Longing & Loss: Exploring Grief & Healing through Heated Rivalry
- Sarah Lawson MSW
- Jan 21
- 7 min read
The new year is a time of longing for fresh starts and new beginnings. Typically, we honor that with resolutions and the hope for something better than the year before, but 2026 barely gave us a moment of renewal before committing to violence and grief. We have witnessed people murdered and kidnapped by ICE agents while those in power pretend otherwise. We have seen human rights and trans rights attacked. We have experienced unseasonably warm days that remind us of the dire reality of our warming planet. And that’s far from a complete list over just the first few weeks of the year.
In short, it has been an exhausting time, and in that exhaustion I feel grief. Grief at the lives lost and the increasing risks posed by fascism. Grief for the ways we hoped our future would be shaping up, which seem increasingly unlikely. For some, this grief has visceral; for others, it might not even be something that you’ve been able to name, you’ve just felt numb as you try to live your life amidst everything that’s going on. Though numbing and avoidance is a common response to uncomfortable feelings, I think part of this specific numbness may be related to our inability to see the full extent of the grief we're holding, due to ways of thinking about grief solely as a feeling that accompanies the death of one we love.
But there are other types of grief as well. To hold space for these other types of grief and loss, psychotherapist Francis Weller, MFT, describes what he calls the Five Gates of Grief, which can help us “understand the many ways that loss touches our hearts and souls in this life.” Through the Five Gates of Grief—which Weller writes about at length in his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief—Weller offers a way of thinking about the types of grief that often get overlooked or ignored, the grief that we don’t have clear pathways to express or acknowledge.
Each of the Gates of Grief holds a specific category of grief that we all feel, according to Weller, who writes, “By understanding the grief that is held at these gates, we may be able to compassionately meet it and, in the right settings, allow the full expression of grief to be felt and honored.” After all, like any feeling that we try to avoid or bottle up, the grief that we don’t allow ourselves to feel will find another way to express itself, which often gets in the way of us living the life we want. And naming grief as grief is an important first step in this understanding, compassion, and expression of grief in order to live more fully.
At this point, you may be thinking, “Okay, but I was promised hot hockey romance and there’s been zero mention of Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, or Scott Hunter. Should I even keep reading?” Fair. And yes, please stick with me for a little longer. Also, spoiler alert from here on out if you haven’t already watched the show all the way through.
As I watched Heated Rivalry, I felt such a strong sense of joy and possibility, of desire and love, and of hope. However, there are also undercurrents of sadness and loss. And those contrasts are what makes Heated Rivalry a really interesting place to look at how we understand grief. Shane, Ilya, Scott, and Kip aren’t characters who endure pain for the sake of queer tropes in mainstream media, but they are characters who experience a wide range of loss and sorrow that can help us take a closer look at Weller’s Five Gates of Grief.
Francis Weller's Five Gates of Grief, as seen in Heated Rivalry
The First Gate of Grief is “Everything we love we will lose.” This is the grief that accompanies the loss of someone or something that we love. It’s what’s most widely acknowledged as grief, and in Heated Rivalry we see it show up for Ilya when his father starts to decline in health and then eventually dies. During his father’s decline, Ilya avoids the situation as much as possible—not answering phone calls, never talking about it with anyone—in an attempt to avoid his feelings of grief. Once his father dies and Ilya returns to Moscow, we see him struggle to express grief to Shane; language ceases to be able to convey his grief. Shane encourages him to take more time, but Ilya is too estranged from his brother and alone in his loss to be able to grieve fully until he talks with Shane, who provides him with the chance to sit with his grief, to express it in his own way, and to feel the range of emotions accompanying the loss, from sadness to anger.
