Greater Good · 2 hours ago

How a Video Game Helped Me Process My Grief

After losing Mary - the woman who had become a quiet maternal anchor in her life, who stopped time over bowls of pho and grocery store runs - writer Lisa Kwon found that conventional grief rituals left her "unmoored from her purpose." What restored her was unexpected: a video game called Pokémon Pokopia, in which an amorphous creature named Ditto rebuilds a world emptied of everyone it loved. Playing as Ditto, Kwon discovered that tending to abandoned habitats and coaxing frightened Pokémon back to safety was not escapism - it was a way of metabolizing her own loss, of asking what it means to keep building a home for others when the person who built one for you is gone. "Even though our loved ones may 'mysteriously' leave us behind," she writes, "we recreate happiness, redefine ourselves, and choose who and what we live for." The story quietly insists that grief and purpose are not opposites - that the same instinct which drew Kwon to Mary's side can, if we let it, draw us back toward the living.