Given that I was a youngster in the early 2000s, I missed out on the craze that was Bridget Jones.

I definitely heard about it through the years (I mean…Colin Firth + Hugh Grant…swoon), but as I got older, I never felt the draw to watch one of the iconic films.

Well, flash forward to 2025. Valentine’s Day in particular. And I saw that Peacock released a new Bridget Jones movie called Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy. And I really wanted to see it.

Having never seen the prior films, I charged ahead and figured out the backstory the best I could.

I loved it.

The brilliance that Bridget Jones, the charm of England, the adorable London suburb that they all call home, and the beautiful storyline…this movie series was worth the wait.

Amongst the laughs, this film also found me shedding some tears. Namely, because Bridget teaches us some valuable lessons about grief and loss. But, she does it such a way that you find yourself shedding those tears with a smile on your face. It’s a delicate dance, but Bridget does it wonderfully.

Here’s five lessons Bridget taught me about the love + loss, joy + grief, and finding yourself after losing someone near and dear to you.

P.S. There are spoilers ahead.

#1: Lots of People Don’t Know How to Talk About Grief

At the start of the movie, we learn that Bridget Jones has sadly lost her beloved husband, Mark Darcy, and today is the anniversary of his death. We see Bridget make her way back into London proper where she attends a dinner with acquaintances and friends who knew her late husband. In what is already a hard day, we witness Bridget get peppered with questions about her moving on from Darcy’s death. And Bridget realizes she’s had enough.

This is painting a large brush, but society doesn’t know how to talk about grief. There are certainly pockets where this is the exception, but I’ve come to see in my own grief journey with my dad, a lot of people don’t know how to talk about death and grief with someone who lost a dear loved one.

What can we do about this?

Firstly, have compassion for them. These people are byproducts of generations of humans who have been taught that death and grief is something you talk about under whispered conditions and pretend largely doesn’t happen.

Secondly, start talking about it. No matter how difficult.

The quintessential “They’re in a better place now” and “At least they’re not in pain anymore” just don’t scratch the surface level when you’re feeling grief.

Bridget captures this masterfully when she says, “And even though there might be 600,000 words in the human language, the world still struggles to find the right ones when someone you love is gone.”

Let’s try to find the words for the people experiencing grief. Or let’s be brave enough to say, “I don’t know what to say, but I am here for you.”

#2: Life Keeps Moving Forward

While Bridget Jones has been on a break from working after Darcy’s death, we witness her talking to her gynecologist/”therapist”/ Emma Thompson who encourages her to go back to work to regain a sense of purpose in her days.

She does, and we witness her slowly start becoming herself again.

Perhaps one of the most shocking lessons to learn after someone you care about passes away is that life will keep moving forward. While we might wish for the world to stand still for a while (and it often feels like it does right after experiencing grief), the hard truth is the world is going to keep moving forward. Days will keep coming and going, the Earth will keep spinning and people will keep moving forward with their lives.

And sometimes, when you are feeling in that time-standing still funk of grief, a great way (I have found for myself) to lessen this a bit is to get out and go experience the world. See that the seasons keep changing, the birds keep singing and life does indeed keep moving onwards.

#3: Faith is Trusting in the Unknown

While every Bridget Jones movie (I’ve since watched all of them) witnesses Bridget in the midst of love struggles, this movie has a delightful juxtaposition of her dreamer, romantic self falling for her son’s science teacher, Mr. Walliker, who is very much a pragmatist and stick-to-the-facts kind of guy.

We see this really clearly when Bridget comes in for a sort of “Career Day” in her son’s classroom and Bridget decides the best way to show the class what she does behind the scenes in TV production for a news talk show is to have a “live” talk show where she interviews Mr. Walliker. However, it quickly goes haywire when Bridget-who has been teaching her kids that their dad is now up in Heaven-conflicts with Mr. Walliker when he says there is no science behind the afterlife, and there’s no certainty that there is such a thing.

While I like to fashion myself more on the side of Bridget Jones’s thinking, I can agree with Mr. Walliker on this. We don’t know with certainty what happens when we die or a loved one dies. We can hope there’s an afterlife-that we will see them again-but we don’t know with 100% certainty. Just like we don’t know with 100% certainty that there’s not not an afterlife.

We witness this moment come full circle again at the end of the movie (again, spoilers!). Throughout the movie, we’ve seen the kids have an owl always watching over them from their backyard. For me, I like to think it’s their dad’s guardian angel. Well, this owl flys away when Mr. Walliker and Bridget have fallen fully in love and everyone seems happy together as a family. Mr. Walliker, for that brief moment watching the owl fly away, seems to wonder… is there perhaps more to life beyond human comprehension?

#5: Eventually, You’ll Let Them Go (+ That’s Okay)

In perhaps the sweetest of scenes, we see Bridget Jones’s son, Billy, sing “I’d Do Anything” at the school’s Christmas concert. The beloved song his dad used to sing to him and his sister at bedtime.

After the concert, Bridget goes up to the concert’s teacher in charge- a one Mr. Walliker- and thanks him for helping Billy to sing that song.”People talk about moving on like it means…leaving something behind…leaving someone you love behind,” she tells him, “but perhaps it’s more that suddenly you see you can live at the same time as all the things you’ve lost, and that you can be happy even without them.”

It’s another stop on the grief train, realizing that you will eventually let your loved one go.

Not in the sense that you forget them, but in the sense that you let them be wherever they are. That you don’t have to have such a strong grip on them, that you can let them move on and you will move on.

And that’s okay.

It doesn’t mean you are a bad person for letting them go, and it doesn’t mean you will never remember them.

It means, you will start living your life again. And isn’t that what your loved one would want?

As Bridget Jones says, “Bridget Jones, it’s time to live.”

Photo by Alex Block on Unsplash