After spending the past six weeks buried under five seasons and 63 episodes of the astounding HBO series Six Feet Under, I'm greatly relieved to find myself not only still alive but maybe a bit wiser and even -- dare I say it? -- a stronger person for the experience.

Far be it from me to say anything this positive about a TV series -- I usually resist getting sucked into a long-term commitment to a single plot, set of characters and made-up world.

Give me the occasional rerun of Seinfeld or even The Andy Griffith Show and I'm usually happy.

But Six Feet Under is not only hugely entertaining -- causing me to hold my breath for inhumanly long stretches, with the occasional burst of laughter or tears in-between -- its relentless and unflinching reminder of my own mortality brought me out of my persistent state of denial and into a an even fuller, more vibrant relationship with my life. And I didn't have to personally lose a loved one to get here.

For those of you who either watched the series when it aired, or have already done your time with it on DVD, none of this is news.

But for those who haven't, Six Feet Under is the story of the 30-something Fisher boys, who run a funeral home in Los Angeles, plus their family members, friends, lovers and enemies.

It took me years to get up the nerve to try it -- the thought of watching undertakers at work and play made me want to walk, run or climb on the nearest space shuttle. Anything to escape the grimmest and least welcome of all human topics -- death.

And then one day in June my husband and I decided to overcome our reservations, a decision immediately followed by an obsessive lining up of the next discs on Netflix, waiting by the mailbox, clearing our calendar, popping big bowls of popcorn and settling in for round after round of drama, comedy, tragedy and, most importantly, redemption.

I can just imagine the writers meeting every week or even every day to come up with 63+ ways for their fellow Angelenos to die -- their meetings must have been full of the darkest jokes, the only way they could get through it all themselves.

Nearly every episode starts with an accidental, violent or natural death -- some bizarrely amusing -- which produces a corpse the Fishers must then embalm, reconstruct and make up in time for an open-casket viewing in their parlour, which is on the ground floor of their home. The Fishers also spend much of their time comforting the deceaseds' relatives, not all of whom are bereaved.

Nearly every aspect of modern life makes its way into the both lofty and more prosaic story lines -- gay relationships and marriage, drug use, adultery, betrayal (big theme), teenage angst, promiscuity, adoption, surrogacy, mental illness, religion and spirituality, racism, feminism, bad parenting, narcissism, random violence, the contemporary art scene (superb and often hysterical insight into that world), emotional and sexual confusion, funeral styles (including green), middle-aged angst, and so much more.

If you're exhausted just looking at that list, you're not alone. By the time you reach the closing credits, you will feel like you have seen it all. And I won't lie -- if you haven't guessed already, watching the series will take you through the ringer. It can be grueling, made even more so with the in-your-face graphicness of it all.

It's especially grueling when you're watching several hours of it night after night. It was only after the final episode that I could relax again and finally get a decent night's sleep.

The producers and writers believe they raised the bar on television series with this one. It's now been four years since that final episode was first broadcast -- and many other well-made series have come and gone since -- but I'd have to argue that after Six Feet Under, I don't need to see many or even any more.

We'll all be six feet under someday, or tucked away in an urn or sprinkled over a favorite landscape -- some of us sooner, some later -- and we have no choice but to watch our family and friends someday breathe their last.

But while we're waiting for the inevitable, Six Feet Under can provide a powerful, virtual guide to experiencing it more fully and wisely when it does knock on our door.

The ultimate message is that reminder we so often feel after a death in our own family or community-- the importance of living our own life to the fullest, moment by moment, with great joy, gratitude and thanks.