Why Did Nate Leave Six Feet Under?

Nate Fisher's departure from Six Feet Under was one of the most heart-wrenching moments ever seen on TV. After several seasons of his true self being slowly revealed, Nate’s departure felt like the culmination of his story, the end of a restless soul. The brain hemorrhage that ultimately killed him was depicted in a very raw and very real way. It was sudden, it was messy, and it was in no way glamorous or dramatic. The way in which Nate’s death affected his family was very real as well. Each of them dealt with their grief in their own unique way. The way in which Ruth dealt with her loss was very different from that of her sister Claire, and again from David. But in the end, Nate’s death was very real, and it affected each of them in very real ways.

It was so interesting to see how each of the family members reacted to Nate’s passing – from Ruth’s quiet despair, David’s anger, and Claire’s sense of numbness. But in the end it was how Nate’s passing affected each of them individually that was so real. How grief can split people apart and affect them in so many different ways. The funeral for Nate was so amazing as well. How they portrayed his death after that was also incredible. How after someone’s passing you are left with so many unanswered questions and they just linger in your head. The way they weaved Nate’s ghostly figure throughout the rest of the episodes was pure genius. It made me realize how we are left with so many unfinished relationships after someone has passed and we are left to deal with them in our own way.

Nate was always a character searching for something, like the rest of us, just more self-consciously than most. His leave from the show was always inevitable. He left in the midst of a fight with Brenda, no resolution, no closure, just the way he lived his life. The character was an existential crisis walking around, and the show’s geniality in killing him off was to underscore the show’s core tenet: death is unconcerned with the rest of our lives. His death exposed all sorts of things about the other characters, of course: Brenda’s guilt, David’s repression, even Rico’s selfishness. And it was all revealed in a wonderfully (?) griefless scene, even to Claire who burst into tears of anger at the mourners while her mother tried to console them, and Lee testified to Nate’s character in a very unflattering but sadly true light.

A Magnificent Departure: The World of ‘Six Feet Under’ lost a unique voice with the passing of Nate Weiss. In so many ways Nate’s departure became the ULTIMATE expression of who he was as a very complicated man – a true Visionary or even a Driftist. His death became another journey into the ‘grief’ that his absence caused – be it quietly despairing with Ruth, numbingly unaware with Claire, or even a rather stoic ‘practical’ approach to grieving with Keith. I am especially still so affected by one particular scene where he is finally given a burial by his family by scattering his ashes to the wind – a scene of utter silence and no music. It’s stayed with me longer than many other ‘dramatic’ death scenes on TV.

Nate’s death in 'Six Feet Under' was more than a shock event. The event served the core of the narrative of how families break apart and reassemble in the face of loss. Nate Fish spent many seasons struggling with the legacy of his father and in the end he leaves behind his own daughter. It was rather ironic and I found it rather sad. The show never sugarcoated the flaws of Nate. He was selfish and often acted on impulse. But he was human, lovable, annoying and real. His death forced the Fisher family to deal with their own mortality which is where the show truly excelled. Brenda was tormented by her ‘what ifs’ of how things could have been and David was impressed that Nate would still want to talk to him even in death. I imagined that conversation. It was so real and honest and therefore made for very real and honest TV. It made me cry, ugly cry, at a fictional funeral before any other TV show did.

Oh Nate! His departure from this earth affected me for days. Six Feet Under treats death with the minutest of details and at the same time it’s so very ordinary. The death of Nate wasn’t heroic or poetic in any way. It was totally random and really quite mundane. We saw him fighting with Brenda in the previous scene, and then…poof! He’s gone. No words of love to Brenda or anyone else. No final farewells. It was complete and utter chaos. The way death is treated in Six Feet Under is that it’s not part of some neat story line. It’s a rude awakening, disrupting the lives of the characters in the worst possible way. The whole show explored the searching for meaning of Nate, and in the end his death prompted the other characters to begin searching for meaning as well in their very messy lives. I still get shaken up by that final montage, when we see how Nate’s passing affected the lives of his friends and family. His absence became just another thread in the tapestry of their lives.