I have been in the same room with a dead person only once. This is when my fascination with death and dying began.
I was 23 and working as a reporter in a small town in Iowa. For a month, I had spent a couple mornings each week with a chaplain at a Christian long-term care facility.
One day, the pastor I had been shadowing warned me that one of his residents, Edgar, was in a coma and imminently close to death.
Two hours after I arrived, we returned to Edgar’s room. Nursing staff had turned off his oxygen just minutes before. He was gone.
And yet there he was, lying on a hospital bed in front of me. I couldn’t believe I was so close to a dead body that just minutes before was alive, breathing — the husband of a woman not yet a widow, a man not yet underground.
When HBO’s “Six Feet Under” became a hit in 2001, three years before I wrote the story about Pastor Keith and Edgar, I didn’t have premium cable, and my strange curiosity with death had yet to develop.
But a year ago, my roommate brought home the “Six Feet Under” season one DVD. I was hooked.
The show is about the Fishers — siblings Nate, David and Claire, and mother Ruth — a non-Jewish family that runs Fisher and Sons Funeral Home.
Each episode begins with a brief (often gruesome) scene of a random person (or persons) dying — from a gunshot, a heart attack, a poorly measured dive into a pool.
The person’s family always goes to Fisher and Sons Funeral Home. The episode that follows is about how the Fishers work through that death, by helping the family grieve and by preparing the body for an open casket, but more than that, it’s about the Fisher’s dysfunctional family dynamic and their individual loves and losses.
When I found out that Jhos Singer would be teaching a class at Congrega-tion Netivot Shalom in Berkeley called “The Torah of ‘Six Feet Under,’ ” I knew I had to go.
Singer loved every episode in all five seasons. When it ended in 2005, he realized that many of the themes in the show had direct relationships to Jewish law and wisdom. So he developed a curriculum around the 13 episodes in season one.
“To me, the show is a 63-episode drash [an oral commentary on a Torah portion],” said Singer, who serves as a maggid (Jewish spiritual leader) at the independent Coastside Jewish Community in El Granada.
The 10-week series at Netivot Shalom started March 1 and runs through May 10. Each class meets from 4 to 6 p.m. and costs $10.
Singer begins by screening a full episode, which serves as a contemporary lens through which to consider traditional Jewish approaches to death, burial and mourning.
When I attended March 8, we watched an episode in which the person who dies in the opening scene is accidentally killed by an industrial bread mixer.
The mortician at Fisher and Sons stitches Mr. Romano’s body back together — but can’t find his left foot. It seems that in transit from the morgue to the funeral home, his left foot disappeared.
“If Mr. Romano were Jewish,” Singer asked the class, “what would the rabbis say about his missing foot?”
Two rabbis who contributed to the Mishnah actually discussed such a scenario. (I never cease to be amazed at the minutiae discussed and documented in the Talmud and Mishnah.)
If a person’s head is found separated from the torso, the parts need to be reunited before burial, but how? The rabbis disagreed. One believed the head should be taken to the torso, and another believed the torso should be taken to the head.
It seems like such a tiny detail, considering that the grief following a death hits the living with such massive force.
Alan Ball, the creator of “Six Feet Under,” said in a behind-the-scenes book that “death is life; an epic, primal force that terrifies and fascinates us, gives our experiences meaning, and ultimately consumes us.”
When you think about death in those terms, no detail surrounding it is too small to consider.
And it’s just as fascinating.
Stacey Palevsky lives in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].
(Read more of Stacey’s thoughts on the “Six Feet Under” class in her blog entry, “Claire Fisher takes a foot … and the Torah has a comment.”)