The Accumulated Past

There’s a common metaphor for trauma that most of us are familiar with: baggage. It’s useful for describing things we pick up in our past and, ultimately, carry with us. The problem is, it’s a lot easier to pick up than it is to put down. HBO’s The Leftovers follows a group of people trying to move on from the Sudden Departure, in which 2% of the world’s population disappears in the blink of an eye.

But as the show’s title indicates, this isn’t a story about the past; The Leftovers is about what comes next, about trying to move past the past. By the show’s final season, Kevin (Justin Theroux) and Nora (Carrie Coon) have both picked up so much – Nora lost her husband and two kids in the Sudden Departure, Kevin is haunted by the ghosts of things he’s done, and they’ve caused each other so much hurt that neither can imagine forgiveness.

By season three, the two find themselves in Australia – Nora leaves Kevin to undergo a dangerous procedure that will either send her to the world where her husband, kids, and all of the Departed are, or else kill her.

Before her procedure, Nora sits facing the ocean with her brother, Matt. In this moment, the past is a comfort: she reminds him that when she was sent to Bible Camp as a young girl, he wrote her letters calling her “the bravest girl on Earth.” These were the only things that got her through a traumatic experience. Now, she conjures up this memory right as she’s about to take a huge risk for the small chance of healing herself, of seeing her family again. So, when the researchers ask if she’s ready, Matt tells them: “Of course she’s ready. She’s the bravest girl on Earth.” She sets this moment down, giving it to her brother like a gift, one that he gives back to her simply by repeating the words.

This is a stark contrast to earlier moments in the show where the past haunts – the not-quite-lifelike mannequins resembling her husband and children positioned at her kitchen table by a chain smoking cult called the Guilty Remnant who refuse to let her forget the past. What’s conjured up here isn’t a moment of love, but of unfathomable loss, of something with which she will never find closure.

We don’t actually see Nora undergo the procedure. She is much older next time we see her, living in a small house in the Outback. Kevin, aged by years apart from her, knocks on her door. Maybe she’s always wanted this, but she can’t stand the weight of seeing him again. For Nora, the past is too heavy a burden to bear.

On the other hand, he acts like they barely know each other, claiming to be on vacation and recognizing her from afar. He brings up the day they met, a lifetime ago, it seems. A time before they had a romantic past to yearn for or cherish or regret.

He invites her to a wedding, and at that wedding, Kevin continues to feign ignorance about their history. Maybe letting go of the past is as simple as refusing to accept its existence. Maybe they can heal each other by pretending their wounds aren’t there. Maybe it can be that easy. Wouldn’t it be nice?

They take to the dance floor for what is perhaps my favorite moment of the show: a quiet, romantic scene with the two of them together, finally together. They sway in slow circles looking, not at each other, but behind each other. We see their faces: both older, with so much past they wish they could rewrite. Right now, though, there’s no fighting, no sadness or hurt. It’s as if this small moment is all that exists. Looking past each other, it’s as though they can finally see each other. They want this moment to be enough, or at least, I do. Maybe it isn’t the truth, that they have no past and can simply start over again, but I want it to be good enough for Nora, for her to shake away the past like an Etch-a-Sketch.

It isn’t until the next morning that finally the past can be set aside. Kevin comes clean that he’s been searching for her, and that after everything, erasing their history is the only thing he believes will give them another chance.

Earlier in the episode, Nora tells the scientists performing her procedure that she doesn’t lie. But the story she goes on to tell Kevin is so fantastic that it requires an act of faith to believe. She tells him that she found her family, but that she was a ghost there, that she didn’t belong. She’s finally gotten what she wanted only to realize that her past didn’t wait for her like she thought maybe it would.

We never learn if her story is the truth, but maybe what’s more important in the show’s final scene is its emotional truth. It’s entirely plausible, after so thoroughly removing herself from her own past, that she does feel like a ghost, that she no longer knows where or if she belongs anywhere. Moving across the world and severing all connections to her previous life is easier for her than living with her past. But here the past sits before her: Kevin, ready to finally, at long last, put the past behind them. Maybe this is where she belongs.

Kevin and Nora aren’t unlike many of us, having made so many mistakes that they can’t forgive themselves, let alone hope that anyone else can forgive them. They’ve accumulated too much and are simply looking for a place to hold it all. Kevin’s response to Nora’s story, then, is something we can all learn from. It’s an act of faith, a refusal to keep carrying the weight of the past on his shoulders: he believes her.

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Jimmy Hollenbeck is a writer and professor living in Ohio and he likes food so much he usually eats it three times a day. His favorite thing to cook is chicken korma.