"How are you doing right now?"

Jimmy Kimmel, Regina King, and a piercing exchange of grief.

It was a big week for displays of emotional intelligence on TV. It began with a Regina King appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! King, who is promoting her new Netflix biopic, Shirley, is doing her first press tour since her only child, Ian Alexander Jr., died by suicide in January 2022 at 26-years-old. It began with your typical pleasantries. “It’s very good to see you.” “It’s good to see you, Jimmy.”

And then Jimmy asked six words that instantly undid me: “How are you doing right now?” Kimmel raised his hands, palms down, and pushed downward on “right now.” King, picking up what he was putting down, did the same. She pressed down once: “Right now.” And twice: “I’m good.”

“Good,” Kimmel responded. “I’m glad to hear that. I know you’ve been through a lot the last year,” he continued as his voice began to break and he looked down. “Yeah,” King acknowledged. “Hey…” he began to say, trying to regain the momentum. At that point King reached out her arms and grabbed his hand. “It’s good to see you, Jimmy,” she said in a way that felt, for lack of a better word, like divinity. There’s a sparkle in her eyes that felt transmutative, as though she was stabilizing him with her gaze and with her touch. And it worked. “It’s good to see you, too,” he responded, tears now fully welled up in his eyes. “Um…” he said, pointing at King, finding his balance. “Did you see William Shatner backstage?” he asked. Both her and the audience laughed. And we were back to our regularly scheduled programming.

King’s reaction to Kimmel’s joke.

“I know we dog on him a lot, but what an INCREDIBLY touching exchange,” I wrote on Instagram. “The voice crack from Jimmy. The arm reach from Regina to let him know that she’s okay. The way they kept it moving with grace and recognition. Because that’s grief. I’m reminded of a recent quote Ms. King gave to Harper’s Bazaar: ‘A smile doesn’t always mean happy.’ Her smile, in this moment, was strength. We love you, Regina.”

Strength.

There’s a number of reasons why I think this moment hits the way it does. Kimmel’s acknowledgment of grief that subtly allowed King the space to address it (or not). The grace. The compassion. The empathy. The understanding (Kimmel’s infant son had to undergo open heart surgery in 2017, which he detailed on his show). All that, and the talking through tears by Kimmel — something that will always get me.

I was far from alone in finding this moment to be piercingly poignant. “Now I’m crying.” “This broke me and inspired me all at once.” “A very human exchange, that’s all any person in grief could ever ask for.” “Saw this moment and immediately rewound it. There’s so much to say, sometimes it can’t be said at the moment except in the most contained way.” “A mother losing her child and then reaching over to comfort someone is the epitome of motherhood strength. A strength I will never know but have observed in my own mom. Bless Regina and her family.”

I’m reminded of other instances of grief expressed on late night television. “This is all of the unexpressed love,” Andrew Garfield lamented during a 2021 appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert following the death of his mother. “The grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, no matter whether someone lives until 60 or 15 or 99. I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all of the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her, and I told her every day, she was the best of us.”

When Molly Shannon appeared on the same show a year later, the pair discussed the loss of her mother at age four. "I just get like, 'Oh my god, we're all alive and like — ‘" she said, choking back tears. "It's so sad to talk about on such a comedy show, but I feel so grateful that we're alive and we're living and I don't take it for granted. Because I guess you never know how many years you have with somebody so I feel grateful and an urgency about like, you're up to bat and you're f*cking alive!"

It’s tough to talk about grief, a subject I’ve written about extensively. We feel it acutely at the onset and then watch as it reverberates, sometimes debilitatingly so and other times, at least for me, like something of a comfort in choosing to believe in the presence of memory. As Anderson Cooper beautifully explained in his podcast All There Is: “Experiencing loss and actually grieving are two different things.” We all have or will experience the former, but the latter is where the divergent paths emerge.

15 months into my own grief, I still struggle. I can’t hit play on my dad’s voice messages, despite a desire to hear his voice. My fingers just won’t let me. But I find pennies everywhere, all over the city, and know with a certainty that astounds me: He is here. I find it remarkably difficult to talk about, still. I was at lunch with a friend and it became relevant to our conversation to mention that my dad was dead. She stopped me to offer condolences. It felt weird. It wasn’t her fault; how sweet of her. But he’s been dead. I’m not in need of consolation. And thus this ongoing conundrum of how to integrate grief into my life. 

And I think that’s part of the alchemy of the resonance of the “right now” in Kimmel’s question and the “right now” in King’s response. One of the biggest struggles around grief is what to say. “How are you?” people ask. I always immediately think of Dorinda Medley on The Real Housewives of New York City and want to reply: “I'll tell you how I'm feeling… not well, bitch.” But then I find myself asking the same question to friends of mine who have recently lost loved ones. Because what else are you supposed to say? But what Kimmel’s “right now” opens up is this idea that we can feel other emotions amidst grief. It might not seem revelatory, but it felt somehow astonishing to witness. 

To lose a child. To lose your only child. To lose your adult child. To lose your adult child to suicide. To have to return to a vocation that mandates you to appear on national television and smile and grin and bear it. It feels impossible. It is impossible. What Kimmel did in that moment allowed King — again, on her terms — to recognize this complexity. What King did in that moment allowed for a smile and pain to exist together, not as one, but as both, together, inextricably.