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addictedtostorytelling · 5 years

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I liked your take on the g/s divorce -- I wish we had gotten more information about it in later seasons or in the finale. Do you have any head cannons about the conversations that took place surrounding the divorce, their relationship in the interim, etc? Even though this is not my favorite plot point (and seemed more of a necessity) it seems like this could have been mined for more interesting material.

hey, anon!

i’m right there with you on your feelings about this particular plot point.

i do have a post here in which i conjecture about how the phone conversation from episode 13x11 “dead air”might actually go down. the post also contains specific headcanons about how grissom and sara’s post-divorce relationship operates between s13 and the series finale—seeing as the show gives us so little to go on in that regard.

otherwise, more discussion after the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.

__________

so in terms of the conversation, here’s what i imagine:

both grissom and sara come into the thing acting based on faulty assumptions.

grissom erroneously believes that he is holding sara back from living her life and is secretly making her miserable. for a while now, on the rare occasions when they’ve talked, he’s perceived sadness and frustration in her voice, which he takes as evidence that he is making her unhappy. he doubts his own lovability—both if he can be loved and if he should be loved—and thinks that regardless of how sara may feel about him, she can (and should) do so much better than him. he therefore decides to “set her free,” even though letting her go is the last thing in the world that he actually wants.

meanwhile, sara fears that over the last few years grissom has learned to prefer living alone to living with her. she takes his radio silence as proof that he doesn’t need her as much as she needs him. she erroneously believes that he has asked for a divorce because he (personally) desires one. she takes his behavior to mean that he has fallen out of love with her. she therefore agrees to the split, even though it’s the last thing in the world she actually wants.

so.

on that fateful night, grissom calls sara several times (and she ignores his call several times, per the events of episode 13x11 “dead air”). eventually, she answers his call. they make some awkward, stunted small talk—like “how are you?” “uh, fine,” “how’s the weather?” levels of stilted—before abruptly, with no preamble, grissom just drops the bomb.

“i think we should get a divorce.”

—and even though sara had been expecting to hear those words (or at least some version of that sentiment) for a while now, she’s still taken momentarily aback.

“what?”

grissom, not trusting himself to explain his reasoning, resorts to shorthand.

“we both know that this isn’t working.”

he expects her to fill in the blanks in a certain way—to understand that he is offering her an out, which is what he presumes she both wants and needs from him, given that they’ve gone months with next to no communication.

of course, she fills the blanks differently than he expects her to, inferring that if he’s asking for a divorce, then he must be the one who wants it; that he must have fallen out of love with her, even though she still loves him with every beat of her heart.

her first instinct is always to shield her wounds, so she doesn’t fight him (even though she wants to), and she doesn’t allow herself to cry or display any vulnerabilities or weakness (even though her heart is breaking). she just agrees to the proposition because she thinks that’s what grissom’s interested in hearing, and she isn’t about to make a fool out of herself, begging him to stay when clearly he wants to go.

“no, no, it’s not. i mean, of course, it isn’t.”

then there’s probably a pause as grissom struggles internally, wondering if he should say something else—should tell her that, no matter what, he’ll always care about her; that he just wants her to be happy, always—but ultimately realizing that anything he said at this point would probably do more harm than good. so all he manages is a quick sign-off. a retreat, really.

“okay, then. i’ll, uh, get the paperwork started.”

“um, okay. thanks.”

(she can’t believe she just thanked him for breaking her heart, but.)

and then they both hang up.

sara immediately bursts into tears once the call ends. grissom wilts onto the chair beside him, phone still clutched in his hand, wondering if this is what having a heart attack feels like.

only later do they both realize that they’re going to have to have some more in-depth conversations in order to work out the actual logistics of the dissolution of their marriage, in terms of who gets what and what goes where.

those conversations are intermittent and tense. they always go generally the same way: grissom calls, sara answers, they forego any kind of pleasantries or personal discussion, focusing instead on the task at hand. sara never allows herself to cry on the phone; she fights her tears for as long as grissom stays on the line, and then once he’s gone, she finally breaks down. grissom never offers any additional explanation as to why he’s doing what he’s doing; he just presumes that sara knows and that the less he says, the better. he finds speaking to her so difficult that oftentimes he resorts to monosyllables, barely making it through.

i don’t suppose that they ever get to the point of screaming at each other over the phone, but that’s not to say that the divorce process isn’t difficult or angsty in other ways.

things being as they are, both parties have plenty of motivation to hide their emotions from each other and to passively go along with what they assume that the other person wants. neither one of them is seeking to hurt the other, but they are both trying to avoid making themselves appear needy and foolish, and in so doing they undoubtedly do cause each other some pain.

in this situation, the underlying emotion for both grissom and sara is sorrow; they’re equally heartbroken at the prospect of losing each other, doubting themselves and their own lovability, fearful that they won’t be able to survive alone. but sara tends to mask heartbreak with anger, and grissom with fatalism, and those two responses don’t mix well.

