Six Feet Under

I cannot say how often I would talk to dead people if I had never seen the show Six Feet Under. But I have seen the show and so the bell cannot be unrung.

Let me be clear: I did not see my first episode of Six Feet Under and immediately start talking to dead people that evening or the next day.

I began watching the show after my father implored me to. It was the summer of 2001, and I was on a visit home from Tucson, prior to the start of my senior year at the University of Arizona. My parents had watched the pilot episode together the week before and had loved it. It is about a family who runs a mortuary, Dad explained, and every episode starts with someone dying. I thought this sounded a bit morbid and sad, but I was persuaded by my father’s enthusiasm. He said it was some of the best television he had ever seen and I just HAD to watch the next one with them.

And so I did. And like many people in America during the early aughts, I fell in love with the Fischer family and all of their dysfunction. I watched every single episode of the show, even when it broke my heart or terrified me.

Throughout the series, there would be instances where deceased characters would appear and have short interactions with living characters. It was never portrayed as something indicating mental illness or default, but rather as a natural part of dealing with death.

When I first started watching Six Feet Under, I had only experienced the death of one close family member: my Grandpa Dan, who passed in the fall of 1998. Before the show would wrap up in 2005, I would experience the loss of four more people I loved, including my father. When I cried during the final episode of the series, I thought about how insanely unfair it was that Dad had loved this show so much and didn’t even get to live the short two more years he would have needed to see the end of it. What a bunch of bullshit.

But my foray into occasionally talking to dead folks did not occur until years after the show had been off the air. I was driving around Tucson in 2008. I was alone in my red Prius. I drove by the intersection of Oracle and Wetmore Road and began to vividly remember a time when my father and I had driven through that same intersection together some seven or eight years before.

“The Steve Miller Band always makes me think of Tucson,” Dad had said. Their song “The Joker” had just come on the radio in the car.

“Really? Hmm,” I had replied, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you play them before.” I tried to think if I had seen a Steve Miller Band album in the hundreds of CDs stacked up around the different stereos in my parents’ house. The only cover art I could remember was the blue horse on the band’s ubiquitous best of album, and I mentally flipped through CD jewel cases in my mind, unable to find its place in the Siegel music collection.

It was this unexceptional memory and unremarkable exchange with my father, combined with driving through that intersection at a time of day similar to when we had this chat (sixish in the evening, sun not exactly setting, but thinking about it), that brought an unexpected rush of feeling. Feeling like my dad could have been sitting in the back seat of the Prius right then.

“So you bought a Prius anyway,” I could hear him saying, looking around its beige interior and out the back seat window.

“Sorry Dad. I know you thought they were going to stop making them. But they’ve actually become quite popular.”

“Love you Chan.”

“Love you Dad.”

At the next stop light, I turned to look in the back seat. No one was there.

###

With the move to Denver, I now travel by plane for work almost every week. I have taken more plane flights in the last the few months than I have in the last decade of my life. This frequent flying has done nothing to dull the apprehension I have about flying. This preexisting dread combined with the typically turbulence-laden flight path into and out of the Denver International Airport has made for some exceptionally exciting time in the air during recent weeks.

When I was a kid, I would pick the best song off the best tape I had with me on the airplane and queue the song on my Walkman for take off. When the plane began to taxi down the runway, I would push play and look out the window as the plane left the ground. I was always excited, excited to be going somewhere, and I loved watching the landscape below grow smaller as the plane ascended skyward. When it was time to land, I would do the same thing: fast forward or rewind to the best part of whatever album I was listening to and then press play so I could have the optimal soundtrack blaring in my ears while I watched the landscape of my destination come into view.

Now I have entire curated playlists at my fingertips on my smart phone. In an effort to regain the serenity and excitement about flying I felt in my younger years, I have tried listening to my favorite upbeat tunes during takeoff and landing (Bruce Springsteen’s “Radio Nowhere”, Pink’s “Blow Me (One Last Kiss”)). I have tried listening to playlists of soothing music (Enya, Yanni). I have tried listening to whatever audio book I am working on, hoping some interesting idea will distract me from my fear. All of these approaches have been similarly ineffective, even when paired with meditative breathing, my mind conjuring tips on inhaling and exhaling from my most recent online yoga module as I try not to grip the arms on my seat too tightly.

