#09x09

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so.

in the wake of warrick's death and sara's second departure from vegas at the start of s9, grissom is, frankly, not well.

as i talk about here,

basically, grissom is a man on the brink. 

ever since sara left vegas in s8, grissom has missed her terribly and been struggling with depression. the lab, which was once his safe place, his “well-ordered kingdom” in an otherwise chaotic world, has become increasingly strange and unwelcoming to him, and particularly as the team has changed, with sara’s departure (which sparked the beginning of the end), warrick’s death (which has been, in itself, another huge and devastating blow), and riley’s addition (which has proven to grissom that things will never be the same again as they were before). 

add in the extra heartbreak of sara returning briefly to vegas for warrick’s funeral, spending four months in town, and then suddenly leaving again without even saying goodbye—plus the fact that grissom feels as if he may have truly lost her this time around, given his unwillingness to follow her into the unknown—and you’ve got a grissom who is one step away from completely falling apart. 

whereas he once took satisfaction and even comfort in his job, nowadays the cases he investigates horrify and disturb him. he’s lost his appetite. he’s having nightmares. he can barely sleep. barely think.

one of the worst parts to all of this is that he is without his usual support system: normally, when he needs comfort, encouragement, and understanding, he turns to sara, but he can’t do that now, not with her gone.

what’s more: he is almost haunted by sara’s absence. she was at the heart of both his work and his home life. she was his partner, his right hand, his roommate, his confidante, his support system, his best friend, his lover, his spouse, and his whole world. every place he goes reminds him of her in some way, from their condo (which now feels impossibly empty in her absence), to the lab, to different places around the city where they’ve investigated crimes. hell, he can’t even sleep without dreaming about her—about how he’s lost her. she’s everywhere to him and yet nowhere, and he can’t seem to focus on anything aside from the terrible ache in his chest from missing her so much.

but here’s the thing: for as miserable as grissom is at this point, he is also too paralyzed by his fears to do anything to help himself or even really to acknowledge that anything actually could be done to help.

he is the proverbial deer in headlights, frozen in the middle of the highway, unable to either run back the way he came or continue forward.

as i talk about in this post,

he is torn between his desire to chase what he wants and his feeling that if he does so, he will end up losing everything he needs.

his dilemma is not a small one.

remember: at this point, sara has not given any indication that she will ever return to las vegas, so if grissom leaves to go after her, then there is some possibility that that chapter of his life will close forever.

without knowing if he’ll ever be back, let alone when, he’ll be giving up his job and regular contact with the rest of his lab family. he’ll be walking away from everything he’s built for himself over the last 20+ years. his comfortable, familiar existence, where he has routines and regular haunts and a sense of purpose, will end. for the first time in decades, he’ll not know what he’s doing or where he’s going, except that he’ll be following sara.

—and, honestly, were he guaranteed that making such a grand sacrifice would result in them being together forever and living happily ever after, i think he’d make it in a heartbeat.

but there’s the rub:

he isn’t guaranteed that all will end well.

from his perspective, there is a big chance that if he walks away from his life in las vegas in order to get the girl, sacrificing everything for love, he’ll end up losing out not only on the job, the sense of control, the stability, etc. but also on the girl herself.

grissom, as always, struggles with incredibly low self-esteem and feels that he is patently unlovable. while he knows that sara has loved him in the past and professes to still love him now, he fears that she may not love him forever, and especially not if he can do nothing to help her heal from the traumas that caused her to flee vegas in the first place.

he feels like even if he does leave his job, his comfort zone, and everything he knows behind in order to chase after sara, there is a good chance that he won’t be “enough” for her, and eventually she’ll leave him, meaning that he will, ultimately, lose everything.

... that’s why he clings to the lab and his “puzzles” so hard—not because he loves them more than sara but because they’re a sure thing, a security blanket, and he’s afraid of what might happen if he gives them up to be with someone who may not want him around forever.

when he tells hodges that he isn’t ready to leave the lab, he’s not just talking about being unwilling to retire. what he isn’t fully saying but is absolutely feeling is that he isn’t ready to walk away from something certain for a life of uncertainty and that he doesn’t want to have to find out who he is outside of the “safety bubble” of his job.

sara is to a point where, though she has been as much of a workaholic as grissom, she is now prepared to find out who she is beyond her identity as a criminalist, beyond her place in the lab hierarchy, without that old crutch of work-work-work, but not so for grissom.

not yet.

he’s still too worried that once all of his professional attainments are stripped away and he can no longer define himself in terms of his career, he’ll be found lacking.

he’s a superb criminalist, but he may not be much of a man.

what if he follows sara into the great unknown only for her to find him inadequate?

what if he leaves everything behind only for her to leave him (again)?  

