The Many Seasons of Grief & Loss: Anne in Netflix’s The Four Seasons
By Amanda LaMela
Spoiler warning: This essay discusses major plot points from Netflix’s The Four Seasons, including character arcs and the show’s ending. While the themes explored here are undeniably heart-wrenching, the series is far from bleak. With its humor and human messiness, The Four Seasons makes even the most painful moments feel tender and life-affirming. It’s a show about heartbreak that still makes room for laughter. 10/10 would recommend.
At first glance, Netflix’s The Four Seasons seems like a breezy dramedy about long-married friends who vacation together four times a year. But beneath the lake houses, inside jokes, and Chardonnay runs a powerful study of loss, grief, and life transitions. Just as the changing seasons emphasize the passing of time, this show captures the reality of navigating life’s perpetual endings. At the center of this emotional undercurrent is Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), a ceramic artist whose 25-year marriage to Nick (Steve Carell) unravels just as she’s planning a surprise vow-renewal ceremony.
At first glance, Anne seems like the archetypal “glue friend.” She is practical, nurturing, and optimistic enough to believe that with the right gesture, the cracks in her marriage can be repaired. Yet her arc reveals something much deeper about the ways we mourn not only people, but identities and imagined futures. When her kiln literally explodes during the ceremony, it serves as both a darkly comic moment and a potent metaphor for her life imploding mid-creation.
Each season of Anne’s story captures a different flavor of absence. We watch as this character navigates five distinct forms of loss and grief that mirror what many clients bring into therapy: anticipatory relational grief, loss of self, disenfranchised loss, ambiguous loss, and cumulative grief. We mourn what we sense is slipping away, the versions of ourself we no longer recognize, the losses no one validates, and the ones that pile up before we can recover from the last.
Anticipatory Relational Grief: The Art of Holding On
Anne’s story begins not with a loss, but with a quiet intuition that something is shifting beneath the surface. We watch Anne oscillate between denial and bargaining as her husband, Nick, grows increasingly distant. In a desperate act of preservation, she decides to throw a surprise vow-renewal ceremony. If she can just make the marriage sparkle again, maybe she can stop it from unraveling. For a brief moment, the viewers share in Anne’s hope and get a glimpse of what their marriage once was.
When her kiln suddenly explodes mid-ceremony, the symbolism is merciless. Her creation literally shatters, decimating this illusion of control. And yet, Anne smiles through the smoke, clinging to composure as the life she’s crafted begins to disintegrate. What Anne experiences could be called anticipatory relational grief, the emotional dissonance that arises when you sense a relationship fading or changing but can’t yet acknowledge its loss.
The Empty Nest, Divorce, and Loss of Identity
Anne’s sense of identity sheds in layers, sometimes without noticing until there is nothing familiar left. Anne’s loss of self doesn’t begin with the divorce. It seems to emerge when her daughter leaves home. The quiet house that once represented stability begins to feel like a museum. In that silence, Anne faces her first identity rupture, as she is no longer a mother-in-motion. Her routines and sense of purpose once revolved around parenting. When that shared role ends, what remains between Anne and Nick feels glaringly hollow.
Even before the kiln exploded, Anne had already begun stalling her art. At one point, she even wryly jokes, “Does the world really need another bowl?” Instead, she spends hours playing farming games on her iPad in a subconscious attempt to distract herself from the silence and recreate the nurturing role that once defined her self-worth.
Anne’s instinct is to restore her closeness with Nick and sense of identity through effort. She’s not ready to feel the loss, so she choreographs it away. She only revisits her once-beloved creative outlet to design a decorative platter for the ceremony, which ironically resembles a tombstone. In her bids to recover a younger version of herself, she wears an elegant white gown and places baby’s breath in her hair. She looks beautiful, devoted, and hopeful, making it all the more heartbreaking for the viewer.
