Green funerals

Six Feet Under has got me thinking morbid thoughts this week - that's what the show does best I suppose. I'll try not to put too many spoilers in here for those who haven't seen the episodes - but geez, the last one kind of freaked me out.

I've always wondered why we go to such great lengths to dress up, show off, moon over and party with the dead. Wakes, one after the other. Clogging rooms with flowers until the smell of the air is so sweet that you almost feel sick. Dressing up the dead, streching their skin and weighing their skin with makeup so they can look presentable, yet nothing like they did when you knew them in life. Now I'm all for having funerals, people saying words, and mourning and saying good-bye. But it seems like most of it - like burying someone in a silk laced pillowed coffin, which goes inside some kind of worm proof box which then goes inside some over thing - seems a bit over the top.

Then I saw last Sunday's Six Feet Under. The Corpse of the Week (tm. Television without Pity) wanted a green funeral. An environmentally friendly one - no coffin, no family plot, no embalming, no makeup, no viewing, nothing. He wanted to be wrapped in a shroud and put in the ground on a hillside somewhere, back to nature. Sounds a little old fashioned, but all right. Now maybe it was just the way they did the episode - but geez, it was creepy. Drive out to the middle of nowhere in a nature preserve. A hole dog next to a tree. Pallbearers hauling the body out of the hearse in just a white shrould with carrying straps. Laying by the grave. A poem. Then lowering the heavy body in the shroud into the hole, and shoveling dirt over it themselves. No headstone. No marker. The cars leaving. The whole thing gave me the shivers - just being placed in the ground out in the middle of nowhere like that...and suddenly I felt like I had a bit of a better understanding of why so many people dress up death and make a parade out of it.

On that note, thanks Six Feet Under for making me think. Only two episodes left - I sure am going to miss this show.