No album has so consistently tried to kill me as much as Sufjan Stevens’s 2015 Carrie and Lowell. I’m not joking. When I was in a very dark time in my life, I listened to “Death with Dignity” and “The Only Thing” over and over and over. I don’t think I’ve ever heard music that so perfectly captured and contained grief and pain.

The only thing that keeps me from cutting my arm
Cross hatch, warm bath, Holiday Inn after dark
Signs and wonders, water stain writing the wall
Daniel’s message, blood of the moon on us all

Woof. It’s about as dark as deep fried onyx, and richly inflected with the evangelicalism of Sufjan’s upbringing.

I think of this in the very silly context of watching HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, more or less written and produced by Danny McBride. I had started to watch the show a few years ago but didn’t really quite get into it at the time.

I should have. My family moved to North Carolina in 1990, right when the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal was about to melt down, so the very thinly veiled satire of Carolina televangelists shown in Righteous Gemstones literally hits close to home. I recognize these people. I remember them.

At first, I was a little put off by the series. It seemed like it might be one of those texts that just makes fun of white working-class people and so-called “rednecks” for cheap laughs, and I really hate that sort of thing. Now that I’ve watched it again, though, I see how much it is an epic story about a family gone wrong — the stuff of Oedipus, King Lear, and Knots Landing.

There is actually a heart to this show, even if superficially it seems to be a very basic satire. The story is about Eli Gemstone (played by that perfect person we all love, John Goodman), who was entrepreneurial enough to create this megachurch empire in the Carolinas in the 1980s and 1990s. He has three horrible children who are to the manor born, as they say, and they are the ultimate rich fuck-ups. Jesse (Danny McBride), Judy (Edi Patterson) and Kelvin (Adam Devine) are little goblins that seem not to have emotionally matured since 7th grade, even though they are truly and fully adults. Much of the humor of the series comes from the idiotic decisions these pampered morons make, redolent of the The Three Stooges or Workaholics. But these three little fools potentially have access to a multimillion dollar evangelical fortune, which Moe and Shemp definitely did not have.

There’s not a lot of point in chronicling the shenanigans of the Gemstone family here, except to say they run into problems keeping their empire alive. The children are supremely venal and myopic; the patriarch John Goodman sees that things are going wrong but has no idea how to set them right.

But the thing that holds it all together is the person who is not there — the matriarch Aimee-Leigh, who passed early in life. It’s like if Etheline Tennenbaum died at 41. The implicit and never-said subtext of the entire TV series of The Righteous Gemstones is that everything fell apart when Aimee-Leigh was gone. She is the ghost of everything. No one knew what to do once she was gone.

I think many of us have seen our own or other families where’s there’s one mom or grandma who is the linchpin. When she’s gone, things are just different. For all of The Righteous Gemstones‘ well-earned and reasonable satire of Southern evangelical culture, it’s mainly a story about a hole being blown in a family by a shotgun. The key piece is gone.

When at the end of the third season, the ghost of Aimee-Leigh is set apart, looking at a distance from the extended family enjoying their time together and goofing around in the park, it really got to me. I’m not a big believer in supernatural things. But I’ve been reading a lot lately about people who feel like their lost loved ones have come to visit and talk with them in dreams, and reassure them after they have passed. I have experienced this; and in a way, whether it’s an illusion or not doesn’t really matter.

Which brings us back to our original theme. What Sufjan Stevens was talking about is the irreducible incomprehension of why his family turned out the way it did. It seems random and nonsensical in some ways. But even if we know we’ve been put in circumstances not of our choosing, even by people who hope they have our best interests at heart, you can find yourself in a weird place.

The Gemstone kids and grandkids didn’t sign up for all of this, but they were signed up all the same. To be honest, they all seem like sociopathic dirtbags. Yet the aching heart of the show is the loss of Aimee-Leigh for Eli, Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin. They lost their compass, and the series reminds us of this as the story unfolds and Aimee’s ghost is there watching — they needed her, and they never found a way to fill the void.

As Sufjan Stevens said in “Death With Dignity,” in psalm-like style, “What is that song you sing for the dead?””

The Righteous Gemstones reminds us of the radical insecurity and uncertainty we all feel. As its bird-brained protagonists try to feel their way through the world, they seem to be unaware of how the loss of their mother has fucked them up. We have to reckon with the things and people we’ve lost, or otherwise we’re not going to get anywhere wisely.

(Also, I’m running around the house with a pickle in my mouth.)