What Supernatural Teaches Us About Grief and Staying Connected

There’s a moment in the television show Supernatural that isn’t about monsters, or lore, or the end of the world. It’s quiet. Ordinary. Easy to miss if you’re waiting for something explosive to happen.

Sam Winchester hands his mother, Mary, John’s journal. (Sam and his brother Dean carry deep, long-standing grief after the death of both of their parents years earlier. John has been dead for several years. As has she and now she's back, but that's a story for another time.)

That’s it. That’s the scene.

And somehow, it captures one of the most accurate, humane understandings of grief that I’ve seen portrayed on television.

Mary looks at the journal and says she has a lot of blanks to fill in. And then Sam states that having his Dad's writing - his words - helped fill in some blanks he didn't even know he had. Then he said something that many grievers feel but rarely say out loud: “It keeps him with us, sort of.”

That single line lands squarely in the heart of what grief researchers call continuing bonds—the idea that healthy grief doesn’t require letting go of the person who died, but finding new ways to stay connected to them (see citation below).

What’s striking is that the show doesn’t explain this. It doesn’t label it. It simply allows it to be true.

For a long time, grief was framed as something you “worked through” by detaching. The goal was closure. Moving on. Severing emotional ties so life could resume. Continuing connection was often misunderstood as denial or avoidance—something to be overcome.

But real grief rarely looks like that.

Most people don’t want to erase their relationship with the person who died. They want to understand it. To carry it. To let it evolve. Continuing bonds theory emerged because people kept doing this anyway—keeping photos, talking to the dead, holding onto objects, telling stories—and clinicians finally noticed that, far from being harmful, these practices were often stabilizing.

Mary’s response to the journal reflects this perfectly. She isn’t pretending John is alive. She isn’t stuck in the past. She’s trying to know him more fully. To make sense of who he was, and who they were together, in a way that death interrupted.

Grief isn’t only emotional. It’s also deeply cognitive. When someone dies, especially when the relationship was complicated or incomplete, people are often left with gaps—missing information, unfinished understanding, questions that will never be answered directly. Those gaps can ache just as much as the loss itself.

John’s journal becomes a bridge across those gaps. His handwriting, his thoughts, his voice on the page allow Mary to fill in parts of the story she never got to see. This kind of meaning-making is not about nostalgia. It’s about integration—bringing the past into conversation with the present so it doesn’t remain fragmented and haunting.

And then there’s Sam.

What Sam does in this moment matters just as much as what Mary feels.

He doesn’t tell her what the journal should mean. He doesn’t caution her about “holding on.” He doesn’t redirect her toward the future or remind her that John is gone. He simply offers the journal and lets her decide what kind of relationship she wants to have with it.

That’s what good grief support often looks like: offering access without interpretation. Trusting the griever to know what they need. Resisting the urge to manage or fix their process.

So often, people who are grieving are subtly—or not so subtly—pressured to relate to the dead in socially acceptable ways. Keep a photo, but don’t talk about them too much. Treasure their belongings, but don’t rely on them. Remember them, but not too vividly. Love them, but quietly.

This scene refuses that. Mary is allowed to say that John’s presence still matters. That his words still help her. That wanting to keep him “with us, sort of” is not a problem to solve.

And then Sam says something else—something that widens the meaning of the scene even further. He talks about family. About staying with the family tradition of hunting. About how this is who they are. And he tells his mom, Mary that having her here - having her back - fills in the biggest blank.

This is where continuing bonds stop being only about the dead and start being about the living.

John’s presence—accessed through his journal—becomes a point of connection between Mary and Sam. It’s not competing with their relationship; it’s strengthening it. The past is not pulling Mary away from the present. It’s anchoring her more firmly within it.

That’s something grief gets wrong so often in our cultural imagination—that staying connected to someone who died will somehow prevent connection with those who are still here. In reality, healthy continuing bonds often do the opposite. They create shared language, shared memory, shared meaning. They allow relationships among survivors to deepen rather than fracture.

Mary isn’t stuck in who she was before. She’s integrating who she was, who she lost, and who she still is.

And that’s the quiet wisdom of this scene.

Continuing bonds aren’t about refusing change. They’re about allowing love to adapt. The relationship doesn’t end; it changes form. The connection moves from physical presence to memory, meaning, influence, and internal companionship.

When done flexibly—when chosen rather than imposed—this kind of bond can be deeply supportive. It can reduce loneliness. It can ease anxiety. It can help people feel less like they’ve been cut off from their own history.

What Supernatural gets right here is the permission.

Permission to keep asking questions.

Permission to keep learning about the person who died.

Permission to keep them emotionally present without apology.

John’s journal doesn’t trap Mary in the past. It doesn’t keep her from moving forward. It helps her feel less alone where she is now.

Grief doesn’t ask us to let go of love. It asks us to learn how to carry it differently.

Sometimes that looks like a journal passed from son to mother. Sometimes it looks like a recipe, a voicemail, a song, a story told for the hundredth time. These aren’t signs of being stuck. They’re signs of relationship continuing in a new form.

And maybe that’s why this moment lands so strongly. It doesn’t dramatize grief. It normalizes it. It allows love to stay visible.

In a show full of ghosts and resurrections, the most realistic portrayal of grief is this quiet acknowledgment: he’s gone—and he’s still with us, sort of.

And for many grievers, that’s not something to fix. It’s something to honor.

PS - Thank you to my husband for introducing me to Supernatural. It is, admittedly, not a show I would have selected on my own - even though I'm a fan of Jensen Ackles. It has become very meaningful to me. <3

Supernatural Episode: Season 12, Episode 3, “The Foundry”

The Theory Behind Staying Connected

Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Taylor & Francis.

Want to Explore Continuing Bonds Further?

Read Conscious Grieving: A Transformative Approach to Healing from Loss by Claire Bidwell Smith, LCPC, pages 206-207. (I also recommend the whole book - it's a wonderful resource.)

Image by Mollyroselee from Pixabay