The Choice to Survive

If you’ve watched The Last of Us, you know it’s not just a story about surviving a zombie apocalypse—it’s about surviving being human. The show follows Ellie, a young woman navigating a brutal, post-pandemic world, haunted by loss and driven by revenge.

In the final episode of Season 2, she finally closes in on the person responsible for killing her surrogate father. Her journey takes her to a dystopian version of the Seattle Aquarium—a place that once represented life and wonder but now stands hollow and eerie.

Inside, Ellie encounters two members of her enemy’s group. What starts as a tense negotiation collapses into violence: one shot, one life gone instantly. The second—a woman—takes longer to fall. As she bleeds out from her neck, she unzips her jacket to reveal a near-term pregnant belly. Her voice trembles, urgent and fading, as she pleads for Ellie to grab a knife and save her baby.

You can tell she once worked in medicine; she gives quick, desperate instructions on how to perform a cesarean, fighting for her child even as her own life drains away. “You’re doing good,” she gasps. “Is he out?”

It’s devastating to watch.

I expected Ellie to do it—to cut, to save the baby, to give this horror-stricken world one small act of redemption. But that’s not what happens. She sets the knife down. Covers the woman’s exposed stomach. And just sits there, stunned—wrecked by what she’s done, and by what she’s chosen not to do.

The scene has stayed with me. Maybe because it’s controversial. Maybe because it’s honest.

It happened in a TV show, but the weight of it was real—because it mirrors the choices we all make to survive. Sometimes we pull the trigger. Sometimes we set the knife down. Sometimes survival means letting something die—a dream, a version of ourselves, a hope we once believed in—so that we can keep breathing.

I’ve felt that this year: fighting to stay intact while my inner world collapsed and my outer world was under intense scrutiny. Choosing what to save and what to let go. And choosing potential controversy by sharing my writing publicly, because that, too, has been a way to survive.

There’s no tidy moral here.

Just the echo of a truth I recognized:

that survival isn’t always heroic.

Sometimes it’s just heartbreaking.