What can you say about a TV show that died? That it departed on its own terms, in its own time, surrounded by those that loved it? That it hurt just the same?

Last Sunday, "Six Feet Under" shuffled off its mortal coil and entered the pantheon of late, great television series. And I was crushed, like whoa. I felt as if I’d lost an old friend — and as someone who came of age during the first AIDS generation, I’ve lost a lot of those. "Six Feet Under" was luckier than many of my real-life compadres; it died a beautiful death, filled with resolution and poetry and transcendence. Which was fitting for a show whose raison d’etre was coming to terms with our ephemeral existence.

It was a grand finale, and we all knew it was coming. So why did it affect us so profoundly? I use a collective noun here because I know I’m not the only one who’s spent the past week processing the Fisher Gotterdammerung. Viewers posting in online TV forums report weeping, dreaming about the series’ characters and questioning their own mortality. Some are devoting themselves to picking over the episode’s True Meaning, while others are content to share memories.

In short, fans of the show are going through the classic stages of grief, and sharing the love. Salon.com TV critic Heather Havrilesky summed it up nicely when she wrote, "Saying goodbye to ’Six Feet Under’ was, unexpectedly, an emotionally wrenching experience, more memorable and invigorating and heartbreaking than I could ever have imagined it would be. It’s just a TV show, after all."

Yeah, it was just a TV show. So was "Oz," and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and other series that I’ve adored and lost and mourned. I have agonized over my favorite characters’ demises with a shameless lack of stoicism. In fact, I’m insufferable in my grief. When Chris Keller executed his fatal swan dive in "Oz" (damn you, Tom Fontana), I wailed; when the town of Sunnydale slid into the hellmouth on "Buffy" (damn you, Joss Whedon), my fellow fans and I rent our hair and blubbered.

Dude. Why do our favorite TV characters get under our skin so? Is it because they visit our homes on a regular basis — they’re more reliable than our real friends, in that way — and invite us to share the intimate details of their lives? Is it because we see reflected, in those intimate details, our own life stories? Do we live through these people?

Oh, hell. Do we love these people?

I think we do. I know I do. At least I know that I have cared about fictional characters with a fervor that’s embarrassing. In the offscreen world, I’m socially cautious; inside fiction, I’m wanton in my attachments. And every time a series ends, I’m allowed to confront things I too often sidestep, like the inevitability of loss, without the ramifications that accompany it in the real world. Losing a beloved fictional character is a manageable thing, and so I let myself mourn, and that mourning opens a valve to other, more profound forms of grief.

TV is like therapy, man: It walks us through a virtual re-enactment of what’s really out there and gives us a safe haven in this unsafe world where we can experience the unthinkable. The other day a friend told me that the "Six Feet Under" finale helped him mourn, for the first time, the loss of his parents. He couldn’t cry at their funerals, but he cried as Claire Fisher said her farewells and drove into the future — a future that included a montage of her family’s deaths. Her fictional journey took him to places he hadn’t dared go on his own.

I know this isn’t a phenomenon reserved for the emotionally charged — some might say melodramatic — world of "Six Feet Under." If I’d been paying attention, I’d probably have noticed people going through stages of grief after the ends of "Cheers" ("Sorry, we’re closed"), "MASH" (with "goodbye" written in stones), "Seinfeld" (they sent ’em all to Oz, man!), "Xena: Warrior Princess" (poor Gabrielle) and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (actually, I do vaguely remember the trauma of watching Mary Richards turn out the newsroom lights).

See, those were others’ losses. "Six Feet Under" was mine. So goodnight, Ruth, Claire, Nate, David, Keith, Brenda, Rico and Fisher fans everywhere. I’ll see you all in syndicated heaven.

This has nothing to do with TV, but a lot to do with life, which is what I was trying to write about in the first place. Last week I had dinner with Ellen Baier, the 22-year-old production assistant/pit camera operator on James Taylor’s tour, and she delivered a line worth commemorating: "At James Taylor concerts," she told me, "we don’t worry about people stage diving. They might break a hip." Oh, baby, the humanity. Aging is ignoble and death is inevitable. Let us rock while we can.