With the Second Gate—“The Places that have not known love”—we begin to venture into types of grief that are often overlooked. Weller writes that this grief is connected to “the places within us that have been wrapped in shame … What we perceive as defective about ourselves… but we are unable to truly grieve, because we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of grief.” Enter Scott Hunter. Over the course of episode three, we learn why he feels so lonely and conflicted about his desire for Kip, and how much sadness is part of his life. Viewing this sadness and loneliness as grief for the parts of himself that he can’t accept offers a path towards healing that honors his regrets and offers compassion to his past self. However, by not acknowledging this grief or offering himself compassion, Scott’s grief is shared with Kip, who experiences the grief of keeping their relationship a secret. Weller writes, “We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional.” Ultimately, with the support of his community, Kip chooses to lose Scott instead of weathering the grief of shame. However, Scott remains (for a time) stuck in his shame and grief, unable to embrace his life.
Weller’s Third Gate is “The Sorrows of the World,” or the communal grief we feel at the loss that surrounds us, for the earth and our communities. Though this is largely about the degradation of our natural world amidst climate collapse, it is also related to “the loss of our connection with nature” which leaves us feeling isolated and lonely. So much of Heated Rivalry takes place in urban spaces, hockey rinks, stairwells, airports, and impersonal hotel rooms—echoing with loneliness, shame, and grief, even amidst intense desire and passion—which makes the final episode at Shane’s lake house so amazing. As the first season wraps up, here are Shane and Ilya—who have begun working through their grief together—spending time reconnecting with nature and nurturing their bodies, in more ways than one. As Weller writes about this gate, “Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing…. Remembering our bond with the earth helps heal our bodies and souls.”
The Fourth Gate of Grief is “What we expected and did not receive.” This is the grief related to unfulfilled anticipation and the disappointment of not having the support of a village to help us find our way. Weller writes, “At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. … We feel eviscerated, made tame by rules and conditioning that blanket the world in uniformity and mediocrity.” This is as much about safety and inclusion as it is about living with purpose and discovering how we are part of something larger than ourselves. For me, this is a core grief within Heated Rivalry: the sorrow of anticipating a lack of acceptance by the hockey league, fellow players, and family members that Shane, Ilya, and Scott all share for most of the show’s first season. We see this in their decisions to stay closeted as well as in their conformity to tactics to help them hide from rejection, from Shane’s stylist to Scott’s persona at the fundraiser. Unlike Kip, who has a village of support in his dad and friends, these three long for acceptance, which they all think must be put on hold until they retire. However, as Scott kisses Kip on the ice, and as Ilya and Shane discuss their dreams for the future with Shane’s parents, this grief begins to be acknowledged and worked through collectively by the characters who have felt it most acutely. They create the village they need.
The Fifth Gate is “Ancestral Grief,” or the sorrow that we inherit from our parents and grandparents, and other ancestors down the line. This may be grief resulting from colonization, slavery, assimilation, poverty, or other forms of structural violence, or it may be more personal grief that accompanies shame, regret, or abuse. In Heated Rivalry, it shows up in Shane’s mom’s intense focus on his career. We learn that hockey fandom was a critical part of how she found a sense of belonging in Canada, and we can intuit the pain and isolation she felt as a Japanese-Canadian child trying to navigate those cultural divides. However, her unaddressed grief shapes so much of Shane’s experience, from his pursuit of a hockey career to the pressure to be a good role model. And in the end we see the first steps of repair, as his mom embraces Shane and acknowledges some of these pressures she has put on him. As the first season concludes, we are left with the hope of healing together from our grief.
I hope these examples have expanded your ideas of what grief looks like in your own life as well as opportunities for addressing it and healing these harms. We are all feeling so many of these types of loss and sorrow, amidst the longing for something better, and the work we can do personally and collectively to acknowledge, attend to, and share our grief becomes more important every day.
Journaling about your grief—to get to know it better and understand what it's trying to tell you—can be a first step in that process. But, remember: Grief is something to explore with support and in community. If you’re looking for an affirming and trauma-informed therapist to support you in navigating your grief or other emotions, schedule a consultation with me or one of our other therapists so that you’ll have the support you need to live your life fully, amidst the ongoing grief and pain of the world.
Sarah Lawson
MSW Supervisee in Social Work
at Divergent Path Wellness
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