Good vs. Great - Part II
Read Part I here.
I love watching TV on DVD – I don’t have to wait until next week to see what happens in my favorite characters’ lives, and I don’t have to deal with annoying commercials. (Pet peeve: how the volume goes WAY UP as soon as the station cuts from TV show to commercial.) My latest obsession is Grey’s Anatomy, which is addictively awesome in all the ways I like a TV show to be awesome: very realistic characters, bruised and raw and sometimes unkind; epic storylines with plots of epic OMG!ness, and lots of very attractive, very talented actors who manage to make an environment I will NEVER work in seem incredibly familiar to me. In other words, Grey’s Anatomy has managed to nail the human condition right on the head.*
While working my way through season three a couple of weeks ago, I found myself moved to tears during nearly every single episode. This may have had something to do with the pregnancy hormones, but I’m not so sure. It really was an emotionally wrenching season for the show’s main character, Meredith Grey, and I found myself “feeling her pain” even more than I usually do. One episode in particular touched me deeply – in a good/bad way.
In case you’re not a fan of the show, let me give you some background. Meredith is an intern at Seattle Grace Hospital; the show follows her professional and personal life, as well as that of her coworkers and friends. Meredith is a real mess (one of the reasons that I can relate so well to her) but by season three, she’s finally found some peace and happiness. Meredith’s mother, Ellis, is also a doctor, and was a brilliant surgeon, revered in the medical community, until she had to retire due to early-onset Alzheimer’s. Meredith clearly had a difficult relationship with her mother, but we don’t realize how difficult until one day Ellis wakes up, completely lucid, and she and Meredith pick up where they’d left off five years before – spitting the worst insults they can think of at each other.
Ellis is horrified to find out that Meredith has been “distracted” by a love affair and isn’t working harder to make a name for herself in the medical field. At one point she growls, “I raised you to be an extraordinary person. So imagine my disappointment when I wake up five years later and find that you are no more than ordinary!”
Wait, wait, wait. I can’t do this scene justice. You just need to watch it for yourself:
Direct link, in case embedding doesn’t work.
One would think that having a child become a doctor would be enough to make most parents proud – but Ellis Grey isn’t most parents. To her, good enough isn’t good enough. Professional greatness – at the expense of goodness in every other area of life – is the only thing that will satisfy her. Her own romantic relationships died painful, strangling deaths and her relationship with her only child is suspiciously civil at best and downright antagonistic at worst, but she doesn’t seem to regret the fact that she is slowly dying alone and unloved, because she was an “extraordinary” surgeon. Meredith knows instinctively that her mother’s worship of professional greatness is nothing short of pathological, but she cannot help but feel that maybe she has failed at life, by failing to give up love and friendship for the sake of making a name for herself.
Ellis’s abusive rage reminded me all too well of the times my former pastor would scream at us for imagined slights and innocent mistakes. For five years, I lived for his approval, hoping to figure out what God wanted from me by decoding my mentor’s emotionally manipulative behavior. I can’t imagine being raised by a parent like that; I’m surprised poor Meredith is even capable of interacting with other human beings without dissolving into a puddle of anxious terror.
There was a time when I believed that everything must be sacrificed on the altar of “greatness,” but that time is long passed - something that was quite clear to me as I watched Ellis unleash her hateful insecurities on her daughter. “Boy, did she get it all wrong!” I thought. “What a sad, pathetic person.” Perhaps I’ve healed, learned and grown more than I realized. Perhaps I’ve been transformed by this brand new person whose physical, psychological and spiritual health depends largely on me getting the hell over myself. No matter the reason, I was horrified at the thought of letting my career or my “mission from God” get in the way of my relationship with my family and friends. I made that mistake before. I’m not doing it again, dammit.
So what if my life is ordinary? So what if I succeed in being a good and loving person, but no one outside of my small circle friends knows my name – is that so bad? I used to think so, but I can’t hold onto that foolishness any more. Where I used to recoil from the idea of living an unexceptional life, I now recoil from the idea of living an unloving life. I don’t want to reach the end of my days I regret how I treated my child, or my husband, or my friends, because love is what makes a difference, a real and lasting difference, in this life and the next.
It’s quite clear to me now what the difference is between good and great.
* Another favorite show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which goes even further by taking a fantastic, unrealistic premise (fighting vampires and demons in SoCal) and making observations about friendship, identity, self-worth, interdependence and morality that are completely relevant to the real world. Joss Whedon, I HEART YOU.
