My best friend in college bemoaned the finiteness of movies. They are too short-lived and it’s all over before we’re ready to let go. Television series, on the other hand, endure for multiple years if they possess the right ratings. Characters accompany us for months; we incorporate them into our long-term schedules. Their regular return is a valuable payoff for our investment. For Ava, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a perfect example of a long running series that provided enough gratification through its seven televised seasons. She and I kicked off our sophomore year watching all of the episodes of Buffy. After warning me that the first few episodes were a smidgen campy, she assured me that the series was brilliant and that I’d love it. I enjoyed the series, which was made more fun by her enthusiasm for it. We moved onto Angel, and eventually the rest of the Joss Whedon canon. The routine was often dinner, homework, Buffy, more homework, followed by Buffy with the stream of our chats and pleasant digressions.

Over the summer, she died in a car accident. It devastated her family, our community, and me. Her sweet, strong mother gave me Ava’s DVD collection. It included Thai bootleg DVDs of Buffy, each with a customized, embossed sticker proclaiming it as part of Ava’s library. For a while I couldn’t bear to touch the DVDs for fear of smearing the precious fingerprints she left behind.

When I tried to think of the laughs we had, I smiled when recalling Buffy’s fashion choices (cranberry pleather pants!) and Spike’s fondness for spicy foods (Vampire tongues are less sensitive, was our theory). Ava’s comments about Buffy triggered a smile even when the grief was suffocating the good inside me. One night, unable to sleep, I gingerly slid open a DVD box and watched an episode. Feeling the need for a tearful release, I began with the pilot episode. At first, it felt heretical to watch Buffy without Ava. But Ava’s voice settled into each episode and it comforted me that my memories of her could still be so vivid. The memories of her comments and quips soothed me when I felt lonely.  

I soon reached season five, and braced myself for the sixteenth episode: “The Body.” Buffy’s mother, Joyce, unexpectedly dies of an aneurysm. This is the rare episode in which there is no Big Bad to blame nor an apocalypse at stake. Set to no soundtrack, Whedon claims he was trying to express the “boredom” of loss right when it happens. The countless amount of minute things you notice in grief but are unable to filter out of your mind come across clearly in “The Body.” In the background of one scene, a wind chime clinks prettily while Buffy vomits from shock of Joyce’s passing. The scene reminded me of how bizarre it seemed to me that birds chirped while I wept. And, indeed, it was a boring realization that the sun would rise no matter how I felt about it—that the outside world progressed regardless of my participation in it.

 In addition, I discovered that the impulse to find reasons for such random and insignificant events was in vain. Identifying the purpose for events in narratives are generally easy—events are crafted to serve a coherent plot. “The Body” helped me let go of the idea that nothing happens without a reason. Sudden loss is discordant to our general understanding of the world. In Buffy’s universe, where the demons are kitten-eating evil incarnate, few questions asked, it’s especially poignant that Joyce dies of a natural cause. The story about a girl with the gift to destroy vampires and stave off a series of apocalypses who is coping instead with her mother’s sudden death is unexpected, and an entirely different formula. I recognized in watching “The Body” that my control of the direction of my life is less certain than I believed. There are unperceivable forces beneath an opaque surface of understanding. This goes for both mild-mannered undergrads and Slayers. Part of maturing, for both Buffy and me, was growing to tolerate this through the cruel lesson of loss.

As the Buffy series is set in high school, one of its major themes is the experience of adolescence. Buffy learns her limitations, and that taking the part and shape of a strong woman arriving from girlhood necessitates some loss. Watching the show a second time, I felt far more sympathetic towards Buffy and appreciative of its steady pacing. Moreover, it became a way to honor Ava. In an earlier stage of grief, I dreaded that I was somehow leaving her behind by growing up without her. Through revisiting Buffy I learned how to carry the memories of her with me through my adolescence and college graduation. The television series she was so passionate about, enough to watch it with me from the beginning for a second time, stays relevant to me. And so does she.