9:15 a.m. - 2005-08-22
Six Feet Under
The show Six Feet Under is really great. If January rolls around and you've got nothing to do...please proceed directly to your local video store or your netflix queue and obtain episodes of this show. I plan to start with the first season as soon as life pauses a bit. The last 4 weeks or so, sunday nights have been my favorite night. Kevin and I snuggled on the couch, maybe had a beer and watched this compelling, amusing, disturbing, entertaining drama with deep engrossment. It's about this amazingly screwed up family that is somehow so normal and real, it feels like you could walk down the street into their house and sit down and have some coffee with the whiny, indignant, majorly self-absorbed and yet delightfully relatable matriarch. It's a complicated family...rife with tragedy and selfishness splayed out, web-like...interconnecting relationships with the cloud of death lingering constantly nearby. I cried at the season finale and last show ever, last night. The very end showed these lovely snapshots of how each of the characters would eventually, years later, die...some by heart attacks, some by violence...some, apparently by grief and shock...it was beautiful and awful...because as I sat there, I was reminded of one definite reality. Everyone I love will die. And unless I'm first, I will have to go through that heart-wrenching pain many times over.
Sometimes God is kind and easy on us and we experience death starting from far away and growing increasingly closer...working us up to the really hard ones....first a distant great aunt, a grandparent you never really knew, a parent's friend, a co-worker, your spouse's mother, a friend, your parent, a sibling, your own spouse.
Hopefully never a child. Or anyone young. Or anyone violently or painfully. Hopefully no suffering. But inevitably we will all experience a death that is shocking. Unexpected. One that offers no closure or sense. That causes us indescribable grief and pain and loss. I'm afraid of that. I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of losing people. And there's little that can be done to avoid it, as Kevin reminded me gently last night as I was sniffling bits and pieces of this out loud. I remember when my grandmother was still alive. She was in her mid 80s and death was so familiar to her. The matter-of-fact way she'd say when I asked about one of her friends I hadn't seen in a while..."Oh, she died." Kind of how you might say "Oh, she moved to Florida." I guess you figure out how to soldier on. It's obvious, I know...but the treacherous risk we take in loving and needing people is losing them...and it's not even really a Risk, per se, because it's GOING TO happen...the word Risk implies it might not happen...I guess it's a Result. A Result that will take place at an unkown place at an unknown time, in an unknown way. I'm just warning you guys...even with the bit of practice I've had so far, I'm not very good at this yet.
Some people fear death...probably because either they don't believe that they know what happens when you die, and so they worry that something bad will happen. Or they believe that they DO know and that because of whatever they've done or haven't done, they are afraid of what they do believe is going to happen. So, the way you get over that is figure out what you believe is true, and then do what needs to be done to get yourself on the right side of the fence. In the case of Christians, believe that Jesus died for your sins and accept that forgiveness...in the case of muslims, pray to mecca and make the pilgrimage or whatever...in the case of most Americans "just be a good person."
But if the thing you're afraid of is losing people....like me....how do you "get over" that? I guess getting over it isn't the point. The point of life isn't, as many act like it is, to avoid pain. Some forgeign missionary type person once said something like "Americans are always surprised when tragedy happens." What he meant is that in other cultures where car bombs, draught, famine, flood and rampant disease area way of life...you start to realize that maybe the point of life isn't to be comfortable and happy. Maybe there is beauty in the pain and even in how you respond to the fear. Maybe we are strengthened through loss in a way not attainable through any other experience. People who "get" this are the ones who truly have perspective, and I, admittedly, do not. I don't want to get stronger by losing people I love. It's the same reason I don't have an amazing athlete's body and the same reason I don't have a bunch of money in my savings account...because I am too unwilling to endure the discomfort and sacrifice of the present to yield a positive result in the future. Instant gratification has ALWAYS been more appealing to me. Maybe I'm on a bit of a tangent here, but how do you get over THAT?
Right now, so many of my weekends are being monoplozed by the weddings of people I love. There will come a time when the frequency of funerals exceeds the frequency of weddings in my circles. Do you just get used to it? In my experience when someone close to you dies, that whole situation kind of hijacks your brain, your heart and your life in general for a while. It's been over a year and a half since my grandma dorothy died and I am still just a speck of will power away from crying when I think about her or talk about her or something unexpected reminds me of her. How do you function when these things start becoming less than unusual?
I know this post isn't particularly amusing...but this is what happens when I watch a show about a family of funeral directors...just like during 24 season, I pepper nearly all blog entries with Jack Bauer references.
