3 hours ago
2
Fantasy realms offer a place to escape when our own world is too intense, too boring, too heartbroken
The idea of being present with your grief might evoke virtuous images of letting ashes blow in the wind like dandelion seeds, days spent flipping through family photo albums, or crossing the finish line of a charity run in honor of your person. Grief at different times in your journey might look like all those things to you.
Perhaps your life might call for you to find the off switch. Or if there’s not one to be found, to turn the volume up on something else in your life to drown out the noise that all this grappling with death can stir up. Fantasy football. National politics. FBoy Island.
You might be relieved to get this permission to turn away. You might be doubly relieved to hear that it’s not just self-help conjecture but backed by some field-changing psychology research led by the scholars Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut.
Their theory, known as the dual-process model of coping with bereavement, is rooted in the observation that in grief we oscillate between two different modes of being: one where we are actively working through the real-life stressors of losing someone (like cleaning out our dead cousin’s dorm room), and another where we’re seeking a break from grief, even actively avoiding having to deal. As Stroebe and Schut argue, the second mode isn’t some kind of failure. It’s a critical part of how we learn to live with our loss.
This likely feels intuitively true to you. Some days you’re vibrating with all the feelings and looking for better ways to find meaning with what’s happened, and some days you’re absolutely wrecked. When we can find ways to healthfully escape, oftentimes that is paradoxically where we can also find the heart of our healing. Escaping is just as much the work of grief as is weeping.
For my sibling Claire (they/them), their escape came in the form of fantasy worlds. Claire was a fan of fantastical worlds long before our dad died. When other students at their Catholic school dressed up as cheerleaders and football players on Halloween, they opted for a spooky werewolf mask and didn’t take it off all day. While other kids spent summers in mesh scrimmage vests at soccer camp, Claire preferred a chain-mail overshirt worn to the local ren faire, where they learned how to shoot a bullseye with a bow and arrow, and developed a taste for mead.
AD, or “after our dad’s death”, fantastical worlds became an even bigger refuge for Claire. Yet Tolkien novels had finite pages, and Star Trek made only so many episodes of the original season. Fan fiction forums, where fellow lovers of far-out worlds could elaborate on characters and themes, allowed Claire a never-ending supply of their favorite escape.
Whether reading, or writing, Claire was hooked. I asked Claire later if this was smutty stuff, assuming the lure was tied up in the potential erotic tension between Star Trek’s Spock and Captain Kirk. But it wasn’t that. “Writing about how my favorite characters dealt with situations that mirrored my own – whether it was my first breakup, or Dad dying, gave me a way to experiment with my own choice and response,” they told me.
When Claire first played Dungeons & Dragons, the cult-classic tabletop game from the 1970s, they were pulled in by the way one game could go in an infinite number of directions. The premise is simple, the outcomes limitless. You play with a board and dice and set characters to navigate a plot narrated by the Dungeon Master, a role of container-setter and conversation engine. What Claire loved about D&D was the expansiveness of the worlds, the characters, the storylines. Anything could happen. Anything might.
A game of D&D represents a shared experience with at least three other humans at the table who are all open to improvising, listening and responding. The game requires its players to lean on one another, to hold a shared image of an imagined world in their mind’s eye, and to decide how to navigate conflict together. Whether the conflict on the board was directly related to navigating a death, or simply a way to weave a social safety net more tightly between a group of players, it was through these unseen worlds that Claire found their most solid footing in grief.
After hearing stories told of Claire’s fantastical favorites, our brother José and I asked to join in. Without our dad in his family role of initiating time together, it was up to us kids to find time to connect. A weird silver lining meant that instead of doing the yacht-rock activities he enjoyed– unnecessarily long walks, alphabetizing his CDs, washing his car in the driveway – we now got to take turns picking the agenda.
I had moved from Los Angeles out to the Mojave desert, and my siblings came to stay with me for the weekend. But our real destination? The Lost Mines of Phandelver, a day’s walk outside the town of Phandalin, where a few good townsmen had gone missing, or so posited Claire, our Dungeon Master. We named characters, defined our skills, and blew good luck breath on the litany of dice.
