What time is it? Borrowed o’clock, I’m afraid

Opinion

There is this scene in the 2005 finale of the HBO show Six Feet Under that I think about often (spoiler: I am going to say something about it — if you haven’t watched the series and it’s on the to-watch list, maybe don’t read on).

Anyway, there’s this part in the series finale, right near the end, when one of the main characters — Claire Fisher (Lauren Ambrose) — is tearfully taking a photo of her family on the front stoop of their home/funeral parlour before leaving California to start a new chapter of her life in New York.

It is an ending, and the beginning of something else, outside of anything she knows.

The show takes place in 2005, nearly two decades ago. It ran for five comedically dark seasons, where the characters grew and developed almost masterfully into the space where writers cemented them in the epic final episode. Forgive me as I bumble on about this; I’m not much of a TV critic or arts writer, but this show had me feeling all sorts of ways and it left an impression.

Anyway, in that particular scene, Claire snaps the photo of her family using her professional-grade camera (iPhones weren’t even a thing back then) while the ghost of her recently deceased older brother Nate (Peter Krause) stands behind her — unbeknownst to her — saying, “You can’t take a picture of this, it’s already gone.”

This was so profound to me.

The context of this probably has so many different meanings to people who have watched the series, and translated it into their own experiences. There are scores of online clips and Reddit posts from people who have also been moved by this thought and have described their own interpretations of it.

“I mean, we have to leave everything we love because that’s just the nature of reality,” show creator Alan Ball said in a 2021 interview. “That line… is sort of a paraphrasing of a tenet of some kind of Buddhism that I was reading in one of my books about Buddhism, about how you can’t hold onto things because you never really had them to begin with, which is esoteric and weird…. I mean, it’s true. We lose everything we love, including ourselves.”

I think of this often. Probably because I usually have my own iPhone camera jammed into moments that I am desperate to keep. And while I love old photographs, and will always track our lives with them, I usually forget to be there, present in that little piece of time, because I am too busy trying to capture it.

Note to self: pay more attention to the time you’re in and less attention trying to capture it.

Of course, that’s just my own personal takeaway, and not some in-depth analysis of what the scene and those words mean. It doesn’t completely align with Ball’s interpretation, but the concept has burrowed its way into my mind and made me aware of how important and fleeting the gift of time is.

On one of the Reddit forums about that sentiment, a person wrote, “It took me a few seconds to fully process that line, but it fell deeper and deeper like a rock into a bottomless lake, and I’ll never forget it. Time and life take away everything, no matter how fast we hold.”

It’s an interesting way to think about time, and how it’s only ever borrowed.

shelley.cook@Freepress.mb.ca

Twitter @ShelleyACook