One Year In The Grave

by Todd Zuniga

Returning to work after lunch, I am greeted with a wealth of new e-mails congesting my inbox. I peruse the subjects, deleting those promising to ’save me from debt!” and hyping ‘dirty teen sluts.” Always in need of some post-nosh amusement to prep me for my day’s second half, I click on my roommate’s name. With a subject line like “Death,” I know I can’t go wrong. His comedic spirit often encourages a guffaw.

Todd,

After some thought, I’ve decided to be cremated.

Cedric

Less-than comedic, I’ll admit. He’s dying. I know he’s dying. He must be dying. He must have been mulling this for some time. But no, no, no. He’s the quiet type when it comes to anything personal. If he were dying I would find him dead on the kitchen floor before he got around to telling me.

Instead of inconveniencing myself by looking up his phone number in my address book during this (possibly) trying time, I smartly respond using the prompt convenience of AOL’s workday ruiner: Instant Messenger.

“Whatever for?” I ask.

My computer rings out as our handles (his suggestive, mine French) shake hands, losing the dust of a 19-hour layoff after yesterday’s “conversation” about Tobias Wolff, the merits of breast augmentation and the approximate height of Andre The Giant.

CedLove: Huh?

FousTodd: Cremation. You mentioned it in your e-mail.

CedLove: Oh. Six Feet Under.

FousTodd: OH!? Are you dyng?

CedLove: Nope.

[15 second pause]

CedLove: Six Feet Under.

I’ve been e-mailing my new love interest all day and the extra typing is too much for my impending carpal tunnel. I make the leap backward in technological time and pick up the phone. Cedric answers in the same easy, southern voice he always uses, but I cut him off mid-sentence.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, sure,” he says. “What’s not to be serious about?”

“Well, it’s just fascinating,” I say. “Letting a television show change a decision like that. To have that much influence.“

“I guess,” he says quietly. The master of whispered understatement.

I have more to say, more to ask, but I tell him I’ll AIM him, the word “AIM” rolling off my tongue as if it were the word “blue.”

I want the conversation to continue, but I want to get personal. My cowardice convinces me that AIM is the best way. Before Cedric’s telephone hits the cradle, I AIM like a two-handed battle axe.

“What about your mom?” I write boldly.

This is one of the unmentionables in our relationship. The disappointing catastrophe with my long-ago ex-girlfriend, his mother’s death, the time he accepted $50 to tongue-kiss another man, and the time I flew to Paris to meet a girl from Oklahoma, but she never showed.

“What about my mom?” CedLove parries.

It is his way of encouraging me to write “Forget it” or “Nothing.” But he’s kicked-off the cremation talk. Forging on is a favor to him. So I forge on.

FousTodd: Did it comfort you to see her?

FousTodd: What if she’d have been cremated/

FousTodd: ?

CedLove: I don’t know.

FousTodd: Well, what about yoru chilren?

FousTodd: children.

CedLove: I don’t know.

It’s copout city and CedLove’s the mayor. I know, I know: He will continue to return my service with I-don’t-knows. Because I’ve breached the contract of our unmentionables, I back off.

If you haven’t seen Six Feet Under, let me introduce you to its protagonists, the Fisher family and, thus, provide a primer for last year’s first season. It fittingly reads like an obituary.

David Fisher (Michael C. Hall) is busy working as his deceased father (Richard Jenkins) looks on  / HBO

Nathaniel Fisher, a funeral home director, is struck by a L.A. city bus and is killed. This occurs five minutes into the first episode. He is survived by his wife, Ruth, and their three children: Nate, David and Claire.

Ruth has been cheating on this now-dead man with her hairdresser, Hiram.

Nate, the eldest, is a 30-something food co-op manager who has been running from death and the funeral home his entire life. He has returned from Seattle for a family Christmas and is having sex (in an airport utility closet) when a city bus turns his father into a corpse.

David, the middle child, is repressed in every way, most notably in the case of his homosexuality. David, who stayed in the family business, hates being a funeral director. He wishes he had gone to law school.

Claire, the youngest child, is a high-school senior and an alterna-chick. She is cast in the same mold as her secretively (though mildly) decadent father.

The Fisher home is also a funeral home. Slowly, after the weighty death of Nathaniel, everyone begins to blossom into the people they can’t help themselves from becoming — while fighting the transformation the entire way.

