Ann Heche, Six Feet Under, And The Sandman

The gifted actress Anne Heche is dead. She died a week after suffering catastrophic injuries in a car crash. Today, Friday the 11th of August 2022,  Heche was declared brain dead. Californian law equivocates Brain death with Death.

Anne Heche was fifty-three years young when she died. It’s a struggle to make sense of her untimely passing. I find myself thinking of Princess Diana’s shocking death. Of the equally stunning manner of  Whitney Houston’s departure. Diana, Whitney, Anne! Each one of them was memorable, each of them left young children behind, and each one of them surely had so many more successes and triumphs to come. It’s hard to understand how their time could be taken away so drastically and unequivocally. There are those who believe in an omnipotent, all-powerful God who shapes reality, and that every single event that occurs in the universe occurs because he wills it to be so.

I am struggling to see the purpose in any pre-destined plan that results in the death of a human being in such an appalling manner. Anne Heche's passing does give me pause. I want to find a measure of meaning in this news. I want to make sense of it. To be at peace with it. And I’m sure the same is true of many who have heard of the passing of this wonderfully talented human being.

I find myself thinking of Alan Bell’s “Six Feet Under” a TV show set in a funeral home depicting the lives of the business owners the Fisher family. In the show’s rightly heralded finale "Everyone's Waiting” the series skips into the future and reveals the deaths of several major characters. As these characters pass away before us, and because of the emotional connection we have made with them over the years, their deaths are horrible to watch. There’s nothing we can do to save them. We can’t change their fate. And we realise that from the first moment we met them, all the way back to episode one, these deaths were waiting for them. Their passing is and has always been inevitable.

In the future when any of us take a moment to recall Anne Heche’s memorable appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show when she spoke bravely about not being afraid to love whom she loved., When we Google her and find photographic evidence of her evolution as a human being, wife, mother and activist; I wonder if it will ever be possible to consider Anne Heche's beginnings and journey without contemplating, even momentarily, her ending. The memories of Anne Heche, even now, so soon after her passing, are already linked together upon a fixed, undeviating path.

Alan Ball’s thoughtful philosophical exploration of the meaning of life and death within the drama of Six Feet Under helped me to accept that I will pass on, as every other single human being who has lived upon the earth, passed on before me. I’m grateful to Mr. Ball for the lesson. Fretting about death is not good for one’s health. Unfortunately, Death continues to worry billions of people. The fear of dying too soon, or too painfully, of losing a loved one in an accident, of not being there when a loved one passes away, of there being no afterlife beyond death, has consumed human beings ever since we came into being and continues to do our collective head in.

How could we have been brought into this big, beautiful world only for stupid stuff like sickness and stupid heart attacks and bloody idiotic accidents to take it all away from us? It’s not fair! Why doesn’t somebody make this crazy nonsense about dying just stop and go away? Let the birds and the bees and all those fishes beneath the sea die! We’re human. We’re unique! We have a soul! We deserve to live forever! Surely there's a magic pill, a magic prayer, or even a magical being out there who can spare us all - and especially me! - from Death!

When tragedies like the awful manner of Anne Heche’s passing occur, much as we did with Princess Diana’s passing, we fret and worry. Christ, if this could happen to her then no one is safe. I could be sitting at work, chatting away to mates, and a big, nasty plane might fly right into our offices. I might be watching a great movie on a plane and the pilot decides to fly into a mountain. Did you see that crazy video doing the social media rounds? Oh, it was terrible. You’ve never seen such a mess. This little lad was sitting on a beach, minding his own business, when this big wheel fell out of the sky and dropped on his head. It had fallen off from a passing aeroplane miles away. Can you believe it?

Death, especially when it is sudden and unexpected, is hard to rationalise. Okay, bad things happen, but why don’t bad things only happen to bad people who deserve it? You know, like drug dealers, baby snatchers, Tories, and Manchester City football fans.

Whenever I’m struggling to come to terms with the shittiest spanner in the works that ever existed (I’m talking about mortality) for comfort, I always re-read Neil Gaiman’s illustrated work “The Sandman”.  The Sandman opus reveals the saga of  Morpheus, The  Lord And Master Of Dream, who happens to reside within the subconscious of every living, sentient creature on earth. Within this long and multi-layered story, Gaiman makes it clear that there are several humans who roam the earth who, but for suffering a serious physical injury, are practically immortal. The lives of these human beings are held in the hands of the Fates in the form of a single thread; it is the Fates who end these immortal lives - as they end all lives - with a single snip of their mighty scissors.

During a story entitled “Brief Lives” Bernie Capax an immortal who has lived for over 15,000 years, while reminiscing about the smell of ancient beasts who roamed the earth during pre-historic times, is knocked to the ground and killed by a collapsing wall.  Bernie’s ending is completely arbitrary and, despite his long life, wholly unspectacular or meritorious. When Death, Morpheus’s older sister comes to collect him, Bernie desperately wonders if he did enough with his many of long life. Death replies, “You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”

I find these words immensely soothing. For a short period, these artfully crafted three sentences always help me to calm down and not feel quite so bad about my own, you know, inevitable departure. These words also help me to accept that stupid, merciless, unfair accidents do happen, often, more than we’d like to know.  Death came for my mother and my father, and when the mood took it Death came for the big-hearted, massively talented  Anne Heche.

Yes, that’s it…  Anne Heche had what we all have. A life. Her immense natural talent, captured on film across a variety of genres and roles, will ensure her reputation endures well into the future. This is something to be celebrated.

Note: A TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman can be found on Netflix. An audio interpretation of the same work can be found on Audible.com. “Six Feet Under” is available on Hulu.

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