When Nick finally announces the divorce, Anne’s identity collapses. Suddenly, she’s no longer the nucleus of her family and friend group, but a single orbiting body. As the group dynamic shifts, Anne realizes her friendships have subtly repositioned around her new identity as “the divorced one.” Her social circle once validated her couplehood, but now responds with pity and discomfort. She continues attending the group’s gatherings as though muscle memory could be a substitute for belonging. Anne’s social invisibility deepens the disconnection she feels from herself.
Disenfranchised Grief: When Loss Goes Unvalidated
Anne’s loss is painfully under-acknowledged. When Nick leaves, their friends fall silent, unsure how to navigate their loyalties. They text her polite check-ins, invite her on the same seasonal trips, and congratulate themselves for “staying neutral.” But for Anne, neutrality feels like abandonment. There’s no ritual for a marriage that quietly dies, and no sympathy cards for the living. Anne’s environment has shifted in a way that invalidates her internal experience. Her grief becomes something to manage discreetly.
There is a poignant irony to this character arc. Anne, who once over-functioned to keep everyone comfortable, is now punished by the very dynamic she upheld. Her ability to suppress discomfort trained others to do the same. So when Anne finally needs to be vulnerable, none of her friends know how to meet her there.
Ambiguous Loss: The Living Ghost
For Anne, Nick’s continued presence is as haunting as his abandonment. Photo evidence of his new and seemingly blissful life appears uninvited on her iPad from their shared iCloud. One afternoon, she swipes through pictures of their daughter’s graduation and stumbles upon images of Nick on vacation with Ginny, the much-younger woman who replaced her. Technology can be ruthless, providing living proof of what Anne had lost. And what makes it unbearable is that the loss isn’t clean. Ambiguous loss, as defined by Pauline Boss, is when someone is physically present but psychologically gone, or psychologically present but physically gone. Nick was both. He was alive in the world, but absent from her life, and the photos function like emotional landmines.
Cumulative Grief: When Endings Refuse to End
During the annual New Year's Eve ski trip, the friend group receives a frantic call from Ginny that Nick had been in a fatal car accident. By the time Anne received the shocking news of Nick’s death, she had already weathered a series of monumental losses. In one calendar year, she’d already faced identity loss, empty nesting, divorce, and social betrayal. However, Nick’s tragic car accident was the most definitive. There is a strange mercy in finality. At the very least, death offers boundaries and closure.
Except it didn’t.
Just as Anne begins to metabolize Nick’s death, she learns that Ginny is pregnant. Suddenly, the closure she was promised is revoked. Now Nick’s memory lives on in another woman’s future. Cumulative grief is a series of unprocessed losses. The grief compounds because each new loss contains traces from the one before.
Grief, Loss, and Seasons of Life
Each loss Anne faces has its own season and palette. Spring marked the ache before an ending. Summer presented the collapse of identity. Autumn grappled with the silence of unacknowledged sorrow. In winter, she faced the exhaustion of a loss that wouldn’t stay buried. Her story highlights how grief isn’t neat or linear. Contrary to popular belief, there is no specific grief process one must “complete.” We are not meant to master loss, because healing is not a single spring. It’s the courage to live through every season.
If you’d like to meet with Amansa or any of the therapists at our practice to explore your connection to yourself, you can check out our bios here or click below to contact us and make an appointment. We look forward to working with you!
References
Papa, A., Lancaster, N. G., & Kahler, J. (2014). Commonalities in grief responding across bereavement and non-bereavement losses. Journal of Affective Disorders, 161, 136–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2014.03.018
Robinson, D. (2025). Human Services Professionals’ Perceptions of Late-Life Cumulative Grief and Loss. Illness, Crisis, and Loss. https://doi.org/10.1177/10541373251326570
Qadoos, A. (2024). Ambiguous Loss: A Loved One’s Trauma. Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso, 26, 51–73. https://doi.org/10.22370/rhv2024iss26pp51-73
Scott, S. (2000). Grief Reactions to the Death of a Divorced Spouse Revisited. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 41(3), 207–219. https://doi.org/10.2190/KKML-1RGK-105U-L9PE
