Think about the life you always pictured, the one you saw for yourself and imagined and wanted more than anything else. Then imagine a daydream of that life so vivid it feels real. Now ponder what you would do and how you would feel if it were all taken away in the blink of an eye.

Stick Episode 7, “Dreams Never Remembered,” brought that exact moment to life and it’s going to be with me for a while.

In the cold open of the most recent episode of the Apple TV+ hit, Pryce Cahill (Owen Wilson) cannot wake up from a stunning but tragic dream where he brings his dead son, Jett, back to life and experiences some of life’s more mundane moments. These moments — experiences like playing superheroes with your child, unclogging a toilet after they stuck a toy somewhere it doesn’t belong, grounding them after they took the car without permission, etc — hold their own poetic beauty, especially to someone who never got to have them.

In earlier episodes, the audience discovered that Pryce and Amber-Linn (Judy Greer), who are established in the pilot as an incredibly amicable divorced couple, lost their son sometime around the age of four. As of Episode 7’s release, they haven’t revealed how Jett died, but if I’m being honest, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no good or best way to lose a child, and that is something that is talked about extensively by members of “the world’s worst club,” a.k.a. parents who have lost a son or daughter.

This all leads me to sharing that the choice to have Pryce walk down a memory lane that he never traversed, feeling and visualizing the highs and lows of parenthood (yes, that means the good, bad, and the ugly), is so narratively intriguing. Even more so when you remember that it was seemingly Jett’s death that led to his blowout on the green, which cut his career short. Now, as he has all but adopted Santi (Peter Dager) as a son during their training, he can’t help but wonder what his own life with his own son and wife might have looked like.

It’s the exact kind of gutpunch moment that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) experienced in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness where she wakes up from a dream in which her twin sons, Billy and Tommy, were still alive and with her. That WandaVision situation is slightly different because she did take over a whole town, essentially put all of its residents under a spell, and conjure her children from her own magic, but a mother is a mother is a mother, right?

I can’t quite put into words how much I loved this sequence the first time I watched it. I can, however, tell you that even as someone who has not lost a child, watching this back gave me some peace and comfort that even in the most unexplainable tragedies like the loss of a young son, there will be moments ahead that feel like it’s going to be okay.

My hat’s off to Stick creator Jason Keller and the entire writing team for crafting an unforgettable start to an equally incredible episode. This show just gets better and better, I tell you.

The first seven episodes of Stick are now streaming on Apple TV+.