8:42am July 31, 2015

“If you didn’t know him when he was alive, you never will.”

—

Brenda, Six Feet Under, Season One Episode Six (s01e06) “The Room”

This quote is so false it’s hard to believe. I’ve started watching Six Feet Under recently because I’ve had so many people recommend it to me. So far it hasn’t lived up to the hype, but it’s far from boring either – well it started out kind of boring but it’s getting a little better now. I’m still giving it a chance. The story is about a family that runs a funeral parlor, and their father dies. One of their girlfriends says the above at one point, about their father.

But this quote, is definitely false. While I can’t say I didn’t know my dad before he died, I can say there are entire sides to him I didn’t know about, or didn’t know very well. And those sides? I’m getting to know better and better the longer he’s been dead. Because the effect he had on the world didn’t go away when he died, and you can read the effect someone had on the world, you can learn new things about a person, there’s all kinds of things you can pick up on after someone dies that you didn’t know before they died. You don’t have to interact with someone directly as a living human being in order to get to know them better. Sometimes their presence as a living human being even gets in the way of you knowing certain things that only become obvious after they die.

So if you lose a loved one without getting to know them first, or without knowing them as much as you’d like, that’s always going to suck, and there will always be questions you won’t be able to ask them anymore. But there will also always be more things you can find out about them, even if they’re not around to talk to. And sometimes that can even take the form of getting to know someone for the first time after they’re dead.