An Existential Exploration of Grief, Loss, and Relationships through “Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End”
Recently, I watched Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End - okay, if I’m being totally honest, I’ve already started rewatching it. If you’re a fan of anime and think that you might watch it (you should, you really should) and haven’t yet, this is your departure point. There will be spoilers throughout.
To make a long-ish story short, Frieren is about the titular character, Frieren, who is an essentially-immortal elf. The series starts with her and her three companions - Himmel the Hero, Heiter the Priest, and Eisen the Warrior - embarking on a ten year quest to rid the world of the Demon King, which they succeed at. This is not what Frieren is about; before the first episode is finished the world has moved on fifty-plus years and both Heiter and Himmel are dead. Not from adventuring, but simply from old age. Frieren doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get aging, to begin with, because why would she? And she doesn’t really get relationships, partly because she’s been alone for so long, and partly because human lifespans last the blink of an eye for her.
Frieren starts here, with Frieren not understanding why she’s suddenly so damn sad at Himmel’s funeral. What is going on? She’s flummoxed. It takes her another decade and new companions, such as her mage apprentice Fern, before she starts to unravel this confusion and mystery for herself.
Grief is confusing. It’s messy, it’s elusive, sometimes it’s dull and lingers and sometimes it’s sharp and quick. So often in life we don’t experience grief so much as experience our desire to not feel sad; we push it away, we tamp it down, we ask it not to come again. It doesn’t listen, of course. It has things to say. It has things that it wants us to know. If Frieren didn’t take the time to stop and listen to her grief, she wouldn’t embark on a second quest with new companions to try and understand what was so impactful about her relationships with Himmel, Heiter, and Eisen. She would have gone another fifty years looking for unique and interesting spells, alone and solitary. Which, if you’d asked her at that time, she probably would have said that it was fine - but there’s a richness and texture to more fully experiencing all that life has to offer that she discovers throughout the series.
Frieren is a beautiful and tender exploration of grief, relationships, and what it means to be human. Through her relationships with others, Frieren learns to process her grief and loss for past companions (and, in some ways, her own traumatic childhood), not by arriving at some destination, some place where her grief is fully resolved and she’s now “healed”, but by experiencing it. By being sad. By allowing it to take up space. By taking time to recognize what comes up for her in these new experiences and what she might want to do differently this time around to experience some of that richness she missed out on. There’s one episode in particular that comes to mind for me: Frieren and Fern are in a village helping to clear out boat detritus and flotsam from the bay to allow its true beauty to shine during the oncoming sunrise festival. This was an opportunity Frieren missed the first time around - she slept in (she really likes to sleep in) and missed the sunrise. Her companions were upset, particularly Himmel. She didn’t understand. Now, standing with Fern, looking out over the bay, experiencing the sunrise - she still doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get it until she looks over and sees Fern’s face with her big, shining eyes and her big, happy smile, and her awe at the beauty. She realizes that it’s just as much about the people as it is the view. She understands, somewhat, what Himmel wanted her to experience.
Okay, great. There’s an immortal elf, she’s sad, we get it, Derek. What’s the point? Grief, like many things, is not something to resolve. It doesn’t get processed and put away in a neatly-tied box and pulled out whenever we’re feeling up to it (which, let’s be honest, if most of us had our way we’d never open that box, right?) Grief comes unbidden, unasked. Grief is a journey. Grief can be like a big, heavy book on an empty bookshelf. The experience can be so overwhelming that it wipes away anything else that might have been on the shelf beforehand. There’s nothing left but Grief with a capital G and it hurts. A lot. And maybe it’s going to be that way for a while. Maybe a long while. Maybe (probably) much longer than you’d want. Yet over time you will add other books, other tchotchkes, trinkets, pictures - all the memories and experiences of your life will begin to fill the bookcase once again. If we can be courageous, to stand with our grief, to allow it in, to allow it to be a part of us, then there is the opportunity to touch something that allows for richer experiences in the future. There is no controlling grief, just as there is no controlling any emotion; there is simply what we do with it. There is no timetable for grief. There is no point where one stops grieving. The book never disappears from the shelf and every now and then when our eyes land on it we go “Oh…” and there’s the invitation to be with it. For a moment, an hour, a day. The invitation to open the book and read a little and remember, before putting it back on the shelf with other memories, other experiences.
This is the existentialist take on grief. Not an attempt to eliminate grief but to be with it. To invite it in. To integrate. Frieren’s journey is the journey of understanding this and she does so with confusion, courage, and apprehension. The poet Rumi sums this up eloquently and succinctly: “The cure for the pain is in the pain.” Knowing this does not necessarily make it easier to bear, something that is at the core of Frieren - friends, companions, and loved ones make being with the pain tolerable.