remember: sara has just walked out on him, and for as much as her reasons for doing so have everything to do with her mental health and nothing to do with a lack of love for him or a desire to hurt him, the bottom line is that her decision isn’t one made in a vacuum; regardless of her intentions, her leaving (and especially so abruptly) does cause him pain and stoke his fears that he doesn’t fulfill her needs. he is left wondering if she could have stayed were he a better partner to her—more attentive, more experienced in love, less “in his own head.” those emotional wounds and self-doubts carry with him the whole time she’s gone, and they definitely figure in to why he doesn’t immediately go chasing after her.

couple this uncertainty with the nebulous state of his and sara’s relationship during this period... and you end up with grissom remaining in vegas after sara leaves:

a) because he believes she doesn’t want him to follow her; b) because he fears that if he does follow her, he risks losing everything he’s ever cared about, including her, and that is a risk he’s not yet emotionally prepared to take; and c) because he and sara are stuck in a strange “holding pattern,” wherein they find themselves living in separate states with no idea of when they might ever be (physically) together again but still are deeply in love with each other and having at least semiregular contact, neither fully broken up nor fully together, waiting without knowing exactly for what.

while grissom may rationalize that he stays because he doesn’t want to leave the short-staffed graveyard shift high and dry and/or because he isn’t ready to retire yet, and while these rationalizations may to some extent be true, the underlying truth is that he’s scared, and when he’s scared, his m.o. is to hesitate.

neither option (either staying or going) feels entirely safe to him here, but at least staying is familiar to him.

grissom grapples with this “i can’t stay here without her, but i’m too scared to go out there after her” paradox within himself throughout the beginning of s9, starting from september ‘08, when sara leaves at the end of episode 09x02 “the happy place,” and eventually reaching his emotional nadir in early december ‘08, during the events of episode 09x05 “leave out all the rest,” when he consults heather kessler, hoping that she, as an expert reader of him, can perhaps offer him some insight into what he needs to do.

she, thankfully, obliges, framing the problem for him more plainly than he has so far been able to do for himself. 

as stated in the first post linked above:

heather puts the idea into grissom’s head that he needs to decide—that he needs to prioritize what matters most to him, his career or the love of his life. if what he had with sara truly is over, then he should feel some sort of relief that it is so. if he doesn’t feel relief, then he needs to question why it is that he doesn’t and what it is he wants to do about the situation.

while i certainly don’t think that heather “ships gsr” or cares about the sara of it all, i do think that she cares very much about grissom’s well-being, and that, in talking to grissom, she comes to realize that, in this case, his well-being is contingent upon what he decides to do when it comes to sara.

based on this understanding of grissom and her own interest in making grissom happy, heather tries to help grissom realize that his current inaction is incompatible with his desires.

only after heather elucidates to him the true nature of his decision does grissom finally get the clarity he needs to make his active choice—which is, ultimately, that since his desire to be with sara far outweighs his fear of her potentially rejecting him, that he is going to follow her, come what may.

to my mind, he consciously, actively lights on this decision sometime circa the events of episode 09x08 “young man with a horn.”

as i talk about in the s9 shipper’s guide,

the story grissom tells catherine [at the end of the episode] is illuminating, in terms of his relationship with sara. just like grissom constantly chose “science” over the girl from college, he constantly chose “work” over sara. however, whereas he wasn’t truly in love with the girl from college—and therefore ultimately allowed science to take precedence over her—he is truly in love with sara. during the course of his conversation with catherine, grissom seems to realize as much in a new and significant way. he sees the parallels between the two situations, and he decides that he doesn’t want the two stories to play out in the same way. this time, grissom wants to get the girl—the right girl—and he is willing to risk everything else in his life (including science, his home in vegas, his friends, and his work family) in order to do so. so when he says it’s time to “up the ante”? he means that maybe it’s time to leave las vegas and go after sara once and for all.  

the moment is a significant one in grissom’s trajectory, as it marks the full time that grissom full cognizes that he is willing to do whatever it takes in order to be with the love of his life, fears be damned.

but here’s the thing: even though grissom finally makes his active choice circa the events of episode 09x08 “young man with a horn,” he’d actually begun making it long before that point.

in truth, it’s not so much that heather got him to make a decision as it is that she helped him to realize his decision was already (mostly) made, and he just needed to commit to it.

from the second he came home to find the condo empty at the end of episode 09x02 “the happy place,” he knew, deep down, that he could never be satisfied living there without sara again.

for as afraid as he felt to change, the truth was that he was already changing.

he already had changed.

he’d lived without sara once before (when she first left vegas in s8), and part of him was already aware that he couldn’t abide doing so again—not in the long term.

back then, he had suffered through her absence and not gone after her because he hadn’t felt like he had the agency to do otherwise. 

but now he realizes he does have that agency.

it’s in his hands to make a decision.

and he knows what he wants to decide.

though it takes him a while to reconcile himself to that fact, he does finally face up to what he has already known in his heart, which is that, for him, it was always going to be sara. 

she will always be his final choice.