there are probably times when sara tries to bait grissom into getting angry—into saying something untoward or putting his foot in his mouth—so that she can seize the opportunity to scream at him (because screaming feels better, or at least less helpless, than sobbing; because she just can’t sob anymore).

she probably says some rude and hurtful things, getting in little barbs (much in the same way that we’ll later see her do during the series finale), constantly posturing.

i doubt that grissom ever takes the bait—though maybe in a way it’s worse that he doesn’t, because his stoicism probably comes across to her as apathy.

there have got to be some awful moments when grissom forces himself to ignore sara’s jabs or even the tears he hears her fighting against—to remain aloof because he feels he needs to be “the strong one,” because he believes that he has to make the hard choice that sara can’t make for herself.

they probably both walk away from those conversations feeling like shit, grissom trying desperately to convince himself that he’s doing the right thing (even though it feels wrong), sara wondering if grissom ever really loved her at all, given his callousness now.

and grissom is probably sometimes rude, too, but in a different way than sara is—not in the sense of saying asshole things, but in being maddeningly laconic and businesslike.

there’s nothing in his conduct that would allow for sara to yell at him, but there is plenty that makes her feel as if he is suddenly a stranger to her, because how can he be so cool and distant? how can he act like what’s happening between them isn’t hurting him at all?

of course, what she doesn’t know is that he is hurting—that for as much as he puts on a stiff upper lip, her verbal stabs do get to him; it does twist his stomach into knots knowing that he’s making her cry the second they hang up (even if he believes that, in the long, she’ll be happier with him out of her life).

the closer they get to sorting everything out—and, honestly, there probably isn’t that much to be sorted, legally speaking, as they’ve already been living mostly separate lives for years by this point—the more sara’s anger shifts into sadness and grissom’s aloofness into loneliness; the more they both realize that soon they’re going to have what may be their final conversation, and all they can do is grieve.

as discussed in the other post linked above, for myriad reasons, i don’t think that grissom and sara ever fully extricate themselves from each other’s lives; even after the divorce is finalized, they likely maintain very sporadic contact, a postcard here, an email there, the occasional three-minute phone call, almost always with grissom initiating (suddenly, sometimes after months without any communication in-between), almost always with sara left reeling in the aftermath.

still.

they probably don’t share a lot of life details between s13 and the series finale; for instance, i doubt grissom ever hears about sara’s troubles with ronald basderic or learns about the numerous times when her life has been in danger (such as during the events of episodes 14x07 “under a cloud” or 15x05 “girls gone wilder”). certainly, neither one of them ever works up the courage to ask if the other one is dating again. they probably, on the few occasions when they do communicate, keep the interactions fairly anodyne, focused mostly on generalities about sara’s work at the lab and grissom’s travel, never anything that could get them into the realm of feelings.

grissom knows enough about sara to know she’s still in vegas at the lab. sara knows enough about grissom to know that he’s sailing the world on a sea shepherd, though not necessarily where he is or what he’s doing at any given time. they both hope that the other party is happy, though they also both dread to think that the other party may have replaced them with “someone new” (or even “someone old,” as i’m sure sara sometimes imagines, in her fear, that grissom has finally taken up with heather, just like she always worried he would).

per gsr usual, they misinterpret the few signals they get from each other during this period, each one thinking that the other has moved on, though in actuality neither one ever truly “gets over” the other (or seeks out long-term romantic relationships with other partners).

for example, i imagine that the very few times when they talk by phone, the conversations are short and harried, less than five minutes, in and out.

grissom probably assumes that sara wants to get off the line with him because she’s got places to go and people to see—a whole life that doesn’t include him. sara probably assumes that grissom can hardly stand to talk to her; that he only called out of a sense of obligation, and he can’t wait to hang up the second he gets the chance.

in actuality, sara is quick to end the calls because she fears imposing (and also because she doesn’t want to lose her composure and start crying like an idiot). grissom is likewise skittish because he knows that the longer he talks to her, the likelier he is to say something desperate and romantic (“i miss you,” “i love you,” “i made a mistake,” “i want you back”). they both go away from these conversations under the mistaken impression that the other person doesn’t want to talk to them.

—and that’s why we see them acting so tentative around each other in the series finale: because they honestly have no idea where they stand with each other after two and a half years of divorce.

they haven’t ever talked about their feelings.

they’ve both just assumed that the other person wants nothing to do with them.

and yet they’re both still desperately in love with each other and pining for reconciliation.

so that’s how i see things going between them, post-divorce: lots of hedging, lots of concealment, and lots of secret, unvoiced yearning. sara tries to play things tough to avoid revealing how hurt she feels. grissom tries to keep his distance to prevent himself from reneging on what he asked for. because they are them, they have a difficult time completely staying away from each other, even though doing so might make things easier for both of them. they still maintain some contact, however irregular and stilted. they never fall out of love with each other, though they both resign themselves to living the rest of their lives bereft of the other’s companionship.

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

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