You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate last night’s episode of “Saving Grace,” but it was especially entertaining if you are and have ever been Godparent to a young niece or nephew or a friend’s child.
Grace (Holly Hunter) is Godmother to her nephew, which is an especially important job since his mom died in the Oklahoma bombings. Why in the world would Grace’s sister choose a boozing, redneck of a woman who sleeps with a new guy every week (even if they’re married) to instruct her son in faith matters?
“Because Grace loves others … more than she loves herself,” explains Rhetta Rodriguez (Laura San Giacomo), Grace’s best friend, to the good Sister who shows up at Grace’s office to make sure she is attending her Godson’s Confirmation.

From the very first episode of this series, Grace’s inner demons are getting the best of her. The war inside her soul rages visibly to everyone important to her: her living sister, who wants Grace to be more involved with the family; her priest brother who harasses her about returning to the Church; her cop partner who is in love and sleeping with Grace even though he’s married; her best friend who is ever preaching morals and values, hoping to rub off some of her prudishness on Grace; Earl, her tobacco-chewing angel who forces her to think about God differently than the way she was raised to; and her nephew, whom she loves more than probably anyone else, and who secures her last doubt of goodness and hope in this world.
She kicks. She screams. She yells. She cusses. She wrestles with the unsolved, profound mysteries of faith in her heart just like a depressive who wants to know peace more than anything. And even though all of these people in her life stretch out their hands for companionship and support along the way, she chooses the path of loneliness.
Why?
Because she loves others more than herself. And until she can begin to love herself, she’ll stay lonely.
Depression certainly makes you hate yourself. The destructive thoughts that debilitate your body scream messages like “you are worthless,” “you are stupid,” “you are lazy,” “you’re a failure.” At the end, you’re left in a fetal position believing all of it to be true. And it is perhaps the loneliest disease because even on the good days, when you are connecting with people and feel good, there is the fear that you may plummet into that black hole at any moment, and in the black hole there is only room for one.
Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison wrote this about loneliness:

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smoothes and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seems to come from a far-off place.

Sometimes Grace exhibits that kind of loneliness that can’t be tempered—like the afternoon she saw a teenager jump from the bleachers of his high school to his death—when her sadness translated to a night of self-destruction with booze, cigarettes, and adulterous sex. But there are also those times, when she crawls into a fetal position on her couch with her dog and cries—feeling the despair and sorrow of the world and grieving with it, open to the possibility of change.
“Earl, I’m just curious,” Grace says after she finds out some high-powered LA attorney is coming to town to try to acquit the kid who confessed to killing his girlfriend, “what does God ask a person like that when he gets to the pearly gates?”
“I reckon he asks him if he ever broke a promise to his nephew . . .” Earl responds, knowing that Grace intends to blow off the confirmation of her Godson.
But in the end she goes. Because buying a fountain of chocolate with marshmallows and strawberries to take to the Confirmation is just enough to rock and cradle her loneliness, possibly turning her eyes away from the darkness and toward the light. For today anyway.