A Real Undertaking

As Six Feet Under digs in for its second season, a Chicago writer recalls her own life as a funeral director’s daughter.

My father was an undertaker before undertaking was cool. He had hearses and wore dark suits just like the Fisher sons on HBO’s weekly drama Six Feet Under, which starts its second season this month. But it irks me to no end that I was born two decades too early to enjoy the sudden vogue of my father’s profession. Instead of my little Dodge, I could have driven a spacious hearse to high school (as daughter Claire Fisher does). Boys wouldn’t have dared break my heart, for fear of finding a body part in their locker (as an ex-beau of Claire’s did). And I wouldn’t have been scared of what my father did for a living.

As a little girl, though, I had no idea my father’s business was unusual. Technically, his job title was funeral director, not undertaker, and unlike the siblings in Six Feet Under, I did not grow up above a funeral home. But like any kid, I loved tagging along to my father’s office, where I gave myself a headache with the smelling salts and wandered the casket display room wishing I could nap inside one of the cushiony, satin-lined models.

It was a family business, founded by my great-grandfather, inherited by my grandfather. And though computer programming was my father’s first love, he joined the business, too, after getting his M.B.A. from Northwestern University in 1965.

He started at the bottom, no special treatment. So when calls came in at 3 a.m., my father quietly dressed and headed out. He rose through the ranks quickly and seemed content with his job. But there were days when someone too young or too brilliant had died and his anguish wafted over the dinner table as he moved the mashed potatoes around his plate and stabbed at his steak.

Continue reading her own words.