In the writers’ room, we had intense conversations about grief and loss. We had a grief counselor come and speak to us. My initial pitch, the structure of the show was mapped to the stages of grief. I did not know that that line would be a sensation, but it did feel at the time that it was the perfect distillation of the show. Laura Donney wrote an extraordinary episode, and as we were moving toward production on the scene, Paul was really hungering for, what’s the thing that Vision can say that will bring her comfort? He wanted a line that, in a very Vision way, would perfectly encapsulate a definition of grief,
like in “Age of Ultron,” how he says, “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”
So I came up with a line that was something along the lines of, “What is grief but love surviving?” We agreed that wasn’t quite it and we were turning it over and trying to figure it out. My incredibly talented assistant, Laura Monti, came up with the word “persevering.” We all believe that the line was born of the enormous amount of collaboration and unity on the show. So many talented women, specifically, came up with it.