Did you notice in the episode when Chet has a heart attack, Corey isn't around very much. We see a lot of Shawn, Jack, Eric, and Rachel, but Cory only makes a few brief appearances, and he's the star of the show. Why do you think they left him out of such an important episode?

I guess because in the amount of time they had, they wanted to focus on Shawn's family. With his dad and brother. Perhaps they didn't want to take away from the seriousness of the situation. He probably could have been more supportive of his Shawn, though.

i agree with this. one thing i noticed is god damn, by season 6 the show is a freakin PG rated soap opera. not nearly enough comedy.

I hated how towards the end, everyone was expected to pretend that Chet had done his very best as a father to Shawn AND that he had never neglected or not lifted a finger to care for Shawn when Virna would 'run away'. Let's not forget that at one point he actually left Shawn all alone in an empty trailer lot to fend for himself for weeks exposed to the cold elements until Cory finally put together what had happened. Chet did this despite knowing that all would have had to do was drop Shawn off at the Matthewses or Mr. Turner's place! But all that got swept under the rug!
Oh, and it turned out that Chet had NOT 'quit drinking' like he, Shawn and even Jack had claimed(though I give Jack more of a pass since he didn't see him on a regular basis) but Shawn had very clear (and possibly recent) memories of Chet staying away only to return drunk as a skunk for Shawn to clean up that he only admitted when Chet had the first heart attack!

Yes, Chet said he was sorry in the hospital and said it wasn't Shawn's fault but his own but who knows if he'd have truly agreed to spend time with Shawn and Jack THIS time after all the many previous promises he'd blown(and that appeared to have been the very first time Shawn had ever attempted to call him on his neglect). AND he kept pretending the neglectful, abandoning Virna was Shawn's actual mother -not even saying otherwise when he'd fessed being sorry and supposedly wanting to do right by Shawn . After Virna wrote that note disavowing having borne Shawn, Chet supposedly came as a ghost he then told a preposterous tale about Shawn's birth mother taking off faster than he could tell her 'it's a boy' when she bore Shawn while singing the neglectful Virna's praises for having liked powdering Shawn's butt as a baby- and not even bothering to tell as a ghost what her name or even having left a clue behind in the trailer as to what her name was- and his track record for 'protecting' Shawn was about zero in a million so I don't believe that was his MO for not telling Shawn the truth about the birth mother).

Yet, Shawn (and Jack) and the Matthewses and even Angela transformed him into Saint Chet the Friendly Ghost from that point on.

BAH!! I just wish ONE of the above (Jack, Cory, Alan, Amy, Angela or even Topanga) had just said that while it was sad that Chet had died with things unresolved, with only a very few exceptions otherwise, he'd been a ROTTEN father to Shawn who had not 'been there' for him and they all needed to just learn to accept Chet's memory for what he was rather than spend so much angst on mourning someone who was nowhere near as 'perfect' as Shawn tried to make Chet out to be- even if he missed what few good things he'd experienced with Chet.