Grave affairs: HBO's 'Six Feet Under'

Christian Century, Nov 2, 2004 by Thomas Lynch

WHAT ALAN BALL so clearly "gets" is that funerals are about the living and the dead--the talk and the traffic between them. In his show, they constantly confront one another. He lets them occupy the same space, often the unlikely "space" of the Fisher & Sons mortuary, where the living look the dead in the face--not out of morbid curiosity but because in the face of mortality we need to stand and look, watch and wonder, listen and remember. Alan Ball presses us to examine the difference between the fashions and the fundamentals in the business of death, what is essential and what is accessory.

And it is time we did.

With the erosion of religions, ethnic and social connections and the rituals and practices they provide to confront mortality and bereavement, more and more of us must reinvent, from the leftovers and borrowings of our various traditions, the wheel that works the space between the deaths that happen and the deaths that matter. This is what we do funerals for--not only to dispose of our dead, but to bear witness to their lives and times among us, to affirm the difference their living and dying makes among kin and community, and to provide a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief and faith, hope and wonder. The value of a funeral proceeds neither from how much we spend nor from how little. A death in the family is an existential event, not only or entirely a medical, emotional, religious or retail one.

"An act of sacred community theater," Thomas Long calls the funeral--this "transporting" of the dead from this life to the next. "We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama." Long--theologian, writer, thinker and minister--speaks about the need for "a sacred text, sacred community and sacred space," to process the deaths of "sacred persons." The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb while the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without those loved ones. The transport is ritual, ceremonial, an amalgam of metaphor and reality, image and imagination, process and procession, text and scene set, script and silence, witness and participation--theater, "sacred theater," indeed.

When the Fisher family gathers at the graveside to bury their dead man, in the opening episode of Six Feet Under, the cleric says the prayers, then passes a canister of sand for the family to sprinkle on the casket. The dutiful David observes the protocol, his wide-eyed sister Claire follows suit. But Nate, the blow-in elder brother from Seattle, refuses, protesting loudly that it is like "salting the popcorn." He won't have the experience "sanitized." He searches for a clump of "real" dirt because it better represents his "real" grief--the untidy business of anger, love, guilt, pain and loss. His prim but apparently passionate mother follows suit, unwilling to go gently into the good night of widowhood. David gets his reality in the embalming room, conversing with his dead father, and argues for tradition, ceremony, decorum and calm. Claire sees her father's ghost, propped on the hearse parked at the curb, smiling widely. Nate shows his mother how to dirty her hands in her husband's burial while her wrenching whole-body sobs remove any pretense of ease. They all leave with their separate longings for the dead the sons still fighting for their father's approval, the daughter still hungering for attention, the wife wanting him back long enough to forgive her for her clumsy infidelities.