Lynch & Sons is what we call them. And unlike David and his brother, Nate, we're not just "on" Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, for an hour. We're almost always "on." Whenever someone calls, we answer. Any day of the week and every imaginable intimacy has been interrupted by a death in the family -- someone else's family. But maybe that's because we are, in fact, in Michigan while the Fisher brothers are in, well, Hollywood.

Still, "Six Feet Under," the latest and happily unpredictable entry in the Taboo Deconstruction Sweeps, by which a death in the family follows "Sex and the City," is more than just another smart, hip, sure-fire hit show for the cable audience. Beyond the weekly belly laughs and heartbreaks, between which viewers are run up and down the emotional register and are thereby "entertained," there seems a deliberate effort to probe a deeper question: What should we do when someone dies?

The prevailing and long-standing cartoon, nearly four decades old, is Mitfordian: the undertaker as obsequious ghoul, a bumbling predator with an inordinate interest in dead human bodies and an overpriced box for every occasion. Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death," published in 1963 and again in 1998, made much of the math of caskets and oddments of the funeral biz, most of which she pulled from the pages of Mortuary Management -- a trade magazine still being read in the new HBO show. Of course, Mitford's own experiences of death -- her first husband, Esmond Romilly, died when his plane crashed into the North Sea in World War II, and her first son, Nicholas, was killed at age 10 in an accident in California -- were never mentioned in either the original or updated text. Indeed, Nicholas, who was delivering newspapers on a bike when a bus ran him down, is never even mentioned in the two volumes of Mitford's autobiography.

Decca, as she was known to friends, preferred the stiff upper lip, a good laugh to the good cry and the talk of money to the talk of mourning when it came to matters mortuary. The comfort in numbers is that they all add up. A death in the family seldom does.

Alan Ball, the Oscar-winning writer of "American Beauty" and the creator of "Six Feet Under," offers a caricature that is more fleshy and recognizable. While Mitford preferred bodies "disappeared," Ball's "Six Feet Under" brings them front and center, with all their wounds and foibles, to be dealt with before they are disposed of, and afterward. And his remarkably dysfunctional family of funeral directors -- Fisher & Sons -- are not so much ghouls as they are ordinary neurotics, made extraordinary by living under one roof with the constant procession of the dead and bereaved.

When Ball was 13, his sister died in a car accident and his mother's abject grief was hushed by the fashions in funerals then -- to treat grief as a structural weakness, by which folks were forever "breaking down" or "falling apart" or "going to pieces."

Ball's work shows he recognizes that both the undertakerly tendency to prettify the dead, with cosmetics and euphemism, and Mitford's instructions to dispose of them, by quickie cremation in the name of convenience and cost efficiency, are equally misguided efforts to get around rather than through the difficult business of mortality.

Disguise and disappearance are both denials. So is diversion. What Ball so clearly "gets" is that the funerals are about the living and the dead -- the talk and the traffic between them. In his show, they constantly confront one another. He lets them occupy the same space, often the unlikely "space" of the Fisher & Sons mortuary, where the living look the dead in the face. Not because we need answers, but because, in the face of mortality, we need to stand and look, watch and wonder, listen and remember. Ball presses us to examine the difference between the fashions and the fundamentals in the business of death.

And it is time we did.

With the erosion of religious, ethnic and social connections and the rituals and metaphors they provide to confront mortality and bereavement, more and more of us must reinvent, from the leftovers and borrowings of our various traditions, the wheel that works the space between the deaths that happen and the deaths that matter. This is why we have funerals -- not only to dispose of our dead, but to bear witness to their lives and times among us, to affirm the difference their living and dying makes among kin and community, and to provide a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief and faith and hope and wonder. The value of a funeral proceeds neither from how much we spend nor from how little. A death in the family is an existential event, not only or entirely a medical, emotional, religious or retail one.

The tastefully upmarket, emotionally neutered, socially ambiguous "memorial service" that Mitford peddled, to which everyone but the dead guy gets invited, where the chitchat and finger food are determinedly lighthearted and, needless to mention, "life affirming," is no more authentic than the junk-mailed, telemarketed, prepaid, preplanned commemorative "events," heavy on warm fuzzies and merchandise that the multinational "death care" conglomerates have been peddling, by quota and commission, for the past two decades now.

Real funeral directors do not call in the middle of dinner to sell you a casket with the tackle boxes on the corner or a space in the memorial suburbs of stone, or a burning, an urn and dot-com memorial. Real funeral directors are the ones you can call in the middle of the night when there is trouble. And real death, real grief, real families are never as tidy as Mitford or the McFuneral crowd would like them to be.

Whether we bury our dead or burn them, whatever oblivions we consign them to, whether we weep or dance or sing or pray or laugh, real funerals draw their meaning not from what we buy but from what we do.

Real funeral directors find more purpose in how we serve than in what we sell. But as in Hollywood, there are often identity crises. The corporate policies of the mega-mortuaries, which have bought up places like Fisher & Sons all over the globe in the past 20 years, seem determined to turn every sadness into a sales-op. The effort to turn licensed funeral directors into casket retailers and insurance agents has had the unhappy effect of making anyone who sells caskets or policies seem like, well, a funeral director.

And the Fisher brothers have found themselves between the rock and the hard place where many family firms have been: to sell hard or sell out. What keeps them doing neither is accountability -- their name on the sign. Sometimes Nate and David hear their dead father speak to them. The air is full of ghosts who both instruct and disturb us. It was ever thus. I hear my father still, these long years since he died too young. "We serve the living by caring for the dead," he used to tell us. His wisdom guides us still. It remains among our principal assets.

Unlike anything else on TV now, "Six Feet Under" plays for the most part in the deep end of the pool.

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