SFU

Maybe it’s giving a television show too much credit or just plain being a sentimental fool before my time, but Six Feet Under has encouraged me to look at death more than anything else in my life. Having not experienced much death at all really, it’s easy for me to consider it only as an abstract concept to be dealt with when it comes along in its many ways and times. No doubt the show intended to do much more and far less, but to me that will be the enduring memory of the Fisher’s and their relations.

For what is at it’s core a 50 minute picture show SFU definitely drew me in far deeper than anything else. The characters came to feel like an extension of my social world, however silly that may sound. So many episodes left me feeling emotionally and physically taxed to the point that I had to just switch off my mind and go to bed in order to recharge. How can a TV show do that to us? How can something that we know is wholly artificial become so real? As what amounts to a former media studies major, I should be able to offer some hypothesis, but I don’t have one to give.

What I do know is that the series finale that I just finished watching left me with a small taste of what it must feel like to lose someone very close — a mother or brother or best friend. I am not saying that I know what it will feel like when my parents die or my grandparents. What I am saying is that somewhere in the last quarter of the episode tonight I really considered what life would be like without the people that I love the most and it was a painful realization that they would be gone someday.

When each of the characters died having lived out the lives that HBO fated them I felt a little more empty inside. It was a strangely moving and cathartic experience — not something that we have come to expect from our television. I won’t go so far as to say I feel compelled to make changes in my life, but I am saying that I have thought about parts of life — and death — that I have never considered before today.

Editor’s note: the preceding was written under the influence of powerful television as well as a surprisingly potent nasal decongestant. Give a guy a break.