‘And Just Like That’ shows the reality of young widow life
by Janet Fanaki
I just watched the tenth and final episode of ‘And Just Like That’.
Like most fans of Sex And The City, I was skeptical about watching this reboot.
Would it measure up to my perfect ideal of the original? Could it even come close?
For over 23 years I have stood by Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha.
My late husband Adam and I started watching the show in the late 1990s and likely saw every episode at least once.
SATC signified a timestamp in my life.
A time in the 90s and early 2000s when Adam and I were newly married, eyes were on the career track, regularly meeting friends for dinners and drinks, attending first weddings and searching for the perfect place to call home.
Sounds like any given SATC episode.
Even years later when babies started arriving, dinner dates became leftovers at the kitchen island and marriages were ending in divorce, this series still held up because our previous lives weren’t that much of a distant memory yet.
But flash forward to being in my 50s, similar to the cast of AJLT, and I can intimately relate to at least one of the characters on the show. Carrie.
Only two years ago I lost my Adam. Far too young and very comfortable in the prime of our lives.
By now nearly everyone is familiar with what happens in episode one. Big dies.
If you were watching it when the series was first released, you were like everyone else and didn’t see this plot twist coming.
Before I even had the chance to watch it, my friend Jane called to warn me about it. “No spoiler,” she said, “but Big dies and it’s pretty horrible. You may want to skip to episode 3.”
God bless Jane! Every widow needs a friend like her to send up the warning shots. A very SATC characteristic for sure.
Against Jane’s advice though, I watched the first as well as all of the episodes that followed it.
The first two were really hard because they showed Carrie moving through the days and nights of immediate grief.
I was like her in the early days of loss with the feelings of confusion, anger, tears and sleeplessness nights while she planned a funeral and tried to understand in the remaining episodes where she fits in this life again.
Sarah Jessica Parker depicts life as a new widow pretty accurately — at least in my experience.
So much happens in Carrie’s journey that mirrored my own. For example:
- Being convinced that Big was trying to communicate with her through a reading lamp. For me, it was an overly friendly black cat that frequented our house two summers ago.
- When she felt the time was right to stop wearing her wedding ring. I wore both mine and Adam’s for a while until I felt that it was time to store them both away.
- The internal push to search for a new place to live and start over again.
- Choosing a final resting place that has a deep personal significance to a departed love.
- And of course it wouldn’t be a SATC reboot without dating. Covid and the pandemic have gotten in the way of that for me, but it was fun to see how Carrie navigated it and ended the despair in my own mind.
Naming this final episode, “Seeing The Light” was just how I felt watching it. Once she was able to put some big things behind her, Carrie was able to make a clear path forward for herself, and move into her next exciting chapter.
Janet Fanaki is the host of the RESILIENT PEOPLE podcast. She talks with regular people who have lived through a major life challenge, found a purpose from it and now help others to be resilient too. She lives in Toronto with her adult children.
