Six Feet Under

I finally made it to the end of season 5.

I knew it would destroy me before the end.

God damn. That show never let up, not once. Okay, once. There was that one stupid paintball scene with Keith and David, and that's the only time that show ever lost me. I thought it was gonna go downhill then, but it picked up again. It's a near perfect piece of art. On television. Go figure.

Next I have to rent Angels in America.

Yeah, that's what I'll do. I just cry every night for a week and then I'll go.

I want to talk about that show more, but I will never spoil it for anyone like the Globe and Mail did for me. All I can say is, WATCH IT. It will change your life.

No, there must be more I can say without giving anything away. That show became a parallel for my life for a while. You know there are those albums or books that come out exactly when you're ready to receive them, and you listen to the music or you read the words, and they allow you to see something about your life that you were just waiting to discover, but you didn't have the means? That's what that TV show did to me. It came along and I knew and identified with, not just one or two of the characters, but every one. It showed me that we are all struggling together with the same thing and that's that we're all going to die. We're all going to watch people die, we're all going to experience sorrows beyond comprehension. But that doesn't mean that we don't have to go on living, and go on dealing, and go on loving people.

These are things that I always knew, technically, to be true. But that show made me realize them in my core. It allowed me to find parallels, inside myself, to my own family and my own story, and it illuminated those relationships and experiences in a new light that I had not fully appreciated before.

I have lived through the deaths of my grandparents, and that's as close to death as I have come. Sure, they were hard for me, they still are. But for me they were more an experience of being there for my mother. I mean, that is the essential meat of what I remember of those times. And to try to understand grief, from the outside like that, is frustrating and well, kind of impossible. We only know from being inside of it. Six Feet Under helped to give me an understanding of how that pain transforms a person. So that I think I can recognize that transformative power, that grace, even if I have not felt it myself.

And that's just how it influenced me psychologically. Creatively, it was just one of the most thoughtful, well-crafted pieces of art I've ever witnessed. And it came around just as I was launching my own artistic journey. And Claire, the youngest child, the character who, let's face it, I have the most in common with, was an artist. So the show brought up all these questions that a young artist faces and it dealt with them all in an honest, no bullshit way.

That's why Six Feet Under was amazing. Because it managed to talk about and deal with life, death, art, all of the subjects that are taboo for a hit TV series... it acknowleged and celebrated life and all of its questions in a way that never became maudlin, and it never became melodrama, and it never took itself too seriously. It was just... true.

R.I.P. S.F.U.