Each show begins with a death. It is compelling stuff, and foolish people, people who know much less than all of us, believe it’s a dark comedy. But it’s not.

At home the night of the cremation e-mail, my roommate and I continue our conversation; he reluctantly, me with measured excitement.

“I was thinking about the cremation thing,” I say.

Silence.

“Thinking about how I don’t find comfort in seeing a dead body lying in a casket,” I tell him. “At both of the funerals I’ve been to, my grandmother’s and my uncle’s, it was disquieting to watch people stare at them while they just lay there.”

He stuffs a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth. Spits a few into a plastic cup.

I say, “The hard thing for me: I wouldn’t know what to do with my ashes.”

I think he makes a harrumph sound, but he could be clearing a rogue sunflower seed from the workings of his esophagus.

“I mean, does anyone really want to go to Paris and dump me out? Or raise your hand if you’d object to dumping my ashes in the East Village.”

He’s motionless. Which I go ahead and take as a good sign.

“Are you listening?” I ask. I am talking to myself.

“I’m listening,” he says, with the tone of a defensive father, girlfriend, roommate.

What makes Six Feet Under such a special show, the kind of show that changes your mind about how your body should be handled after it’s not yours anymore, is its rich characters. Like all of us, each character has three distinct puzzle pieces making up their respective wholes: the piece they show others, the piece they believe themselves to be, and the garbled hunk of grey matter they actually are.

Claire Fisher (Lauren Ambrose) is one of the most complex teens on TV / HBO

Episode after episode I am struck by the different masks they wear. It’s easy to identify with their fissures, failures and successes. And with how gruesome and honest they are when they are caught in a free moment when they think no one is looking, and the masks are off.

One minute Nate is coolly in control of his past and present. The next he is face to face with his father’s ghost, swimming in an ocean of history and memory he never knew existed.

During an average afternoon David is standing at a stranger’s wake in a suit and tie, controlled and somber. At night he may be spinning circles, ecstasy-high at a happening, gay L.A. club. Wearing his 17-year old sister’s shirt.

Claire is a quietly miserable high-school outcast. Claire is a jilted lover who has taken an unattached foot from the funeral home and placed it in the jilter’s locker.

So many faces and masks for the same person you’d think they’re, well, yes, real.

Constant tremors of death circle the show. While watching, my roommate and I fall into thoughtful silence. Neither of us can stop from thinking about the death we’ve experienced. Fluffy the poodle getting run down by a station wagon. Uncle Carl’s heart-attack. My nephew’s brain tumor.

The first five minutes of the show rumble with impending disaster. And the final 50 minutes somberly hold our hands in Dickensian fashion, inaudibly asking how we’d react. What we’d do with the bodies of the people we love. If we’d have the strength to be brushed and rebuilt by strangers so we could lie in the open for mourning on-lookers.

Every episode forces me to wonder if my roommate is onto something with all this ashes-to-ashes business. Certainly I expect to get closer to an answer when the show returns on March 3. And say what you want about the dehumanization of technology, but I’m thankful that the face-to-face inhibitions brought on by such weighty topics as how we’d all like to have our carcasses buried can be lifted by the technology that sits on my work computer’s desktop.

Let the second season of questioning begin.

Enter the Pop Forum
Has a TV show ever made you reconsider your life, or your death?

Todd Zuniga is an associate editor at Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, and the editor of OpiumMagazine.com. His work is smeared around the Internet in places like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His latest story, about Elvis’ ghost, will premiere in the debut issue of Sweet Fancy Moses: The Journal of Wit. He is considerably taller than you might expect.

Related Sites
Here is the official HBO site for Six Feet Under, complete with episode summaries, discussion boards for topics ranging from “coming out” to “funeral directors and aftercare.”
Creator Alan Ball talked to Gay.com about the show’s characters, sexuality and religion.
In his preview of the first season, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote: “As it does so often in just these first six hours, Six Feet Under seems to fill you with tears that cannot flow, flirting with a sadness of unspeakable severity, confronting a subject that hardly anyone, ever, is comfortable confronting. It’s not as if Ball is pretentiously taking you by the hand and forcing you to look at something ugly. On the contrary, he daringly sees the beauty in it, even in some of the more seemingly absurd aspects of rituals that go with mourning.”