Epitaph: When a TV Show Hands You the Words for Grief

The poem that turned a storyline into a ritual of remembrance

I know, I just wrote about NCIS a couple of days ago. Yet, I sometimes can’t get over how this show has always seemed to approach death with more depth than many others. It has surprised me, again and again, in how it refuses to treat death like a disposable plot device. On NCIS, death arrives as a disruption, as a pause, as the kind of moment that changes the rhythm of everything around it.

The episode I want to talk about today is one that I will likely never forget. It’s the one where Fornell’s daughter dies from addiction. Even writing that sentence makes my throat tighten. Addiction deaths, like all deaths, are cruel. They ripple through families with a particular ache, a grief that often lives under layers of shame and silence. And NCIS, of all shows, met that moment with such weight that it stopped me in mine.

There was a scene where the words of a poem were spoken by Director Vance. Out of nowhere, as if the script itself understood that dialogue could not hold the enormity of that loss. It was the poem Epitaph, and it felt like it cracked the air wide open.

I had never heard it before that episode. I wasn’t sitting with a book of poetry or in a classroom where literature is dissected. I was just watching my comfort TV show on a night when I needed distraction, and instead I was handed a set of words that burrowed straight into me. Words that don’t let go. Words that echo long after the credits roll.

So I want to share that poem with you now, in its fullness, as I first heard it.

Epitaph

(Merrit Malloy)

When I die

Give what’s left of me away

To children

And old men that wait to die.

And if you need to cry,

Cry for your brother

Walking the street beside you.

And when you need me,

Put your arms

Around anyone

And give them

What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,

Something better

Than words

Or sounds.

Look for me

In the people I’ve known

Or loved,

And if you cannot give me away,

At least let me live on in your eyes

And not on your mind.

You can love me most

By letting

Hands touch hands,

By letting

Bodies touch bodies,

And by letting go

Of children

That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,

People do.

So, when all that’s left of me

Is love,

Give me away.

---

The first time I heard those lines, I remember feeling the room shift. It was as if the scriptwriters stepped aside and let grief itself speak.

Poetry has a way of shaping what feels unspeakable into something we can carry for a moment. It lingers where other words fall short. It doesn’t try to make grief easier. It settles inside it, unafraid, and asks us to stay there too.

Hearing Epitaph in that context startled me. The words arrived unannounced, carrying more truth than many sermons I’ve heard about loss. I felt like the poem had been waiting for me.

And grief waits like that as well. It finds us in places we don’t prepare for. A TV episode. A line in a novel. A conversation overheard at the grocery store. A stranger’s tattoo. Suddenly, you are not simply watching or listening; you are pierced, undone, and recognized.

For those who have lost someone to addiction, this piercing carries extra layers. The grief weaves itself with anger, with helplessness, with the endless replaying of what-ifs and could-have-beens. Silence often grows around these deaths. People don’t know what to say, and sometimes they say nothing at all.

But Epitaph speaks into that silence. It offers permission. Cry, yes — but cry with your brother on the street beside you. Let your love move outward. Let it keep touching others. Let it keep living through you.

That is radical. That is grief transformed into an offering.

When I think about epitaphs, I think about the inscriptions left behind; those short lines meant to hold an entire life. They often feel like placeholders, polite words carved into granite. Beloved wife. Loving father. Too soon. Gone but not forgotten. Necessary, but rarely alive.

Reading Malloy’s poem, I realized she was reimagining what an epitaph could be. Not a stone marker, but a living memory. Something that keeps moving in the way we touch, the way we connect, the way we love.

And isn’t that what so many of us long for? To know that when we are gone, something more than a slab remains. That what lingers is not only our name, but the way our love keeps unfolding.

When Fornell’s daughter died in that storyline, NCIS showed us more than a crime scene. It showed us a father broken open. It showed us friends trying to hold him. And it brought in the words of a poet who had never been part of the show, but whose truth belonged in that moment.

That’s the power of art meeting grief. It stays.

And here’s the thing: most of us will never write our own epitaph. Someone else will choose the words. Still, we can wonder what we might want carried forward. Not in a morbid way, rather as a reminder of what matters now.

If you could leave one line behind, not for a headstone, but for the people who carry your memory, what would it be?

I’ve thought about this often in my work around legacy and end-of-life planning. People assume it’s about documents and checklists, and those do have their place. Yet what people want even more is to be remembered. To be carried. To be known. To not be erased.

Maybe one line of poetry, or even one sentence whispered in memory, can do more than the most carefully carved monument.

So I sit with Epitaph not as something I stumbled across once, but as something I carry now. Its words remind me to keep giving love away, to resist grief’s pull toward hoarding it. To let the dead live on in my eyes, not only in my mind. To remember that love endures even as people slip from the world.

It’s why I light candles. I write names in my journals. I sometimes say them out loud when no one else is in the room. Because love insists on being remembered.

And so I share this poem with you, the way NCIS once shared it with me as a reminder that still breathes, carrying its weight into the present.

Grief will find its words in places we don’t expect. In a scriptwriter’s choice. In a poet’s voice. In our own.

When those words arrive, let them in. They may be the ones that carry you forward.

Love today,

Heather 🌸