Five Years After Six Feet Under

I recently pulled my copy of Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking off of my living room bookshelf and reread sections that I had marked off when I first read it two years ago.  Didion’s book about the death of her husband is a beautiful meditation on loss, grief, faith, and enduring.  I started thinking about the year the book was published—2006—and realized that death was a prominent theme in American culture at mid-decade.  That same year saw the publication of Philip Roth’s novel Everyman, a stark reflection on aging and the human body’s inevitable deterioration that begins with the protagonist’s funeral on page one.  The HBO television show Six Feet Under, a drama about a family that owns a funeral home, ended in 2005 after five seasons.  Also in 2005 the indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie released its album Plans, which featured several musical ruminations on aging and death (most notably “What Sarah Said,” with its haunting closing refrain, “Love is watching someone die.  Who’s gonna watch you die?  Who’s gonna watch you die?”).  I can’t help but try to connect dots everywhere that I see them, and I started contemplating the meaning of this convergence of four serious cultural meditations about death, all appearing in the mid-2000s.     

My initial thoughts are that these serious treatments of aging, dying, and death emerged in the years after 9/11 and the start of the war in Iraq, and in the midst of Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and even the much publicized debate about Terri Schiavo.  For whatever reason, American culture seemed to take death seriously at mid-decade, with literature and popular culture encouraging audience reflection on life, mortality, and saying goodbye.

I can’t help but contrast these realistic, sober cultural offerings of five years ago to our current pop culture plate.  Much of our mass culture today is devoted not to the dead but to the undead—to zombies and vampires and people who never seem to die.  At decade’s end, we hungrily consume stories about lives (and loves) that transcend death, be it True Blood or Twilight or Zombieland.  Does this mean that 9/11 has receded too far from our memory?  That in the idealistic age of youthful Obama we are more concerned with possibility and new beginnings than with decline and the end (death panels notwithstanding)? 

Or maybe the rhythms of our culture simply reflect what we as human beings experience in our daily lives: there are moments when our contemplation of death is intense, other moments when we feel we will live forever, and many other moments when we simply don’t think about death at all.  I happen to be experiencing the first moment these past few months—thinking more about mortality as I enter mid-life—and perhaps that’s why I am even seeing these connections in the first place.