Besotted with "Six Feet Under"

I've been turned on to the quirky, fabulousness of the HBO series (now defunct) "Six Feet Under," henceforth referred to as SFU. Thanks to the magic of Netflix, my current Big Love, I have been watching the series from the very beginning. While I didn't see it the first time around, I'm now onto Disc 2 of the Second Season (of which there are a total of 5 discs). With 4 seasons worth of discs to go (so, an estimated 20 DVD's still to plop through our mail slot) I'm in funereal heaven. As hokey as this sounds, I feel like I learn something important, either about the world or myself, with each episode that I watch. Some of the things that I've learned, feel like gems to slide into my back pocket which I will be able to produce when needed.

Watching the season also makes me realize how little thought I've given to the subject of death and dying. While I had rudimentary clinical training in grieving and loss, and have done a little reading of my own, I've lost very few people and I've never seen death, dying or a dead person up close. I've heard others accounts of seeing their dead relatives and loved ones, and these really stick with me. My oldest school friend lost her father when we were still in high school. I remember her describing how she leaned over him to look at him, and realized that his body was cold and like there was nobody in there. She said, "It's not like sleeping. He just was gone." This has obviously made an impact on me, because I remember it to this day. How on earth can somebody you love just be gone? It boggled my mind.

While I don't have anything deep and profound to say right now, particularly as it's Saturday morning and I'm at my desk, while my darling granddaughter bounces up and down on the daybed in my study with her new doll (a so-called "Groovy Doll" with pink streaks in her hair and matching sleeping bag!) one episode in particular stands out in my mind so far.

For those of you who have never seen SFU, it follows the relationships between members of a family whose patriarch has just died, and who are getting on with the business of trying not to screw up their lives while running a funeral parlor. Each episode begins with the death of an anonymous person, whose loved ones end up at the funeral parlor. One particular episode begins with the death of a baby. The normally un-flusterable embalmer at the funeral parlor, a handsome young man called Frederico, finds himself frozen and unable to embalm the baby (his own wife is pregnant with their second child). As the plot unravels, one of the protagonists makes the point that we have words to describe a woman who has lost her husband (widow), a word to describe a husband who has lost his wife (widower) and a word to describe a child whose parents have died (orphan) but there is no word to describe a parent who has lost a child. This event is quite literally unspeakable, with no words to describe the trauma of the loss of a child's life. As somebody who loves to read, who relishes words and how they roll off your tongue, the idea that a human event, a human experience, cannot even be described froze me. But it also helps me to understand why people grieving the loss of children have such a difficult time finding places to grieve thoroughly. As a culture, we cannot even come up with words for them to use as descriptors. Even listening to people's grief is unspeakable to us in Western cultures. I wonder if other cultures have words to describe the state of having lost a child. Anbody know?