(Spoilers for the concept of the last few minutes of Six Feet Under. Click here for content notes/ trigger warnings.)
Oh, make sense of me, night/ I can see so much from this cold height/ The moon said, oh darkness/ My work is done/ I’ve poured this bottle/ Of light from the sun/ But their anger keeps on rising/ And they don't understand/ I’ve shown them all that I can/ That the world is at hand.
***
The first time I used a men’s bathroom was in a mission church.
If I were cooler, this would be a story about being brave, about jumping off the deep end because it was finally time. What actually happened is that I was in LA and I don’t know how to parallel park and I had somehow managed to slide into a spot and didn’t think I was going to be able to do it again and the church was the only thing in walking distance. I don’t speak Korean and no one there spoke English, but eventually we worked it out, and someone led me down a skinny corridor to the basement. He dropped me off in front of the men’s room. He did not seem confused.
I was. I’d never been directed to a men’s room before. This was June, 2015. A month before, I’d graduated college; three months before that, I’d started HRT. Before graduating, I’d passed twice. Once, someone had called me “sir” while asking for money on the street, and once, a dude brought up my ambiguous gender whilst screaming at me about dead babies as I canvassed for Planned Parenthood in Harvard Square. (I was thrilled; the cis woman I was training quit on the spot.) But after graduation, I drove west alone, and things started shifting very quickly. I’d double over in my car and shimmy out of my binder in rest stop parking lots, but middle aged women still informed me that at first they weren’t sure, dear, if I was in the right place, but of course I was, and what a silly misunderstanding. Men started calling me buddy and slapping me on the back. It was unpredictable, and thrilling.
For myriad reasons, that day was the only day I’ve ever been happy to be in a men’s bathroom. But I was so fucking happy. I bounced out the door, flying on a brand new feeling, and ran to the reason I’d parked there in the first place. The Moncado Mansion. The place where they shot the exteriors for Fisher & Sons Funeral Home in Six Feet Under. I had come to pay my respects. I’d first watched Six Feet Under two years before because I had a crush on a film student. The show was different than anything I’d ever experienced. I knew the Fisher family. They were people to me, not characters. I felt what they felt. I sometimes only knew what I felt because I knew what they felt.
It wasn’t my first time at the mansion. A year before that, I had done a semester in LA instead of studying abroad. I was wickedly depressed, but by that time the film student and I were dating, and when she visited she took me to stand in front of it together, and it made me feel hopeful. I found pictures of us there the other day, taken just over seven years ago. In them, we are wearing denim jackets and our eyes are closed. We are kissing.
I decided to start T in December of 2014. I do not feel, as some trans people do, that this was inevitable, though it had been on my mind for quite some time. I was rewatching the last five episodes of Six Feet Under— maybe for the third time? maybe the fourth?— and one of the final lines struck through me. “You wanna know a secret? I spent my whole life being scared. Scared of not being ready, of not being right, of not being who I should be. And where did it get me?” I sobbed. Maybe it was true for the first time then, or maybe it had been true forever and I was just then understanding, but I finally had clarity. I needed to start testosterone, and also, I was going to.
That’s the story I tell. It’s true, too. But it’s incomplete. I wasn’t just rewatching the end of Six Feet Under. I was rewatching it with the ex who showed it to me. The one with the denim jacket. The abusive one who would cry when I would bring up the idea of T because she said she was afraid she wouldn’t be attracted to me anymore. The one who, I heard last year, transitioned herself. We were holding each other while we watched, and we were weeping. We knew it was our last week together— she was moving west and I was staying east and we had decided we weren’t going to do distance again— and I believe that she was crying because we were about to break up. I believe that she believed that I was crying because we were about to break up, too. But really, I was crying because it was the first time in I don’t know how long where I felt like I had agency over my own body. She was touching me, but she wouldn’t be for long. And once she stopped, no one would touch me like she had ever again. My body was going to be mine.
***
A few weeks before the church bathroom, I crashed on my cousin’s couch in Washington, DC. My cousin had graduated a year before me, and she had health insurance and co-workers and a room in an apartment complex right by the National Cathedral. I thought she was so fucking cool. By chance, I was there on a Sunday, and I decided that I would go to church. I had never done that before. I come from an interfaith family, by which I mean my dad had a bad time at Catholic school and my mom was too afraid of singing in front of people to have a bat mitzvah. We celebrated Christmas and Chanukah and quit by Passover and Easter. I had only ever been in churches or synagogues for concerts and funerals. But I like old buildings, and Christian hegemony meant that I knew the shape of the rituals enough to feel like I could just walk in, and I had just started passing and the world was my oyster and why the hell not?
