparents and uncles and aunts when things were at their worst before I was born. What’s closer to the truth is that I’m aware I’m stamped by something I never directly experienced.

I have no right to feel as paranoid as I do sometimes. My youth was stable, my parents and siblings are loving and we try our best to heal past wounds and establish healthier habits. And yet, I can feel it in my throat exactly what Carmy means when he voices his fear of the other shoe dropping. It’s my fear, too. I think it’s the fear of a lot of people whose past is full of hurt that they’re still trying to heal. People don’t talk about how complicated healing is — it’s not a state that is simply achieved one day. The more healed I am, the more I am forced to deal with the fact that the shoe can always drop. Always! Every second of the day. And I must find joy anyway, knowing it can be destroyed. Finding joy in the precarity of life rather than letting fear take over, that seems to be the closest definition of ‘healing’ I’ve found.