Looking for the Light: Trauma and Loss in The Last Of Us - Part II

Note: This piece contains spoilers for The Last of Us - Part 2

If I ever were to lose you…

11:00 PM 10/23/18

It’s late evening and my dad and I have polished off a greasy cheese pizza before I turn in for the night. He sits in a darkened room flickering with the TV's glow, complaining about Trump as I peel off, wishing him a good night. My golden-retriever chases my heels upstairs as I finish the last few bites of the last slice of pizza before tossing him a morsel. I hop in bed and he curls up at my feet, crushing them in the process, but I've grown used to losing blood flow and sensation each night because it's been a war of attrition trying to ease him off my bed. I watch something on my laptop I can't remember now, a year and a half later, and fall asleep. In five hours I'll be awake, scrambling for my sweater, shoes, and car keys as I drive my father to the emergency room, still sleep drunk, before he has a heart attack. 

4:30 AM 10/24/18

After what feels like the longest drive of my life, I pull into the driveway in front of the emergency room, let my dad out, and park quickly, before racing in. He's admitted and the entire emergency department swarms the room, attaching EKGs and pulse oximeters and readying an AED. Other nurses, technicians, and physicians not currently attending to patients stop what they're doing and peer into the room as concerned expressions flash across their faces. Other patients' visiting families shorten their strides to rubberneck to see what all the commotion is about. I text my mom to let her know the situation since she's out of the country at the moment and she books a flight home. Local family and friends are called to race to the hospital to be by my side. About ten minutes after our arrival, my dad codes. He goes as pale as the sheets on his bed, he lets out an awful groan, and his heart stops beating. 

...I'd surely lose myself.

2:30 PM 4/5/19

I'm sleepily nearing the end of a meeting. My mind wanders until a sharp buzz illuminates my pocket. "I can check it at the end," I think. I look up at the clock and I've got, probably, about 15 more minutes until I'm free for a break. Thirty seconds later: another buzz. Five seconds: another buzz. Another five seconds: another buzz. My heart starts racing, my mouth is watering, and my peripheral vision begins to darken. Before I know it, my mind has wandered back to 4:30 AM, 10/24/18. It doesn't replay like a movie, more like snapshots and clips. I hear his groan. I see his pale face. I feel like I'm going to throw up as I quickly exit the room and double-over in the hallway. I retreat to the bathroom after experiencing my first panic attack. It takes me what feels like an eternity to work my breathing back down to a normal pace. My heart follows. As I dab the tears from my eyes I finally check the messages that triggered the attack, "What's the name of that movie that we saw last summer?" my aunt asks. I'm too scattered to rack my brain to recall what movie we saw together almost a year ago and I feel a wave of anger that isn't really directed at her, nor at the message that incited the whole attack, it's just defensive rage at whatever made me feel so scared and so alone, so suddenly.

10:00 PM 6/22/20

I'm at the end of a game I've been anticipating for seven years: The Last of Us: Part II. I have mixed emotions about where it's taken me, but in the last 23 hours of play I've found myself, despite her persistently poor choices, fiercely attached to Ellie. As Ellie is beaten by Abby, she retreats to an idyllic farmhouse outside of Jackson, Wyoming. She and her partner, Dina, raise their son JJ on the farm, washing dishes, corralling sheep, and as I navigate Ellie to a lone tractor jutting out of the undulating, amber waves of grain, she sits, swaddling her "Potato", eyes to the horizon in a mercifully player-controlled moment of bliss. I sit and bask in the warmth of the absurdly idyllic burnt orange sun and listen to Ellie coo and nudge JJ. After I feel the scene has played out, I pull back on the stick, leave the tractor and walk back to corral the sheep back into the barn for the night. I've been, subconsciously, waiting for something terrible to happen. This can't be it, right? Surely, they can't end Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us Part II on a happy note. This doesn't feel authentic to Ellie's emotional state nor to the story they're telling. 

After all the sheep have been pushed into their pen, one calls out from the inky black corner at the back. I inch toward it and it startles, knocking down a rake which triggers a panic attack and re-experiencing incident for Ellie. As the doors to the barn shut, suddenly, she's back at those fateful steps down into that darkened basement. Everything is of elongated and outsized proportions and, try as she might, she cannot open the door to save Joel. She sees his head, sanguine red, gnarled and misshapen on the ground, eyelids swollen shut. And then it cuts back to Ellie, screaming in terror, Dina futilely comforting both JJ and Ellie. In this moment, a lot of the emotions that had been bubbling in my chest the last few days as I had played this game came erupting out of me. 

Close to the end of the first act of the game, the couple reach a cavernous theater cloaked in charcoal black shadow. Dina is experiencing morning sickness and rests near the front of the theater. Ellie, frustrated, has gone off to explore the building and ensure it's safe. When she opens the doors to the interior of the movie palace, she's greeted by a hollow, vast, frigid interior; a heartbreaking externalization of her intensely interior feeling rendered in icy blues and silent blacks. As she tentatively pulls back the velvet curtain on stage, she spies a guitar case colored ashen by dust. She picks it up and plays, perched on a front-row seat, as the dark bowels of the theater threaten to swallow her up, "If I ever were to lose you, I'd surely lose myself…"

