Phil Harris, the captain of the Alaska crab fishing vessel “Cornelia Marie” and one of the featured stars of the Discovery Channel series “Deadliest Catch” died on February 9, 2010. Last night, after months of anticipation and a season laced with foreshadowing, the episode featuring the last hours of Harris and the phone call from the doctor to his son, Josh, to inform him of his father’s death at long last aired. Reviewers were appreciative of the series’ effort to tell the story in a way that was both honest to the situation and respectful of the grief of his family. And, even after living with the knowledge of Harris’s death for months and the understated buildup to an already-determined outcome, I still sat in front of my television and wept for the man, his sons, and the people who knew and loved him.
Despite a series of events in the days before his death that tried very hard to mimic the invented melodramas of fictional shows, the episodes related to Harris’s stroke told the story of a man’s death about as realistically as any film or television show can ever hope to achieve. Rarely does life hand us ready-made tableaux of life-changing events; we stumble into them, often completely unaware of the enormity of what has been delivered to us, and we continue to stumble all the way through them. Josh Harris kisses his father goodbye fully expecting to see him later that same day, preparing to find a rehabilitation hospital because Phil’s recovery has gone so well that the doctor is ready to let him go, and then his phone rings. Everything changes, even as everything was changing after everything changed. Life is never linear. It is always a series of random collisions from every conceivable vector, ranging in intensity from the unfelt to the shattering. Only in the review of time do we discern and improve the threads of continuity, like the editors of a billion hours of documentary. And while the people who produce “Deadliest Catch” have to consciously walk that path with their work, they found the essence of the randomness of life and brought it to their viewers.
No one’s life is exempted from this: as long as I live I will never forget the moment when my phone rang and my brother spoke almost the exact same words Josh Harris said to his brother to tell me that our father was dead, and there is not a microsecond of my life now that was not changed when they pumped my heart full of dye and told me that my heart was nearly completely blocked off in its arteries and veins. And I knew on both of those days, as I did watching Phil Harris die, that nothing is ever true for very long, no matter how everlasting it may seem. We change, we age, we die with no more matter than the beat of a heart, the look in someone’s eye, or a farewell kiss. But the possession of that knowledge offers no exception from the truth. At best it can only help us recover from the shock or teach us to have compassion when that shock is dealt to others.
The irony is thus that we had so long to know about, think about, prepare for an event that happened so quickly to other people. In the hour that followed the episode, the other fishermen and Harris’s sons reminisced and shared the denouement of the story, even though the show still has parts of the tale left to tell. Out of sequence, the return to normal seemed off-key, somehow, even though those people had already lived through the process. I thought it was a little jarring to see the fishermen tromping through the swamps “in Phil’s memory” though we had only “just” learned of his death, but I also wished a little bit that life afforded us the same ability to fast forward past the aftermaths. Again, the inexorable movement of time and the randomness of all that passes through it demand their own order and no other.
For we, the viewers, there is the relief that comes from the eventual reunion of natural and narrative, just as the gradual relief of time eases the grief of the Harrises and their friends. While we were spared the closeness of the real events, the balm of distance clearly has begun its work on them, and all is returned to status quo until the next time our lives are put into upheval.
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