I don’t remember when I started weeping, only that I did. I did not start believing, but all of a sudden there was this possibility that didn’t exist before, this knowledge that there maybe could be something… else, more, different, anything. It was completely overwhelming. Up until that very moment I knew that there was no G-d, and then all of a sudden I didn’t know anything. I felt my skin and ribs and guts crack open, tender and raw and exposed.
When I finally did start believing, it wasn’t in G-d. The next summer, I went on another road trip. I had gotten a grant to conduct oral histories about hope with trans elders in rural areas, and my job decided to let me work remote for ten weeks. I spent the months leading up to it vibrating with excitement. Sixty two strangers were going to talk to me, to let me into their lives and their worlds and their selves. I was going to have the privilege of being alone on the road with my windows down and my music up and their stories echoing in my ears.
A few months before I left, the final book in Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle series came out. I had gotten the first book the week after I had top surgery, and proceeded to read them all in an obsessive frenzy. They were full of magic: psychics and demons, yes, but also the Blue Ridge Mountains and immorally fast cars and unbreakable friendships. The final book was exactly what I needed it to be, and I luxuriated in it. So did my sister. We spent I don’t know how long doing laps around the park and just talking about it. (We also, separately, without intention, got the same haircuts as our respective favorite characters, and neither has let the other live it down.) There was a lot of tarot in the books, and they were learning how to read, so I asked them to explain it all. We wound up back at their place, curled up on their bed, Stiefvater’s Raven’s Prophecy tarot deck spread out face up all around us.
They talked about suits and dyads and archetypes and eventually they told me to pick a few cards, ones that really spoke to me, and they would tell me what they meant. I remember being quiet, and slow, picking cards up and putting them down, holding them up to the window and staring at them hard and waiting to be moved. Eventually, I chose. One of the cards I gave them had the silhouette of a child, dark on a bruise purple background, ponytail stubby and arms spread wide, a tiny ball of light above their head. The other showed an empty highway, flat yellow fields on either side and mountains in the distance and no end in sight.
I do not want to regret the interview trip, and most of the time, I succeed. But I went on it because I didn’t have trans community and I needed to be told that I was going to be okay, and that’s not what happened. When I got back, I felt wild-eyed and broken. New York was exactly how I’d left it. I started having flashbacks and picked up a nasty cough that only went away a few months ago. My sister took me to a witch store on the Lower East Side and bought me my first deck, the borderless version of Deviant Moon. I opened it in the early morning on the floor of a cabin that some friends of friends had rented for a birthday. It was snowing. I spread all 78 cards out in neat rows, ran my fingers over them and stared. I decided that I believed in magic.
***
The card with the ponytail kid was The Fool; the card with the highway was The World. I had chosen the first and last cards in the Major Arcana, the point where beginnings and endings meet. My sister taught me that The Fool sees a water slide, shimmies up the ladder, and slides down immediately. She’s so excited about going down the slide that she doesn’t stop to think about anything else. Are they wearing a bathing suit? Is the slide broken? Is there water in the pool at the bottom? The Fool then goes through the journey of the entire Major Arcana and ends, finally, in front of the same slide. When he climbs up the ladder this time, he stops and looks around. He can see all of the places that the slide is broken, the curves where the water is too hot and the straightaways where it’s too cold, the places where the turns will make their stomach drop. Xe stays there for a good, long time.
A thing I discovered after my first suicidal episode is that being alive is a choice. It’s one of the starker splits in my life, way bigger than the line between abled and disabled and the line between trans and not. Before, being alive was passive, something that happened to me; now, it’s a decision that I make every second of every day. A vast majority of the time, it’s an easy decision, but I’m always aware that there are alternatives.
The Fool is, too. Or, she is by the time she gets to The World. It’s part of him growing up. But the growth doesn’t end with awareness. I’m all for ambiguous endings, but the Major Arcana doesn’t have one. Being at the top of the water slide is only part of The World. Because after the looking around, the contemplating, the taking it all in, The Fool makes a decision about going down the slide, and he acts on it.