All those promises at sundown...I meant them like the rest

5:00 PM 7/20/07

 My dad and I are on a camping trip in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. We've set up camp, I'm stoking our pitiful fire with twigs and brush, and my dad is preparing our dinner: rehydrated mashed potatoes and some canned soup. We scarf down our meal, still boiling, and sit in the mini awning of our tent facing a chilly lake at sundown and flip open the last book of The Series of Unfortunate Events, appropriately titled The End. We take turns reading, though he does most of it, and as the night grows chillier, we add layers. The biting black flies that were tormenting me as I searched for firewood retreat and we turn in for the night. Later that night we wake up as some animal sniffs at the periphery of our tent. We watch and listen, hoping it's not a bear since we're alone for miles and, finally, when it abates, we hop in our car to sleep for the remainder of the night. In all likelihood it was some small mammal, a beaver we saw on the way in or a deer, but we term it "the night of the smallish bear". Later, when we return home, we will tell people about the smallish bear that forced us to huddle in my dad's car, the Target customers who looked at us like we were aliens when we came in to get supplies after not showering for a week, or the pit-stop at a diner on the way in that was straight out of Deliverance, where everyone stopped and stared in silence as we entered (note: we were not stinky at this point). 

12:00 AM 6/20/20

Ellie's silent strumming gives way to a flashback. In it, Joel teases a wide-eyed Ellie on a walk to  her birthday surprise, "Is it...a dinosaur?" she asks casually. "Stop tryin' to guess. I ain't tellin' you." Joel coyly responds. After crossing a creek and wading through some underbrush, they stroll into a clearing, a twenty-foot tall plaster dinosaur towers over them, "Holy shit, Joel...Oh my God, it is a dinosaur!" The two meander around an overgrown museum, forgotten to time, as long-lost relics of the natural world are reclaimed by verdant tendrils and leafy appendages. Joel spends the entire walk through the museum, eyes glued to Ellie's every expression and gesture of exclamation, drinking in every moment. As they round the corner on the top level of the museum, the walls darken and shimmer with specks of fluorescent paint meant to picture stars against a blackened vacuum of space. The narrow hall opens to reveal a space exhibit and Ellie loses her mind. 

She geeks out over ornate models of space shuttles and moon rovers. But the most touching moment comes when Ellie and Joel hop into a life-sized pod and Joel hands over a cassette tape with a recording of the Apollo 11 launch. Ground control counts down to lift-off and the world darkens around Ellie, only slivers of late-afternoon sunlight graze her face, illuminating the toothy smile that carves its way across her face. Her eyes flit about underneath her lids imagining a cascade of lit buttons. And she sits, suspended on vapors and starlight, for just a moment, before being beckoned back to Earth by Joel's voice.

It can't be for nothing…

8:00 AM 10/24/18

I've got a stress headache that's pounding at my temples like a jackhammer and the hospital's flickering fluorescent bulb isn't doing anything to alleviate that pain. My mom is on her way back from the airport and I'm called by the physician to come see my dad. He's resting in recovery and very tired after having a stent put in. When I reach his room he's asleep and I fall asleep too. Over the next year and a half I'll have nightmares, panic attacks, and dissociative re-experiencing events that I'll slowly learn to cope with. I'll deal with a low-level hum of anxiety in my daily life that I'll learn to reorient by returning not to that night in the emergency department, but to that still lake at Algonquin or to one of our 'Blockbuster-Gut-buster' nights where we'd rent a movie from Blockbuster and devour a burrito. It doesn't solve the anxiety, but it calms it. And, slowly, bit-by-bit, I'll learn to live with these new symptoms. I'll even learn to write about them, in the process discovering how to re-experience moments from that night while not continuously plunging myself into panic attacks. 

11:00 PM 6/22/20

Ellie sits, at home, alone. After taking years to reorient her trauma and remember Joel not as the husk of a man crumbling before her on a basement floor, but as the quiet father whose love is expressed in totems - a broken watch, a space-shuttle pin, an acoustic guitar - sitting on a darkened porch flickering with a candle's glow picking at a six-string, Ellie has lost almost everything. In the final moments of the story, Ellie recalls that night, the night she began the long road to forgiveness for Joel, how little he regretted, and how much he loved. "If, somehow, the Lord gave me a second chance at that moment...I would do it all over again." The weight of his decision thuds in his every word. "I don't know if I can ever forgive you for that…" Ellie says, "but I'd like to try." Joel works through tears to force out his words, "I'd like that." 

I come back to one moment the night of my father's arrest more than any other. It's the one bit of the re-experiencing that doesn't bring me pain exclusively. When the nurses ushered me out as he arrested, I sat in a waiting room, alone, in the most intense fear I've ever experienced. My head ached, my gut sank to my shoes, and my whole body felt like it was in the process of rot. After what felt like an eternity of pure fear, a nurse came to fetch me. My father had something to say before he was taken up for surgery. I fast-walked over to his bedside and leaned over to bring my ear near his mouth. Through clenched jaw and incredible pain, he said, "I love you." I've never been more scared than I was in that moment. But never have those words meant so much than in that moment. 

I've thought a lot about why The Last of Us Part II means so much to me after playing through it twice. I love its characters. I love the awe-inspiring artistry of its environments and the luxurious attention to detail that suffuses its every frame. I love the way it feels to play. And even if I despise the working conditions that were allegedly used to produce it and even if I'm utterly exhausted by the shouting matches that have passed for conversations about it, it's a piece of art that has bottled the mixture of unfathomable pain and profound love that marks my experience with my dad and rendered it in heartbreaking detail with breathtakingly honest performances. I'm just grateful that some people, somewhere, understood.