{"id":2071284,"date":"2025-10-06T01:54:38","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T01:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2071284"},"modified":"2025-10-06T01:54:38","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T01:54:38","slug":"how-gilmore-girls-helped-me-grieve-my-mom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/how-gilmore-girls-helped-me-grieve-my-mom\/","title":{"rendered":"How ‘Gilmore Girls’ Helped Me Grieve My Mom"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This essay is part of celebrity.land\u2019s series \u201cThis Made Me<\/a>,\u201d a collection of stories about the pop culture that moves us. We republished it in time for the 25th anniversary of the premiere of \u201cGilmore Girls.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d revival premiered on Netflix<\/a> in November 2016, the same week my mom found out she had stage 4 cancer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She got the news on a Wednesday afternoon, and it cast a pall over Thanksgiving the next day, but we tried to stay positive. We also didn\u2019t want it to ruin the four new episodes of \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d premiering that Friday. We\u2019d been looking forward to \u201cA Year in the Life\u201d since it was first announced, reading stories online, analyzing behind-the-scenes photos and hypothesizing about how it would all end, especially those final four words.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The new episodes weren\u2019t just a new chapter in our favorite TV show; they were another chance for us to see ourselves in those characters. My mom always envisioned herself as the lead \u2014 brown-haired, fast-talking, coffee-drinking Lorelai Gilmore (played by Lauren Graham). The pilot episode, which aired in 2000, opens with Lorelai wearing a puffy blue jacket and a striped knit hat. You can feel the briskness of the Connecticut morning as the La\u2019s\u2019 \u201cThere She Goes\u201d plays and Lorelai crosses the street to Luke\u2019s Diner, where she orders coffee and waits for Rory (Alexis Bledel), her 16-year-old daughter, to meet her. In a 90-second conversation, they share lip gloss and a Macy Gray CD, reference RuPaul, and create a new generational paradigm for mother-daughter relationships, normalizing atypical family structures like mine that blurred the line between mom and best friend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Their relationship was different than anything else on TV, and it made my mom and me feel seen. My parents separated when I was a toddler, so my immediate family was always different than my friends\u2019 families. For most of my early childhood, I existed within a tight-knit triangle: my mom, my younger brother and me. My mom remarrying when I was 7 did little to change this, except that her second husband\u2019s erratic behavior often drove my brother to his room and pushed my mom and me even closer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Graham<\/picture><\/div>\n
Graham and Bledel in “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.”<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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So, when \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d premiered, I reveled in the fact that I already had the Lorelai to my Rory. My mom was the controller of the Pop-Tarts and my best friend. And I know my mom loved seeing a modern, complex mother on TV, one who was admirable because of her strength and confidence and independence, and also allowed to be flawed because of her stubbornness and impulsiveness and selfishness. For seven seasons, Lorelai\u2019s complexity made it OK for my mom to be human, to love me and my brother more than anything but also to make mistakes as she reimagined a life for us outside of the nuclear-family paradigm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That Friday afternoon, our love of those wonderfully imperfect characters and our desire to escape into the comforting world of Stars Hollow pulled us to the TV. I curled up on the couch, and my mom situated herself in a chair with a heating pad. Out of the corner of my eye, I noted every time she shifted, knowing she was in pain, wishing I could do something to help her. But I couldn\u2019t. The only thing I could do was sit next to her and be present, imagining myself as Rory and her as Lorelai as we watched those four episodes: \u201cWinter,\u201d \u201cSpring,\u201d \u201cSummer\u201d and, finally, \u201cFall.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Together, we reveled in the dialogue, cringed at the musical, decided that Logan (Matt Czuchry) is Rory\u2019s Christopher (David Sutcliffe), and Jess (Milo Ventimiglia) is her Luke (Scott Patterson). Most importantly, we waited to see how it would end. Before the revival was announced, my mom and I had agonized for years over what the show\u2019s final four words<\/a> might have been \u2015 the ones that creator Amy Sherman-Palladino had teased, before she ended up leaving the show after Season Six. We knew the revival was going to give the show the ending Sherman-Palladino had always intended, but after that single, brief exchange was finally spoken \u2015 \u201cMom?\u201d \u201cYeah.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m pregnant.\u201d \u2014 we weren\u2019t sure we liked it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Usually, I\u2019m a fan of circular endings, but in this case, at a time when my center was disappearing, I wanted something to hold on to. I did not want an ending that hinted at another story waiting to be told.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Still, despite the issues we (and many other fans) had with the revival, we were grateful to return to the world of \u201cGilmore Girls,\u201d and Lorelai and Rory remained the paradigm for our relationship during the next two years, as my mom\u2019s disease progressed and her body began to shut down, and she entered hospice care.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When she moved into an inpatient facility, she was put in a private room, but it was sterile, with beige walls and harsh overhead lights. Sitting by her bedside, I texted friends and family, who kept asking what they could do. I told them to send messages and pictures. With my daughter strapped to my chest in a baby carrier, I collaged their notes and pictures together, making a large, colorful mural in the corner of the room that my mom faced while lying down. The note that I wrote her read, \u201cMommy, you will always be the Lorelai to my Rory.\u201d Writing it, I realized that I would never again call her \u201cMommy\u201d \u2014 the name I\u2019d never outgrown and still used for her, even as an adult \u2014 and that when she slipped away, I\u2019d lose both her and the role of mom \u2014 Lorelai \u2014 that she occupied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A week later, I couldn\u2019t think of a better sentiment to begin my eulogy. Standing in front of the hundreds of people packed into the church, I said: \u201cMy mom was and will always be the Lorelai to my Rory… Lorelai is the light of the show, which is why Mom is and will always be my Lorelai; she is my light.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Bledel<\/picture><\/div>\n
