Last Sunday Six Feet Under made TV history, bowing out with the sort of bold, imaginative stroke that made it the hippest show on TV. Poetic justice was served to all concerned, in a manner that will make this finale rank with such justice-dealing endings as the burning sled in Citizen Kane and the legendary Seinfeld finale — a show famous for "being about nothing" — where the entire cast is jailed (and quite deservedly) for "doing nothing" (during a robbery.)

Six Feet Under was famous for being about death — which is to say it was really about life. Set in a funeral home, it had scenes where mourners would ask one of the two brother morticians, "Why do people have to die?" The most memorable answer — "To make life important" — was typical of the show’s diamond-sharp metaphysics. And so our five years with the Fisher family came to an end this weekend in the most satisfying way possible:

With the death of every principal character.

As Claire, the youngest of the Fishers, speeds off across the country and into her future (in a spanking new hybrid — thank you Green Peace, Hollywood Branch), we start flash-forwarding into suffused, dreamlike vignettes of the deaths — and the marriages (rocky intimate relationships was a major theme in the series) — that will overtake the Fisher family, ending finally with Claire’s own death at age 102, her eyes clouded with cataracts.

On her last day on earth, she will lie in a serene townhouse bedroom, whose burgundy walls are covered in the very photographs that she is now driving off to New York to build a career on. As the home-care nurse reads, Claire looks up at the ceiling with a smile that is as much rictus as beatific and then the cloudy eyes disappear in a suffusion of white — the show’s shorthand for death — and we switch back to what has always been SFU’s real concern, the living — a vibrant young Claire, eyes bright, barrelling down the highway of destiny.

The finale was the perfect cap for a show that right from its pilot episode — where the story was intercut with kooked-out “industry ads” for mortuary supplies — charmed us with its free-wheeling inventiveness. At first the show seemed to center on the gay brother who didn’t want to come out. It was a challenging premise.

How do you make a character believable — or admirable, or just smart — who is uncomfortable about coming out in a city as up-to-speed as Los Angeles and in a family as manifestly fucked-up as the Fishers? Even David’s boyfriend — a hot black cop — is out to his co-workers. And yet it worked. David was simply uptight about everything, as buttoned-up and starchy as his about-to-unravel mother.

It isn’t until David works on the gay-bashed corpse of a Mathew Stewart-like teenager that he gets his head around coming out, and does so from the pulpit of a church. All through that episode the battered figured of the boy kept appearing in David’s imagination. Only at the end, when David walks out of the church, arm in arm with his lover, does he sees the boy smile, the broken face finally whole and handsome.

It was this mix of fantasy and reality – of tear-jerky pathos and devastating one-liners — that made Six Feet Under so distinctive. Life, seen from the perspective of death opened up vistas that were often exhilarating. From this steep, chilly height, life seemed touchingly small, temporary, abrupt.

And very funny.

That the scriptwriters manage to maintain satisfying story arcs over the course of the show’s five seasons, while demonstrating that life itself displayed no such grand design — this was a master bit of sorcery . The storyteller’s art in full sail. And here was the trick: by showing how incidental life was, life revealed itself to be — like many small, fragile things — brilliantly precious.

A signature feature of the show was that the dead "spoke" to the Fishers. But these dead were never ghosts. Ghosts would have negated the finality of death, softened the show’s hardline. These dead were always the mental projections of the living – their longings, anxieties, often their severest critics. And always the message they carried was the same: Death is real; life is short — but life is right now! In this moment is all you will ever have of possibility. But in this moment you are colossal with life, tremendous with possibility.

And so Claire goes barrelling down the highway while the future unfolds around her. Sanguinely, series-creator Alan Ball — himself a gay man — sees a future where the gay brother David can marry his boyfriend, the humparoonie Keith, at least in California, with their two adopted sons standing in as best men. Next we see that Keith will die in a shoot-out (he, by that point, owns his own security company and is transferring bank money) and much later, David keels over at a picnic just as he imagines he sees the young-again Keith about to toss him a football.

One interesting detail that many viewers miss is the seating arrange- ment at Claire’s wedding (to the cutie-pie Republican lawyer, of all things!) To either side of the now jowly David (below) sit his adopted sons, one with a pregnant biracial wife and child, and the other — the younger, sweeter boy who once shyly confided that the only thing he didn’t like about sandboxes "was all the sand" — is clearly holding hands with his Asian boyfriend. A charming rainbow resolution.

Ruth, the Fisher matriarch — easily the character that went through the most radical personality overhaul — dies in a hospital surrounded by family, comforted only by the beckoning shade of — not her acerbic dead husband, who appears as always cigarette in hand, in clouds of smoke, like the devil, and whose frequent, sly asides to the living were always loaded with hilarious, if disturbing, metaphysical vibes — but her first son, the beloved, sexy Nate, the central focus, as it turned out, of most of the series, whose death a few episodes earlier came as a jolt to SFU’s loyal following and lit up the SFU Forum on the HBO website.

There is even one laugh-out-loud moment in the weepy (for this viewer) cavalcade of deaths. We see Brenda and her brother still thrashing out the issues of their emotionally incestuous childhood well into their 80’s. The brother is saying something about needing closure when Brenda hurls her head back in an extravagant slump, literally bored to death by the whole self-involved, self-
important, psychobabble bullshit.

The SFU Forum, meanwhile, was so bummed out by the multi-death finale that many writers confessed they were unable to go to work the next day. There was some controversy over whether the deaths were truly glimpses into the future or simply Claire’s imaginings as she drives off. The debate was settled finally when it was pointed out that all the deaths were listed on HBO’s official SFU Obituary page. Claire was not imagining them — though she may have been remembering them, as her deathbed scene, focusing so tightly on her occluded, inward-looking eyes, seems to suggest.

The on-site obits flesh out the future of the characters in greater detail, cracking many an in-joke for the true Six Feet Under devotee. Here we learn:

RUTH O’CONNER FISHER does, in fact, open "the Four Paws Pet Retreat in Topanga Canyon" — a subject of one of the finale’s gentler jokes. ("Do you believe it?" she asked her gal pals. "They actually have day-care centers for dogs!")

DAVID JAMES FISHER, upon retirement, goes on "to perform in dozens of local theater productions, including Weill and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, and as Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.”

BRENDA CHENOWITH — everybody’s favorite West Coast Uber-Hip Chick with a brain and a straight-talking mouth to match — gets her PhD in "Theories of Human Behavior," writes several scholarly books on the subject and ends up as the top expert in the country on "the role of the gifted child in family development" — which, of course, she herself was. ("As a child, Brenda was the subject of the book Charlotte, Light and Dark," the obit reminds us in a nod to the show’s first season.)

And finally, the last person to die on Six Feet Under, the end of a very long line:

CLAIRE SIMONE FISHER (1983 - 2085) "who worked as an advertising and fashion photographer and photojournalist for nearly fifty years" and ends up as a faculty member at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. "Claire often exhibited her work in New York and London art galleries and in a time when nearly everyone else in her field had turned to digital scanning and computer-driven imaging, she continued to use a silver-based photographic process."

In the last minutes of the finale, Claire, overcome with emotion, wants to take a picture of her family before she leaves for New York. As she focuses her camera, dead brother Nate whispers in her ear:

"You can’t take a picture of this — it’s already gone."

It was this insistently unsentimental view that life was final that made the show so ultimately spiritual, that lifted it out of the materialistic contemplation of future rewards in heaven, or, in fact, of any kind of "after" life, and put the spotlight squarely on what was human in the here and now.

Well done!