It was the first time we were dedicating a day to play together since our dad died, and it felt radical. We opted out of the default conversations of sibling time: catching up on work and relationships, shooting the shit about movies we’d seen, venting about family dynamics, all topics inevitably circling the newly gaping hole at the center of our world. Instead, we played in this imaginary world where anything was possible and nothing off limits, and it was surprisingly liberating. That weekend, we weren’t just three grieving siblings. Two of us were crusaders, an orc and a druid, attempting to rescue strangers from goblins, and one of us was a Dungeon Master, keeping score.
After hours of campaigning inside, splayed on the floor amid a litter of note pads, chip bags and seltzer cans, we would move the game outside in the evening. All was quiet except for the occasional heckle of coyotes hunting cottontail in the darkness behind my house. The wind rustled the sprawl of character sheets in front of us, breezing through the inky darkness all around. We had laughed so hard together at the absurdity and ridiculousness of getting into character, bizarro accents and all. And then we were laughing about the situations we were in, why José had decided to blow up the bridge we were meant to walk over in a moment of revelry with his fireball powers.
This weekend everything was possible. Casting spells to bring someone back from the brink of death, an actual option. The road ahead was as clear as a single call to adventure.
That first D&D campaign blew my mind. The conversations we ended up having in the game, as our characters, felt deeper and more present than the default conversation of those days, even if the subject matter was which spell I could invoke to turn leaves into razor blades, or the number of ale casks José could carry on his back, or what the characters that Claire seamlessly morphed into as our Dungeon Master, with different accents and shifts in body language, had to tell us about our campaign.
There were times since our dad died where the three of us would have opposite responses to the same situation: whether we thought our dad should be buried or cremated (he had died without ever voicing his requests); whether we should encourage our stepmom to get rid of his clothes in the closet, or sweetly smile at the lines of suit jackets that gave her comfort. While we were siblings, we were very different people, and had very distinct relationships with our dad. The uniqueness of how we knew him impacted how we each experienced his passing. We didn’t always understand each other.
Our day-to-day selves and our alternate-reality selves had all sat down to dinner, and we were closer for it
In the tenderness of grief, our inherent differences were confusing, and sometimes unintentionally hurtful. But in this role-playing world, we were able to be explicit about our preferences. And having a diversity of skills on the team actually helped, not hindered, the quest.
Once we finally snapped out of the Mines of Phandelver and drove to our neighborhood saloon for burgers and beers, I noticed that we could be with each other a little bit differently. By spending the afternoon not talking about the normal swirl we usually landed on, we were able to get to know one another in new ways. Sitting in a booth, stealing fries from each other’s plates, we had gone from three siblings to a party of six. Our day-to-day selves and our alternate-reality selves had all sat down to dinner, and we were closer for it.
Gandalf gets taken out on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, at the hands of a Balrog. Mufasa, by a wildebeest stampede incited by his enemy Scar. Yoda, in his bed, at 900 years of old age. Our father, at home in San Francisco, brain cancer. Each fantastical epic has a storyline where the father figure dies. According to the mythologist Joseph Campbell, it’s almost a prerequisite to beginning a process of becoming. And in those nights together, our father dying felt less like the ending of a tragic tale, and more like the beginning of an adventure we were embarking on together, fears and flaws and freakouts and all.
Fantasy realms offer us both a place to escape and an alternate reality to inhabit when our own is too intense, too boring, too heartbroken. But also, once we’re there, it can help us approach our healing from a new angle, experimenting with new neural pathways and narratives in a lower-stakes setting.
Liam O’Brien of Critical Role, a livestreamed Dungeons & Dragons game played by professional voice actors who’ve turned a tabletop game into a spectator sport, has cracked this open. In the months following his mother’s passing, O’Brien spoke bravely about the way that his table became the linchpin in his grief process on X. For Liam, incorporating the themes he was grappling with into the game itself became a powerful tool in processing his grief.
He shared on X: “In the weeks following her passing, I felt pretty swallowed up by loss, but spending time with my trusted friends every week, exploring the very thing that I was haunted by … taught me volumes. Sometimes art is just entertainment. But it’s often much more.”
When my siblings and I were playing Dungeons and Dragons, we felt unhinged from the rigidity of responsibilities in life, of caretaking, of hard conversations, of figuring out how to father ourselves. In our anchorlessness, we were finding a new kind of way to be present, and through our presence, be both together and be free.
-
Excerpted from Renegade Grief by Carla Fernandez. Copyright © 2025 by Carla Fernandez. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
