‘Six Feet Under’ is laid to rest

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Death was always dropping in. At the start of each episode (nearly every one, that is, except the finale), someone met his or her demise in a fashion that might be heartbreaking (claimed by sudden infant death syndrome), grotesque (cut in half by an elevator) or morbidly funny (hit by a car while witnessing the Rapture). Each slice of life (or, more aptly, slice of death) was meant to demonstrate the randomness and ineluctability of our common fate.

“Six Feet Under” thought a lot about death, and about death’s impact on the survivors. After all, it viewed death through the eyes of a family that runs a funeral home — assisting at the cusp of the hereafter, while struggling with the here and now.

In its premiere four years ago, its tone was quickly established: The patriarch, Nathaniel Fisher, was killed while fiddling with his cigarette when a bus smacked into the hearse he was driving.

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But he never went away. Played by Richard Jenkins, he engaged in an active afterlife throughout the series’ run.

Now, on the finale, he reappears to bully his son David into saving himself. Later in the episode, he and son Nate jointly offer Brenda a much-needed blessing.

On “Six Feet Under,” ghostly presences are skilled at saying what needs to be said, as when Nate gives Claire a pep talk about moving to New York to pursue her photography.

“You want to know a secret?” he counsels. “I spent my whole life being scared: of not being ready, of not being right, of not being who I should be. And where did it get me?”

Then, in the show’s closing minutes, as Claire gathers the people she loves most for a farewell photo before she drives away, Nate, looking on, says a curious thing.

“You can’t take a picture of this,” he tells her. “It’s already gone.”

In this richly satisfying finish to a series like none other, we understand what he means. We see these characters as we have never seen them before. But as we realize how much we cared for them, we understand they’re not there. “Six Feet Under” will be over. So the pictures that count will reside inside us. Long after it has gone.

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