The Killing and How it Relates to Me

I meant to post about something else today—a recipe, and probably different thoughts, but my photos for it are stuck in my iCloud and I have to have this post done by 8pm so I can watch the season premiere of The Killing!

If you missed the first season, just go here, and watch the 4 minute recap—it’s free. Then you’ll be caught up and can jump in for Season 2! This show and “project” was my cousin’s baby (look for Kristen Campo in the opening credits!). In her career, she worked her way up from first being an assistant at a talent agency, to working for The OC, to being hired to work in development for a production company. Her job started out as finding new ideas, reading scripts, meeting with writers and agents, and eventually, pitching shows to networks. The Killing, a Danish format show idea, caught her attention because of the uniqueness and the way the story hit home for her. Of course, the show is a murder mystery—but the underlying stories are of the people involved, the family members, the community, the professionals working on the case. Kristen knew that if people saw this show, they would be sucked in by the way the death of a girl was not glossed over emotionally (as is usually done in TV shows before they move onto solving the crimes in less than an hour). Also, it’s not a CSI-type of show at all—aside from the mystery part. The show makes you feel the feelings of the parents when they find out it’s their daughter being discovered dead in the trunk of a car… you can’t not have tears in your eyes when you watch that. And Kristen related to this raw emotion—she watched my parents, me, and my sister’s husband be in the middle of losing my sister, and of course, she lost her cousin and felt the emotions too.

I won’t go on and on, although Kristen and I have talked about this for hours and hours since they first pitched the show—she couldn’t talk about the details much at first (and I know nothing about season 2 yet), but she told me how amazing the story was. She believed in the project—put her heart into it, and when several major networks turned it down, she continued to believe in it. AMC was the smart one…and they’re lucky 🙂

The show, season 1, was like therapy for Kristen and I–every week after the new episode aired, we talked about it on the phone. She was happy to finally be able to talk about it, and I was proud of her and also really magnetized to the story.

I’m excited for season 2 to start for a few reasons. I’ll be back on my weekly Kristen-new-episode chats (we chat every week anyway, but now we have a topic!), which is fun…and I really am looking forward to continuing the story. I’m such a sucker for stories, and love to escape in them. I’ll be honest, I’m feeling a little trepidatious as well. There must be a reason for this, but my Mom found my sister’s medical records yesterday—a 3-inch thick book of her life, with a great big chunk of it being about the night she died. Every objective and subjective medical detail. I opened it last night, flipped through some pages, and read a few sections of it. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t hesitate because I already read it once way back when we got it (and it sucked then too…but I don’t remember much about how it affected me).

Now, I have one line of this book, a medical description of something awful they did to her body when they were trying to save her life, burned into my brain. Since last night, every time I close my eyes, or when my mind goes blank for a second–in yoga class, in the sauna, laying in bed at night, this sentence shows up in words and images. And it’s choking me. I thought, possibly, on my way home from yoga class tonight, that I was going to need to pull over and vomit (but I didn’t).

And I’m thinking about those fake people in The Killing, and how this vision I’m having feels to me exactly how they look in certain scenes in the show. I don’t know how to stop it, or how to react, but I’m pulling out all my mind-body tricks for now. And I know it/I will be fine—because it always is. And challenges are opportunities. And you know what, I like to be sad sometimes—because it’s real. Kristen and I chatted about this more than once–sometimes it’s good to bring out the emotions and feel them extra hard when they’re sad or even horrifying.

So maybe you’ll join me and watch The Killing—and maybe you’ll tear up when you watch the characters experience the grief and horror of losing Rosie. Hopefully, it will make you love your own People even a little more, and maybe we’ll feel even more connected to each other—because we shared it in some abstract way.  I don’t wish Loss on anyone, for sure, but I think we can grow as human beings when we feel more emotions and my loss is one way I’ve had to do it.

Tonight, I’m working through my terrible awful vision that I have in my head. And I’m honoring it too.

By the way, the sad creepy stories are not the only ones I like to get immersed in—I’m also crazy about Parenthood, and as a kid I was obsessed with Little House on the Prairie! (if you saw my instagram earlier, you know that my Mom found my Little House dress from when I was four)

I’m just thankful for all the feelings and emotions—and tomorrow, I will share a recipe 🙂

Do you ever get immersed in stories? Books, movies, TV?  Which ones hit home for you? 

Do you honor your emotions, or try and put away or push down the bad ones?