Bledel in “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.”<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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After she died, I held on to that truth, but I wasn\u2019t sure how my mom could be my \u201clight\u201d or my best friend when she wasn\u2019t there. I couldn\u2019t send her a text, or tell her a story on the phone, or laugh with her at something that happened while we stood in line to order coffee. How could my mom be my Lorelai if she didn\u2019t exist, if the thing I felt the most was her absence?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The missing made me angry. Some of that grief-induced anger was directed at \u201cGilmore Girls.\u201d The show had been such a key part of my identity, and I\u2019d spent so much of my teenage and early adulthood emulating Rory, trying to be bookish and high-achieving and desired by boys. Also, \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d had taught me how to live as a daughter in a single-parent household. It taught me that reading is sexy and being best friends with your mom is cool. It inspired me to write for my college paper. So why hadn\u2019t the show given me a blueprint for what to do when I became Lorelai-less?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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How could \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d ignore the hardest lesson I\u2019ve ever had to learn, that one day your Lorelai will die \u2014 and the second hardest, that one day you might become a Lorelai?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Now, six years after my mom\u2019s death, I finally understand that the final exchange \u2014 \u201cMom?\u201d \u201cYeah.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m pregnant.\u201d \u2014 is the blueprint I was looking for. Those four words that my mom and I had spent years waiting to hear are as close as \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d will ever get to showing the generation of girls like me \u2014 the ones who grew up seeing themselves as Rorys \u2014 that they will one day lose their Lorelais. It is also a subtle acknowledgment that they, like me, might choose to become Lorelais themselves.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This circle of life never occurred to me as a 12-year-old watching Lorelai and Rory watch their Roombas or order takeout or shout \u201cCopper boom!\u201d Even more than a decade later, as I sat next to my terminally ill mom the day after Thanksgiving and witnessed Lorelai and Rory exchange those final four words, I didn\u2019t grasp the role reversal that would come. I still didn\u2019t understand it two years later, when my 2-month-old daughter wiggled inside the carrier strapped to my chest while I held my mom\u2019s hand as she took her last breaths.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Learning this lesson is, I think, why the final season of the revival is \u201cFall.\u201d It\u2019s fitting not only because fall \u2014 as any fan of the show knows \u2014 will always belong to the Gilmore girls, but because it\u2019s a season defined by endings. Flowers wilt, leaves crumple, grass browns, and daughters leave behind one phase to grow into another. They enter new grades and blow out candles on birthday cakes and go to homecoming dances and learn to drive and move into dorms and start new jobs and maybe, eventually, become mothers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s hard to remember, when you\u2019re in the thick of the missing, that these losses are a part of a larger something. It\u2019s hard to imagine the green buds that will form on empty, brown branches, or hear \u201cThere She Goes\u201d in a pilot and foresee that it will become the background music to Rory\u2019s life if she becomes a mom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Bledel<\/picture><\/div>\n
Bledel and Kimber Hardin, as Gabriela, in “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.”<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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I wish this cycle gave me comfort, but it\u2019s the words Rory speaks just before those final four that have helped me the most. Before that exchange, in the last scene of \u201cFall,\u201d Rory sits on the steps of the gazebo and gazes out at Stars Hollow. \u201cI want to remember it all,\u201d she says. \u201cEvery detail.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Last fall, the fifth without my mom, I let myself remember. As the air cooled and the streets sat covered in leaves, I saw her smiling as I pulled a scarf out of her closet and wrapped it around my neck, \u201cborrowing\u201d it. I opened the door to my oven and smelled the aromatic cinnamon wafting from her just-baked pumpkin bread. I envisioned walking through the automatic doors of Macy\u2019s for our annual trip to buy a new pair of boots and tights. I even thought about that night in middle school that we snuck burgers and fries into a late movie just like Lorelai and Rory. I let myself ache for the way we\u2019d be out shopping, and she\u2019d say or do something a little funny or unexpected, and I\u2019d look at her and roll my eyes and call her \u201cLorelai,\u201d and she\u2019d laugh and say \u201cRory,\u201d and we\u2019d both giggle like best friends with a shared inside joke.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And, of course, in the evenings, sitting on the couch after my kids were asleep, I remembered all those Tuesday nights I curled up next to her on our blue couch, reveling in the fact that I was getting to stay up late, waiting for the familiar notes of Carole King\u2019s \u201cWhere You Lead\u201d to fill the room. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Missing my mom, living every day without her, is a loneliness that borders on unbearable. When her absence becomes too overwhelming, I imagine myself as Rory on the steps of the gazebo, and focus on this remembering. I remember it all, even when it hurts, because there is magic in the details. The magic that made Stars Hollow is the same magic that connects me to my mom and the world we created together, and I know it is the atoms from which I will fashion a new world for my daughter. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One day, \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d is destined to be a part of this world. I know when my daughter is older, we\u2019ll sit together as she watches \u201cGilmore Girls\u201d for the first time, and I\u2019ll remember my Lorelai and be grateful for my Rory, hoping she learns how to \u201cremember it all.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n