I just finished the final season of Six Feet Under, and it broke my heart. I know it’s “just a TV show,” but I guess I was pretty attached to it, and I especially identified with Nate. The whole experience was strange for me, as for some reason I believed there was six seasons of the show instead of five. The whole time I was watching the final season, I assumed I was watching the second-to-last season, so when I went to the library yesterday to rent the Season Five finale, I assumed that my wife and I had another twelve episodes to enjoy down the road. I looked at the back of the DVD case when I got home, and was bewildered to see a “series retrospective” listed as a bonus feature. Well, a few seconds on-line confirmed my suspicion, that indeed we were about to watch the final episode, the end, no more show, my favorite show, done, gone. I was hesitant. I told my wife that I wasn’t sure I was ready to watch it. I felt so blind-sided by the whole thing, just as many are by death itself, I suppose.
Needless to say, I wept like a grieving widow throughout the last episode, as I did through much of the series. I started watching the show just after my younger brother passed away, in early 2005. As the cast and crew were filming the final season, I was renting the first season DVD’s at the library a few times per month. The show cracked me wide open during the very first episode, and it became the primary means by which I processed both my feelings of grief and my fears around death in general.
The show really meant a lot to me. My heavy heart can attest to that. Like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring, Six Feet Under came into my life at exactly the right time, and it stands as one of the truly important works of art I have been fortunate enough to encounter. Someday, I will watch the entire series again, just as I return to Miller every so often for sustenance and reassurance. But it will never be the same. It never is. And that, right now, makes me sad. Goodbye Nate, David, Ruth, and Claire. And thanks to Alan Ball, the cast, crew and everyone involved in bringing the show to life. It was more than a show about death. It left me more alive and openhearted.