A Question of How You Live

The past few days I've been thinking of death. We've had Lou Rawls, Barry Cowsill, a dozen miners... and I'm not normally a morbid person, but death just seems to be hanging around lately. On Christmas morning my parents lost a close friend suddenly, someone I have known for 40 or more years. It dampened everyone's spirits for the rest of the day; I could see it eating at my father. What good are gifts when you've lost your best friend?

It has all got me thinking again about the wonderful Six Feet Under, the story of the Fisher and Sons Mortuary that fascinated and captivated me for five glorious seasons on HBO, till its demise a few months ago. Maybe Six Feet Under is on my mind because I saw Rumor Has It... and as I previously related, three actors from Six Feet Under appear in that film.

Maybe, but I think not. I think it's death, just kinda floating around, through the air, making his presence known.

If you watched Six Feet Under then you know that each episode of the show began with a death and if you saw the final episode, "Everyone's Waiting," you know that it ended with a fifteen-minute look forward in which we saw the deaths of all the major characters on the show. I may as well admit it right now, I'm a crier and this show had my wife and I going pretty good.

It was meant to be sad, right? It showed how they all died, that's a sad thing, particularly if you've invested yourself in the characters over the years. How can it not be? It's death and it came for them just as it's coming for each of us and none of us like to think about that.

I watched that ending four or five times (this is what TiVo was created for folks) and about the third time it hit me that this was not a sad ending.

What was sad was the sheer hell the characters had been going though for the five seasons we watched them. Some of the most horrific stuff I have ever seen on television was presented on Six Feet Under. Every member of the Fisher family struggled with their demons during the show's run; each of them suffered greatly.

For five seasons we watched them endure the worst things in life; five seasons bookended with the deaths of Nate Fisher, father and son. And then in fifteen glorious minutes we watched them pull through it and live. And die. Sure, we knew that was coming; we all know it is coming. But in those last fifteen minutes we watched the characters put all of the shit they had gone through behind them; we got to see them living. And most of them lived very long lives full of joy and satisfaction.

Those final fifteen minutes made it clear that Six Feet Under was not a show about death, but a show about life. It's not about how you die, it's a question of how you live.