Life After Life: Mortality, Meaning, and the Mystery of Rebirth
In the 2022 BBC TV adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Ursula Todd lives and dies again and again, each time awakening to the faint echo of what came before. The series is less about reincarnation and more about the metaphysics of possibility—the question of what we do with the time we are given, and what it means to try again.
An Irish Maid and a Theological Mystery
In one of the quieter, more penetrating moments of the series, Bridget, the Irish kitchen maid, contemplates the inexplicable resiliency of Ursula. After Ursula survives the influenza epidemic under seemingly miraculous circumstances, Bridget begins to wonder aloud: “What if God is bringing her back each time? For a reason?”
Bridget’s simple question strikes at the core of the narrative's spiritual undercurrent. Yet there’s more here than narrative convenience. Bridget—unassuming, devout, and largely overlooked by the grander players in Ursula’s life—may possess a unique spiritual gift, manifest by her ability to see what others can not.
Bridget's intuition is not naïve. To me, this gift is penetrating and underpinned much of the deeper meaning of this story. Her message, her revelation carries the scent of prophecy. It seems to me that Bridget sees in Ursula what others cannot: not just a girl who survives improbably, but a soul marked by purpose. Perhaps Bridget is more than a servant—perhaps she is an angel in plain clothes, or an instrument through which the divine communicates. A mechanism of grace embedded in the ordinary.
Bridget also seems to recognize what even Ursula cannot articulate: that there is something sacred and cosmic unfolding just beneath the surface. This recognition makes Bridget special in her own right—not merely a minor character, but a holy presence in the narrative.
The Weight of Time
Reflecting on this, I was reminded of my own meditations in What I Have Not Told My Family About the Meaning of Time, available on my personal blog dhmarks.blogsite.com and here on my Youtube channel @DHM49 There, I asked: “What do I do with the rest of my life, however much time and life I may even have left? What is most important to me to do now and what is most important for my family?” I bring this up in the setting of a similar movie, from 1993, Groundhog Day.
Ursula, in her own way, confronts these questions repeatedly in Life After Life. Her many deaths are not endings—they seem to me to be more like recalibrations. Each rebirth presents another attempt at grace, at preventing harm, at understanding love. And perhaps most importantly, another attempt to get it right.
The Ethics of Trying Again
The series becomes especially poignant when Ursula takes dramatic action to alter the course of history—most notably when she attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler. It raises questions that echo modern ethical debates: If you could prevent horror at the cost of your own life, would you? Should you? Options which were also played out in Groundhog Day.
Life After Life is not merely speculative fiction. In my opinion, it's actually an existential and ethical thought experiment about the weight of individual agency, even when placed within the deterministic constraints of history or divinity.
Bridget’s Theology and Human Agency
Bridget’s voice may seem like a narrative aside, but in my opinion, she represents the theological existential heart of the show. If God is indeed intervening, what does that mean for human agency? For sin? For suffering?
Or, perhaps God is not intervening in Ursula’s life—but rather Ursula is the one choosing, again and again, to return. If so, is that not equally divine? And why not, apparently, for the rest of us mere mortals?
Bridget alone begins to see this mystery not as chance but as calling. Her presence suggests that spiritual vision is not the domain of the powerful or learned, but at least in her case and for her, of the humble and the faithful.
Mortality and Meaning
In both the show and in my own life, the finite nature of time looms large. We do not know how many times we will rise, if at all. We do not even know if we will rise. But we can live—fully, thoughtfully, and with grace. If Life After Life teaches anything, it is this: the universe may offer second chances, but meaning is not embedded in time—it is embedded in choice.
The Irish maid Bridget serves as a subtle but important narrative voice regarding the metaphysical implications of Ursula’s repeated rebirths. There is a particularly notable moment when Bridget, aware of Ursula’s odd behaviors and feelings of déjà vu, suggests that “perhaps it’s God’s way of giving you another chance”—a comment that hints at a divine or cosmic mechanism behind Ursula’s cycles of life and death.
This line captures one of the core philosophical themes of the show (and the novel by Kate Atkinson): the ambiguous interplay between fate, divine intention, and human agency. While the story never confirms a literal religious explanation, it uses Bridget’s faith-inflected interpretation to offer a lens through which Ursula's experience might be seen—not just as a neurological anomaly or literary device, but as something potentially ordained or meaningful in a larger spiritual context. I was heartened by the role of the clinical psychiatrist, Dr. Kellet, a wise and understanding person. Unlike psychiatrists of today who would immediately slap onto Ursula a DSM label, and prescribe disabling medications, Dr. Kellet got to know Ursula through observation and transactional analysis, and provided essential support and validation.
Ursula herself never fully understands why she is reborn, and neither does the audience. But through characters like Bridget, the show plants seeds of possible interpretations—spiritual, existential, psychological—leaving viewers to wrestle with the same unanswered questions that Ursula does in every life she lives. I highly recommend the BBC TV series Life After Life.
0 Comments
Comment from personal blog