My friend, P, discovered Buffy when he DH gave her the series boxed set just before I moved up here. So I have been giddily rewatching *and* watching her see it all for the first time.

In email today, she just started S5 and my first thought, was ooooh, The Body is coming. Not soon really, but I know it is coming. From beneath you, it makes you sob like a baby.

One thing I've never seen portrayed in film or TV about death is the clarity that it provides. How your daily tasks and interactions tend to bob in your face like so many balloons, and death suddenly gives each one the proper weight. And now you can see the few balloons that matter - your family, your friends, your creative work - and the bullshit things sink and all their stresses recede. For a time.

Did your mom die before Emmett was born, Hec? I ask, because this is almost in direct opposition to my experience? Well, my day to day stuff was my family, so maybe that was the difference. And I guess stuff had its proper weight, but I was never free just to concentrate on dad dying, or on my mourning.

The kids still got sick. There was still a blizzard to deal with even though we had to get to the undertaker and the florist, and have the minister over. The kids' conjunctivitis got so bad it literally looked like snot on their eyes, but the doctor's office was closed, and he was pissy when I had him paged, because I had to have them on antibiotics, before we were around family for days. We still had to shovel. Ben had an event at school, and then his Pine Box Derby race caused us to postpone the wake and funeral by a day. We still had to get him to and from school. Scott had to take time off, so I could be at the hospital, and then so I could be with mum to make all the arrangements.

It was one of those reasons I appreciated the vampire showing up in the hospital morgue, in The Body. The shit doesn't stop, even though you feel like the world ought to stop. I'll stop now, before I go all Auden.

I think you are bnoth right, Cindy. The little stuff does go on, but you can SEE it's little, if you know what I mean. Somehting like not getting a parking place near the door was still annoying, but I knew it didn't deserve a second's thought because in the big picture it was meaningless.

In my experience regarding family funerals, people have been far more likely to hyper-obsess over minutia as a way to distract themselves from the big scary death issue. Like, my aunts having screaming freak-outs over who rides in which car. Or me channeling Martha Stewart and washing ALL the dishes/pots/pans after a wake luncheon for 50 relatives.

Or me channeling Martha Stewart and washing ALL the dishes/pots/pans after a wake luncheon for 50 relatives.

This was me the day after FiL's death. I was in the kitchen for hours, because that was something useful I could do.

That seemed like a time of great fogginess and not much clarity at all, to me.

I have rewatched The Body more than any eps except Once More with Feeling and Restless. It is my second favorite episode.

I really like emotionally wrenching things. I imagine it might be a lot harder if either of my parents had died, but it's pretty damn hard to watch anyway.

Did your mom die before Emmett was born, Hec? I ask, because this is almost in direct opposition to my experience? Well, my day to day stuff was my family, so maybe that was the difference. And I guess stuff had its proper weight, but I was never free just to concentrate on dad dying, or on my mourning.

My Mom died when I was just out of college, so that might've been a factor. Probably a luxury I had in my case. I certainly felt like I was able to process my Mom's death more cleanly(?) than my sister (who had kids) or my Dad. It was devastating, but I was able to work through it.

In my experience regarding family funerals, people have been far more likely to hyper-obsess over minutia as a way to distract themselves from the big scary death issue. Like, my aunts having screaming freak-outs over who rides in which car. Or me channeling Martha Stewart and washing ALL the dishes/pots/pans after a wake luncheon for 50 relatives.

That too. That's where the unexpected upsurges of emotion came out in weird, unsocialized ways.

I agree with Cindy about the dailiness not ever stopping, that you can't "stop all the clocks" because the cat still needs fed, the baby changed, people need to eat--and thank heaven for the convention of bringing food to the house of the bereaved, because all the visitors who come by have to eat something, even if the family can't force food down just yet.

But the one thing Joss got right was the extraordinary clarity of a single sense--something in your brain short-circuits and doesn't process normally. You hear children playing three houses over, or footsteps on the front sidewalk, and never notice the kettle boiling, or the water gushing from the faucet.

Or your vision sharpens, almost like pre-migraine, and every nick and cut in the tabletop suddenly is in sharp focus and has meaning, only you can't quite figure it out...

That odd isolation and enhancement of the senses was ably done, and very true, I thought.

Best of Buffy DVD Collection is coming out this fall. It is two disks and includes these episodes:

1. The Pack
2. Halloween
3. Passion
4. The Wish
5. Helpless
6. Fear Itself
7. Hush
8. Same Time Same Place

Not a bad collection -- although I don't know that I'd have had "Helpless", "Fear Itself" or "Same Time Same Place". I know I'd have OMWF, Pangs, FFL, possibly more Faith episodes. . .

Apparently, it's the same collection that was sold as a Best Buy Exclusive last year.

The first disc sounds good (assuming they break in that order) but of the second, Hush is the only one I'd want particularly to own.