OPINION: Sometimes it's a very fine line between fiction and reality.

I'm an avid Gleek, a devotee of the television show Glee and its upbeat, hilarious and sometimes moving episodes - none more so than last week's episode, when the New Directions family farewelled Finn Hudson, a character played by Cory Monteith who lost his life due to drugs and addiction earlier this year.

Normally when a character dies on a television show, the line drawn between fact and invention are stark.

It might be a tragic time inside that fictional world, but we have the comfort of knowing the person isn't really inside that coffin - hasn't really been farewelled forever.

This time the lines were blurred, the tears were genuine and the heartbreak was all too real.

Watching Cory's real-life girlfriend Lea Michele, who was also Finn's love interest on Glee, shed slow tears as she sang Makes You Feel My Love in his honour, was the toughest part of the show to watch and one feels there was very little separating the world of Glee from the real world at that moment.

There has been plenty of criticism of the episode.

It was not made clear how Finn Hudson died.

Some critics believe the show should have been honest and made Finn's death mirror Cory's to make some half-baked statement about drug abuse.

But surely that would have been offensive and bizarre.

On the other hand, to kill Finn off in a car accident or by some other means would be to ignore what the public knows about Cory's death and to push that aside.

As one character states during the show, "Everyone wants to talk about how he died - I want to talk about how he lived".

I wish that was our reality.