the tumor represents the physical manifestation of not being able to take care of Buffy, or a form of mortality that Buffy will not soon face. To Joss Whedon, the tumor represented nothing more than cancer. He planned to kill Joyce as early as the third season, and he wrote the episode to reflect what he experienced when he lost his own mother to a brain aneurysm. In 2001, Whedon told an interviewer, "I knew I was going to kill Joyce, and I knew that what I wanted to capture — because I had lost my own mother — was that weird dumb grief and the various reactions that people have to death." "The Body" begins with a Christmas dinner scene presided over by Joyce as the head of her chosen family. At the table are Buffy, Dawn, Giles, Willow, her girlfriend Tara (Amber Benson), Xander, and his ex-demon girlfriend Anya (Emma Caulfield). Pragmatically, the scene was included so the credits would not roll over the dramatic moments of Buffy finding her dead mother and trying to revive her. Whedon did not want to include any element that broke the illusion presented in the episode. In a realm where the main adolescent characters, who are becoming adults, must regularly face horrors and evils, Joyce represents a stable and predictable life. Her death crushes the illusion that real or normal life — which Buffy frequently says she wants but cannot have — is trouble-free. Joyce is mourned by all of the characters in the series. Even the amoral vampire Spike (James Marsters) expresses his condolences. In an earlier episode he had confided in a very sympathetic Joyce about his equally amoral and insane lover Drusilla (Juliet Landau) leaving him. Likewise, Anya, who has very little experience with human emotions and frailties, is confused and unexpectedly saddened by Joyce's death. Other appearances Joyce appears in four episodes after her death in "The Body", first as a young woman in season five's "The Weight of the World": Buffy has a recurring but false memory of her parents bringing Dawn home as a newborn. The episode deals with Buffy's inability to cope with her mother's death and her inadequacy at protecting Dawn, and explores Buffy's obsession with her failure and guilt. The sixth-season episode "Normal Again" posits Buffy's world of Sunnydale as a manifestation of psychopathology: after being stabbed by a demon, Buffy becomes