And Just Like That — A Study in Grief

How ageing, loss, and reinvention play out in the lives of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte… and us.

Although And Just Like That has wrapped, its cultural afterlife continues especially in online spaces like the AJLT Reddit, where fans gather to critique, meme, and dissect every plot twist of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and friends. Much of the commentary is sharp, funny, and sorry but deserved. But beneath the surface, I saw something else, a quiet meditation on grief.

Not the kind that only comes with funerals and black clothes, but the grief of ageing. The grief of lives not lived, fantasies that failed, and bodies that no longer serve the same social currency. One of the critiques of And Just Like That is that it didn’t always reflect what it’s like to age as a woman in Western society, but it did for me capture how ageing brings grief in all its different forms.

Carrie’s Grief: Rewriting the Love Story

Carrie’s grief is the most obvious. Big, her great love, her pursuit across six seasons, dies. And in the aftermath, she rewrites the narrative. Carrie tells Charlotte that her and Aidan have been together for 22 years, as if her marriage to Big never happened. People were angry by her statement but to me it was a way to make sense of the loss. If Aidan is her soulmate, then Big was a detour. A necessary heartbreak on the way to her true destiny.

Grief makes us do strange things, how else do you explain that Holly Hobby hat! Carrie tolerates Aidan’s erratic demands, even his emotional unavailability. She’s trying to make the pain mean something. If Big had to die, then surely it was to make way for a deeper love. That’s the logic grief offers, a story that softens the edges. By breaking up with Aidan, Carrie was finally emerging from her grief and seeing things clearly.

Miranda’s Grief: The Life Not Lived

Miranda’s grief is quieter. It’s the grief of the road not taken. She had the Manhattan flat, the career she loved, the independence she cherished. Then came an unplanned pregnancy, marriage, Brooklyn, and a life she never asked for.

Miranda as a late blooming lesbian isn’t just about sexuality but about reclaiming the self she lost. When she kissed her softball teammate years ago, she declared, “I’m not gay.” But now, she is. Or maybe she’s just finally brave enough to live differently.

Sexuality can be fluid and so can identity. Miranda’s queerness feels like a reclamation of the life she shelved. A way to grieve what was lost, and to live the life that she merely deferred.

Charlotte’s Grief: The Fantasy That Failed

Charlotte grieves the fantasy. The promise that if she looked a certain way, married the right man, and lived in a House & Garden spread, she’d be happy.

She married Trey, her perfect WASP. She waited until the night before the wedding to have sex because fantasy demanded purity. But the fantasy crumbled. Their sex life was a disaster, as Trey couldn’t ‘get it up’. In the end the glossy magazine shoot was Trey’s apology, not the celebration or reward Charlotte had dreamed of. A consolation prize for a dream that had already unravelled.

Later, Charlotte grieves again, this time for her daughter, who won’t replicate her dream. Who won’t marry a WASP or live the same curated life. It’s a grief many mothers feel, the loss of a future they imagined for themselves, but one their children reject.

Samantha’s Grief: The Body Reclaimed

Though Samantha only appears briefly, her absence speaks volumes. I like to imagine her not grieving her youth or chasing tweakments, but mentoring women of all ages. Her cancer changed her relationship with her body, she still looks amazing, but it now represents survival, strength and energy. It’s a source of power.

That’s the kind of ageing I want to see more of.

Our Grief: The Lives We Didn’t Live

As we age, grief becomes inevitable. We lose parents, siblings, friends. But we also grieve the love that never became serious. The career we didn’t pursue. The version of ourselves we buried to survive.

We now live in an ageing society, almost two in five people in England 38% or 22 million, are aged 50 and over, meanwhile the population under 20 is shrinking. Yet our workplaces, media, and cultural narratives still centre and celebrate youth. What if our ageing society wasn’t decline but a second chance, a chance to live the life we once grieved?

Final Reflection

And Just Like That may not have nailed every storyline. But it gave us a mirror and in that reflection, I saw grief. I saw the possibility for reinvention. The messy beauty of ageing.

And just like that… the chance to begin again.