The film series, Secrets of Life and Death is, in way, a personal documentary about my own journey of healing and transformation after the deaths of my parents. Each film begins with my questions about some facet of the dying process and closes with my observations. In between are the stories of the people who taught me. The films do not pretend to have all the answers, only the answers that worked for me. They are simply a starting point, an invitation to others to share their own stories. This is my story. Does any of it ring true for you? What is your story and how is it different? Tell me so we may all learn from each other.
We are, most of us, uncomfortable with death. It is a difficult subject to explore, on or off camera. Being willing to be interviewed for a film, any film, is a matter of trust – trust that you will be respected, not misrepresented or misused. My focus on death took trust to another level. Death is secret, intimate, and private. In some ways it is a lot like how we used to be about sex, only without much promise of pleasure or titillation. Death is emotional, often unflattering and frequently downright ugly. Who would want to expose themselves that way? Not too many people. I got a lot of no’s, even from people working in hospice.
I began working on Secrets of Life and Death, with a single thread – a book called Who Dies. Shortly after my mother passed, a friend handed me the book and said it helped her when her father died. The book, written by Stephen and Ondrea Levine, was exactly what I needed. Death, it explained, is not failure, not a punishment for eating the wrong things, failing to deal with psychological issues or insufficient positive envisioning. Death is the culmination of life, the goal, the final passage of a spiritual being. And dying, the journey from life into death, is a profound time for healing and transformation.
A few months after I read Who Dies, I saw Stephen and Ondrea speak in San Francisco. I contacted them by letter. It was a bold move. I had just decided to make my documentary. It was my first and I could barely sputter the words, “I’m making a film about death.” Although they declined to be interviewed having recently retired from public life, they kindly pointed me in the direction of a whole cadre of death pioneer living in the Bay Area.
Ram Dass had worked with Stephen and Andrea in the 70’s to explore conscious dying through the Living/Dying Project. A decade later, Frank Ostaseski founded The Zen Hospice Project to serve the local homeless population and refine the spiritual practice of accompanying the dying. Expressive arts and movement artist Anna Halprin used dance to heal her own cancer then lead numerous transformative workshops for people with HIV. Rachel Naomi Remen, co-founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, has been helping bring spirituality to the practice of medicine and treatment of cancer for thirty years. I contacted every one of them and each of them helped me either by being filmed or by referring me to others.
Early on in my interviewing process, I realized that I did not want to make a film of lecturing experts. I wanted personal experiences that came from the heart. I wanted a film people could connect with, that would take them deeper into their own feelings about death. I wanted stories they would remember. I was able to get this sort of personal revelation from Ram Dass and Frank Ostaseski and so they appear in my films, not as experts, but as people struggling with the challenges of death like anyone else.
In Part II, the journey continues with the others willing to address death -- hospice, Buddhists, the gay community and the San Francisco Day of the Dead.
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