I Was Halfway Through ‘The Pitt’ When My Father Died. Here's What It Was Like to Finish It

Early in season one of The Pitt, a middle-aged woman is forced to come to terms with her father’s imminent death from natural causes. When we first meet her, she’s something of a problem patient, repeatedly rebuffing our hero, the twinkle-eyed resident surgeon Dr. Robby, when he tries to explain that any more attempts to keep her father alive will actually just bring him more pain while only temporarily delaying the inevitable. It takes a couple episodes for this to sink in, and after it finally does, during her father’s final moments, she laments the unfairness of it all and wishes they’d had more time.

That was the last episode of The Pitt that I watched before learning that my own dad had suddenly passed away.

I remember the first thing I watched in the aftermath of getting the news: the next episode in my queue for the final season of You. I needed to do something in those wrenching in-between hours of inactivity and it needed to be as far away from reality as possible. Joe Goldberg wreaking stalker mania havoc on trust-fund one-percenters fit the bill.

But as the days and weeks went by, I felt an almost perverse urge to return to The Pitt. I’m not sure if it was a play at defiance, to prove that I could and would be able to handle something as innocuous and evergreen as depictions of death and loss in art. Another part of me wondered if watching people grapple with death, in most cases sudden and unexpected, would offer some kind of comfort or catharsis.

Crucially, it was an experiment I wanted to undergo alone. Even with a house full of family on hand to support me, I didn’t want to feel like someone was watching me watch something that could reflect my real circumstances at any given moment.

Smash-cut to the wee hours of the morning, me in full vamp mode, as the rest of the house slept, pressing play on what must have been episode six or seven of The Pitt and, to my surprise…feeling nothing. It was as easy, enjoyable, and escapist as it had been a week before, even with all the dying patients, conversations about sudden loss, and early-onset grief.

A subplot involving an older, loquacious Black man charming the ER staff alongside his exasperated son reminded me of being in the hospital with my dad during a Covid scare years ago, him trying to deflate any tension or anxiety with non-stop jokes—but in a matter-of-fact way. Nothing that had me rushing to turn off the television.

I felt relieved, reassured, emboldened even. Surely something soon would pull the rug out from underneath me—the game is the game—but in the meantime, I wasn’t fragile enough to crumble at any given moment or in the face of the more obvious red flags.

Then a funny thing happened. I put on an episode of Frasier, my go-to sleep-timer TV show, the ideal, unfussy sitcom for people who can’t fall asleep to silence. Frasier and Martin were commiserating about something, in a scene I’ve likely seen dozens of times. But in this particular moment it hit differently.

A guy in his 40s, finding new ways to relate to his father. I’m in my mid-30s and suddenly that experience is no longer in the cards for me. That brief moment changed the whole texture and DNA of one of my favorite shows. No intubations, flatlines, or conversations about loss, and yet it choked me up.

I’ve kept up the nighttime Frasier routine every night since, but that different perspective is always in the back of my mind now. As is the certainty that more moments like this are on the horizon.