—and that’s where catherine comes in.

as i talk about here,

catherine and grissom have known each other since the mid-1980s. in addition to being the supervisor and assistant supervisor for the graveyard shift, they are also frequent field partners. they have a great deal of working history between them and also maintain a social relationship outside of their work.

other than sara, catherine is grissom's best friend, as is evidenced by the fact that they socialize outside of work (see catherine coming over to grissom's condo to drink screwdrivers with him in episode 02x15 "burden of proof"), are familiar with each other's personal lives (see catherine's comments in episode 01x04 "pledging mr. johnson" which insinuate that grissom knew about eddie's cheating before she did), support each other in times of trouble (see catherine showing up to the hospital to wish grissom good luck before his surgery in episode 03x23 "inside the box"), have a playful rapport between them (see their back-and-forth banter in episode 03x19 "a night at the movies"), are comfortable showing vulnerability to each other (see grissom telling catherine about his father's death in episode 06x10 "still life" and catherine collapsing sobbing into grissom's arms after keppler is shot in episode 07x15 "law of gravity"), know each other incredibly well (see catherine anticipating that grissom will forget about her deadline and working around him in episode 01x20 "sounds of silence"), etc.

given how close catherine and grissom are, she can tell that a dial is turning in him—has already turned, even!—long before he makes that acknowledgment to himself.

prior to the events of episode 09x08 “young man with a horn,” he may not be to the point where he is able to acknowledge what he truly wants with regards to his staying in vegas vs. leaving to follow sara dilemma, but catherine is.

she can.

sara already left vegas once before, but back then, things were different, and catherine can tell as much.

the grissom of s8 clearly wasn’t ready to leave his work and his life and his routine behind to chase after her, and particularly not when it was uncertain how she might receive him.

but the grissom of s9 is, and catherine can see the signs.

in over two decades of knowing the man, she has never once witnessed grissom acting so broken up about anything, so listless, so heartsick, so unable to concentrate. even back before his sabbatical in s7, when he was burning out on his work, the weariness didn’t reach so far down to his bones; it wasn’t so existential or deep.

but now it is.

what he’s experiencing now isn’t about needing time.

it isn’t about needing a distraction.

it isn’t just about needing a vacation.

it’s about needing something new, something different entirely.

catherine doesn’t really understand the ins and outs of gsr (and particularly not what appeal sara holds for grissom, beyond just the physical side of things), but she can tell that grissom is heartbroken over losing sara in a way that one can only be heartbroken over losing the love of his life.

every break-up requires a mourning period afterward—time to grieve and process and heal and eventually recover—but the thing is that grissom isn’t bouncing back. he’s not getting over sara’s departure. time isn’t healing him. if anything, he’s just becoming more and more obviously despondent as the months roll on.

and catherine knows him well enough to know that though he’ll inevitably be slow in coming around to it, eventually he will make the decision to pursue his love.

he’s going to leave the lab.

he may not arrive at that decision until sometime in early december ‘08 himself, but catherine can sense it coming in october and november, can see it in the way he no longer seems as invested in the lab, in how he always has one eye peeled toward the horizon, which is why she’s not at all surprised when, come january ‘09, he finally reveals to her his intentions, letting her know that he is finally going to make that break and follow his heart once and for all.

he feels like it’s a decision he’s springing on her.

but for her, it’s one that’s been a long time coming.

she saw that he was done with the lab long before his last day finally arrived, and though she may not fully understand the decision herself—who could walk away from being “king kong on cocaine”?—she does respect it and support it, because ultimately she just wants him to be happy.

she told him to go after his girl a year ago (see episode 08x08 “you kill me”), and now he finally is.

as for how their conversation might have continued had the scene not cut, honestly, i can only conjecture.

maybe catherine might have promised to take good care of the lab/team in grissom’s absence, and maybe grissom might have told her he didn’t doubt that she would. 

maybe he might have started to try to express how much she means to him—that she’s his oldest and dearest friend and that he honestly doesn’t know what he would’ve done without her all these years—fumbling, as he always does, in his attempts to verbalize the full weight of his emotions. maybe she might have stopped him in his floundering with a simple, “i know. i’ll miss you, too.” 

and maybe they would’ve hugged.

i don’t think grissom would have acknowledged to catherine where he was going or whom he was going to, but intuitive as she is, catherine still might have told him, as they were pulling away from each other, “go get her and don’t let her go this time,” and he might have whispered, “thank you,” meaning more than he could say.

a few weeks later, catherine receives a postcard from grissom postmarked from costa rica, asking her to put his things in storage (see episode 09x11 “the grave shift”) but not saying much otherwise. she dutifully does as he requests, knowing full well he won’t be back.