***
The finale of Six Feet Under is widely considered to be one of the best finales of all time. The whole thing is extraordinary, but when people talk about it, they’re almost always talking about the last six minutes. Up until then, every episode had begun with a death of the week. The dead person would become a foil for the Fisher family. They’d turn into meaner, braver versions of the Fishers’ egos and give them excuses to fight themselves. But first, we’d see the death itself. Some of them were quiet, and some were goofy, and some were devastating. After each death, the screen faded to white, and the dead person’s formal name would be memorialized in big black letters, along with their birth and death year.
We spend the finale saying goodbye alongside Claire, the youngest and most hopeful Fisher, who’s moving from LA to New York. Her last goodbyes are with her family. It’s early in the morning. I don’t know if it’s the cinematography or if it’s all the times I’ve driven away from people I love before their coffee brewed, but I can feel the dew, feel the way that daylight shimmers around a car when it’s not too hot yet but it’s going to be, feel the style of driving t-shirt that she’s wearing, soft and not too heavy. She takes a picture. Her lips don’t tremble so much as they shake. She slides a CD into the player. She gets on the highway.
The flashforwards are warm, fuzzy, bright. They’re interspersed with Claire driving. Birthday parties and weddings, picnics and aged up makeup. Then, for the first time, a hospital. Ruth, the Fisher matriarch, surrounded by her family. Dying. When her eyes close, we stay with Claire and the rest of the family for long, long seconds, grief fresh and clear and present. The screen fades to white. Ruth will die in 2025. The music does not stop; the flashforwards continue. I sometimes think about what it must have felt like to watch live, or to watch without knowing the end first. I imagine the moment of realizing that you are about to see every single member of the Fisher family die. I remember the title of the episode: “Everyone’s Waiting.”
***
I watched the end of “Everyone’s Waiting” for the first time in five years the other day. I had prepared for it to be triggering, but instead I just felt sad, and proud. I still know it by heart, but I was surprised at how much felt novel. David Fisher was the sort of gay man that I wanted to be, that I almost was, and I admired and pitied and understood him. I had not remembered, until I watched him memorialized, that his middle name was James. I did not name myself after him knowingly, but I did name myself after him. Sia’s “Breathe Me” is such a widely acclaimed scoring choice that last time I watched, it didn’t occur to me that I was allowed to have a different opinion. This time, I was unimpressed. “Breathe Me” is a fine choice, but I think they could have done better.
But the biggest thing was the final shot. Claire lives until she’s 102, and her death is the last thing we see in the flashforward. When we return to the present, she’s still driving east. Driving away from us. The camera pulls back, and she’s alone on the highway. It pulls up, and the car is gone. Orange dust spreads out. Mountains shimmer ahead.
It’s the same image as The World in the Raven’s Prophecy deck.
Time, space, and imagination collapsed. I was everywhere I’d ever watched the finale, every place I’ve ever done my shot, every mile I’ve ever driven. My tarot decks were papering the walls of the National Cathedral; the characters in the Raven Cycle were introducing themselves to the characters in Six Feet Under. I went for a walk. I wound up alone in front of a church. I took my mask off and threw my head back and I breathed, deep.
What makes The World what it is is that The Fool always chooses to go down the water slide. Every single time. He sees the pain, and she picks it. They see the joy, and they pick that, too. At the bottom of the slide is the end of the Major Arcana. But, like every journey in tarot, the Major Arcana loops back on itself. Embodying The World is a promise that you also embody The Fool— innocent, energetic, full of unexamined desire. Weariness and self-awareness mingle with faith and want. And at the heart of all of it, choice. No one ever has or will make The Fool go down the water slide. No one can. But here they are.
The Fool takes one last look, and they sit down, and they slide out of sight.
The song at the top is called “Calling The Moon.” It’s originally by Dar Williams, and the link is to a Richard Shindell cover. This is my playlist for The World. You can reach me for private or group readings, tarot tutoring, or just to say hey at jamiebeckenstein.com. You can tip me at @james0ctober on Venmo and Cash App and jamiebeckenstein at gmail dot com on PayPal. I’ll write y’all a big thank you and goodbye post next week or the one after. In the meantime, for the last time: stay safe, watch TV. <3