Peter Krause, who plays Nate Fisher, the eldest son of the family around which the series revolves, hardly minds. Shooting the series right inside the funeral home his family in the series owns for the past five seasons is a reality check he won’t forget.
He realized more than ever how death strikes when you least expect it. And how therefore, we should seize the moment every single day. For Krause, it meant scaling a 14,000-foot mountain California, going surfing and taking on a lifetime job he now enjoys to the hilt: fatherhood.
The Peter Pan in him – similar to the character he plays in the Emmy-nominated series – is still around. But it has benefited from a greater sense of purpose.
Far from desensitizing him about death, Six Feet Under (Tuesday nights at 11) made him more acutely aware of the inevitable. So that when it comes, he knows how to deal with it and help others do so, too. Peter showed this when he sympathized with a friend who lost his younger brother. He – and the others in the cast – can even joke about it in-between takes.
"Our conversations on the set centered around our thinking that are bodies are just ‘soul suits.’ Our soul takes this journey and our body and so we wear soul suits," says Peter.
And since the soul travels through lifetimes, can reincarnation be far behind? Peter is not closing his door on the idea.
The cast it seems, is not closing its door on this centuries-old belief. On the set, Peter says their catchphrase is "one world at time," taken from widely-read American author Henry David Thoreau.
Now that Nate has met his death in the most recent episode, this belief surfaces again. The family that gathers around him, and whose lives will never be the same again, must face questions about rebirth and moving on all at the same time.
It may be tough, and the theme of death itself as dark as can be. But in daring to look at it straight in the eye per episode, Six Feet Under makes us realize that it may not be as bad as it seems. And that death – like reincarnation – can signal the start of something new, even better.
In this sense that Six Feet Under, for all its shocking scenes of death in its various forms (e.g. through a freak accident or a moment of lunacy), is also a story of hope and salvation.
And it’s but fitting that the series takes its final bow on Tuesday, Dec. 19, just when everybody is getting ready for another season of hope and redemption – not just in the here and now, but more importantly, in the world of foreverafter.