If you’re reading this, you either subscribed to my gaming website or clicked a link on my social media. Before I go further, thank you for that, from the bottom of my heart. If you’re here from my social channels, you likely know that, besides gaming, I talk a lot about wrestling. This isn’t a light and fluffy piece; in fact, it’s probably the most raw and real thing I’ve written for this site since I started.
I’ve loved wrestling since I was a kid, as a lot of us have, but as I grew up, I got away from it. About 13 years ago, I started watching again, and every Sunday I would call my dad, and we’d talk and laugh about the storylines, matches, and what-ifs. When my dad got sick, those weekly calls were less about the actual wrestling, but more of a way for him to not think about being ill for an hour or so. It was him and his little girl watching wrestling ‘together’ from opposite sides of the country.
Fast forward a bit, my dad passed in 2021, but my mom and I still continue to talk wrestling frequently, even though they both only watch/watched WWE. While none of this may seem like it’s talking about Moxley like my title suggests, this isn’t just about Moxley; it’s about grief and how grief can sometimes hit you unexpectedly and without warning. Something that really hit me this past weekend during AEW WrestleDream.
The past few weeks have been difficult for the wrestling community, and a lot of that has been on display for the public through AEW and the way their talent has processed the loss of Benjamin Satterley, known as Pac in AEW and formerly Neville in WWE. His sudden passing left a lot of the talent shaken, in particular his close friends in the Deathriders faction (Jon Moxley, Marina Shafir, Wheeler Yuta, Claudio Castagnoli, Daniel Garcia, and Gabe Kidd). Throughout the beautiful tribute show, we saw many wrestlers break down as expected and through multiple components of the show, we saw the Deathriders leader, Jon Moxley, stand as a leader. Not only the leader of the faction but of the locker room. It was evident that people looked to him for support, and he was there.
After the show, we heard stories about the way he checked on people, and those stories really drive home what a person he is to the locker room.
If it wasn’t clear, this article isn’t about his character on TV; it’s about the person a lot of us got to see during these past few weeks. Many of us noticed that he had a backstage segment recently on AEW Dynamite where he let out a primal scream that was all too familiar. It was one I heard escape from myself when I was home alone after my husband died, and once again when my father passed, and I wasn’t able to see him before he did. It’s the sound you make when no one is there to see and hear you be ‘weak.’ Having his real-life wife, Renee, in that segment was beautiful and heartbreaking, as she transcended from Renee the reporter to Renee the wife in the blink of an eye. He was in pain; what hurt? Everything.
We jump forward a few days to the PPV, WrestleDream, and Moxley is fighting a favourite of mine, Mark Davis. A man who is bigger than Moxley. While my brain knew Moxley was winning and this match would be as good as we knew it would be, there was something I didn’t expect: my grief to come back at me before I even knew it was happening. During the entrance to the ring, the Deathriders did their new huddle/shuffle around Pac’s empty chair, and we heard Renee talk about how the group is actively still grieving. Of course they are. She spoke about how Moxley was carrying all that weight to the ring with him. That’s when it hit me. Mark Davis wasn’t just Mark Davis in the moment; he was that grief that needed to be conquered.
Whether Tony Khan/Moxley/Davis put this together intentionally or perhaps the online wrestling community put this together themselves, I can’t ignore it. The match put both of them through the wringer, and at the end the Deathriders surrounded their leader and held him up through exhaustion and pain, as they have all done for one another over the past few weeks.
I don’t know why I’m writing this, other than to say grief does not follow a fixed timeline, an expiration date, or a predictable linear path. Seeing people grieve publicly, especially strong men crying, reminds me that while I often grieve quietly, I am lucky to have people who support me, and I don’t need to hide it. Although I know they won’t see this, thank you, Jon Moxley and Mark Davis, for having this match that broke my heart and gave me an outlet to talk about things I rarely do.
And to tie in one last nerdy little thing, I often think of the quote spoken by Marvel’s Vision to Wanda, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”
If you’ve stayed this long and read my ramblings, thank you… again. While I don’t expect I’ll write personal articles on a regular basis, this felt like something I needed to write down so I could move on a little this week as well.
Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.
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