“I don’t want to die,” is what I think. “I want to make it home. I am not ready to die.”

“No one on this plane wants to die,” I respond in my head back to myself, “especially the people working on the plane. They wouldn’t get on this plane and fly around on it all day if they didn’t think it was reasonably safe.”

“Shit happens,” I argue against myself, “And when you’re cruising at 30,000 feet, the margin for error is pretty slim.”

“Oh shut up,” I berate myself, “why can’t you just enjoy this like you did when you were a kid?”

“I don’t know.”

But part of me does know. Death surrounds me, takes up space in my every day thoughts and perceptions these days. I never thought about it when I was a kid. And so I think about death on the plane, as I think about it everywhere else.

Most of the time this results in my reverence and appreciation of the every day. It helps me endeavor to be thankful for each day I get to wake up and get out of bed. When I go for a run in the park, I am filled with gratitude that my legs work as well as they do, that I can breathe. I am delighted by coming home, walking in the door, kissing and hugging Basil, getting to pet our dogs and cats. Thank goodness we are all still here. Because we all could very well not be.

###

Basil and I went to see a psychic this week. I have never gone to see or otherwise talked to a psychic before. I am neither a fervent believer in nor an ardent disbeliever of those who claim to have psychic abilities. It seems possible. I am aware some people who claim to be psychics use cold reading techniques to manipulate people into thinking they know more than they actually do. I have enough faith in humanity that I think there are some psychics who truly believe in what they do. More importantly, I trust Basil’s ability to be able to recognize when someone is trying to pull a fast one.

Basil was motivated to go and see a psychic after the recent death of his son, Octavian. I wanted to go to support him. I also wanted to go to make sure this person wasn’t going to be shitty, in one form or another, to my beloved husband in his time of grief.

I hadn’t planned on talking about myself during the hour session. I wanted to make sure Basil got to focus on what was important to him during the reading. Regardless of my intentions, the psychic brings up Aunt Terry not too long into the session. She does a flawless impression of Aunt Terry’s Buffalo accent and comments on her proclivity to roll her eyes, both of which are so true to life Basil and I are taken aback. Basil purposefully withheld my name prior to the session and was careful to limit any opportunity the psychic may have had to find out critical information via some focused Google searches.

Talk turns to my father.

“He is showing me writing,” is one of the first things the psychic says. I nod my head. I think Basil is nodding his head too.

“You are a writer,” she states.

“Yes, he is,” Basil agrees. From the time Basil and I started dating, he has always said he thinks of me as a writer ahead of any of my other vocations and interests.

Later in the session, the psychic says, “You have to travel a lot.”

I nod.

A while after that, the psychic wants to reassure me my father is always keeping an eye on me, and comes to be with me when I am in need of reassurance.

“Like when you fly. He wants you to know you are going to be okay.”

###

This is, of course, the other method I have employed to try and calm myself when I am flying, which I omitted from the initial discussion above. Even though I have been talking to dead people for years now, I am still shy about bringing it up.

When I have failed to comfort myself with playlists, deep breathing, and audio books, I shut my eyes. And then I listen carefully for my father’s laugh. He was prone to chuckles and tee-hees as opposed to all out guffaws, so I have to listen attentively. Once I hear Dad laughing, I listen next for Aunt Terry. She is reading the alcoholic drink menu to my father, while mulling over her own beverage choice. Dad decides on a Dos Equis and Aunt Terry defaults to her go to: Southwest Airlines’ “house” white wine.

Important decisions made, I can feel Aunt Terry’s hand press on my shoulder, as she reaches to touch me from the row behind my seat.

“Don’t be afraid sweetheart. You’re going to be okay. Your father and I are here.”

I feel my father squeeze my other shoulder. “She’s right. We love you chan. Try to relax.”

My grip loosens a little on my arm rests as I mutter, “I love you guys.” I settle back more in my seat and strain to hear what I can of Dad’s and Aunt Terry’s banter back and forth, before they drift away again, their disappearance as miraculous as their turning up after take off.