"If we live our lives the right way, then everything we do can become a work of art."
~Claire Fisher, Six Feet Under
I'd never really considered how much we sanitize death until I watched Six Feet Under. Suddenly, it seemed very strange: the way we try to preserve the bodies, make them look like they did in life, lay them on a bed of satin, cry on their graves not once but over and over and over (but quietly, and mostly in private), until we die ourselves. When did this become the normal way of doing things? Why is death -- just as natural and inevitable as birth -- such a shameful thing, so blanketed in denial?
When I started watching the show, I hadn't really experienced death myself. I knew some elderly neighbors or distant relatives or family friends who had died, and although I felt a lot of empathy for their families and some measure of sadness for myself, it wasn't until my grandparents died that I truly felt grief.
I don't have much to compare it to, of course, but I'm so grateful that my grandparents opted to skip the embalming/viewing stage and go straight to cremation. The thought of having to see them as mannequins, false representations of their former selves, made my stomach churn (as it still does). I'm unconvinced that literally seeing them one last time, but minus the opportunity to say any real goodbyes, would have done much to help me grieve. I'm also unconvinced that having a grave site to obsess over would have made the process any easier, especially when I already have such complicated feelings about living far away from my family. Everyone has their own way of grieving, of course, but for me, there is no point in trying to have an ongoing emotional relationship with their bodies; the people are already gone, and pretending otherwise gives me no comfort.
One of many things that drew me to this show was its willingness to confront a wide range of people's complicated feelings about death, along with what actually happens in a funeral home, how many things about death are concealed from the mourners, and how bizarre (and often darkly funny) it all really is. Outside of the macabre, its brutal honesty, no matter how controversial the topic, and the complexity of all the characters make it a shoo-in for my favorite show. So far, I have found nothing else that sucked me in as immediately or tugged as forcefully on my heartstrings. I can't wait to watch it all again, from start to finish.
Sorry, I couldn't get it to stay rotated, no matter what I did. :(
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