In making the film series, Secrets of Life and Death, I was extremely fortunate to be able to interview two people shortly before they died. Rick Fields was a practicing Buddhist and the author of How the Swans Came to the Lake; A Narrative History of Buddhism in America. Tighe Foley was a young man with HIV. Rick’s willingness to be interviewed is not all that surprising. Contemplation of death is a Buddhist practice. Death is impermanence, the nature of all existence. Resistance to change is the source of suffering. Accept change, accept one’s own inevitable death and reduce suffering. I like Buddhism because it is practice-based, not faith-based. You don’t have to believe in God or an afterlife or anything to receive its benefits. Another part of the practice is being of service. Rick agreed to an interview even though he was barely two weeks away from his death as an act of service. He finished his interview saying, “You may as well spend your life helping people. What else is there for us to do.”
I believe that Tighe Foley also wanted to do something meaningful when he agreed to be interviewed for the film. Although a practitioner of the San Francisco Church of Religious Sciences (now The Center for Spiritual Living), he also studied Buddhism. So he certainly absorbed many of its concepts about life and death. But I think his being gay was also part of his willingness to be interviewed. Because of HIV, because so many young men died from this disease, the gay community did a lot of work around dying. They did workshops with Anna Halprin and other therapists. They explored self-assisted death with the Hemlock Society. They wrote plays and did artistic works on the subject. There is a gay person in each of my three films. I think we owe them a lot for all the road maps and trails they have given to guide us.
A year into my filmmaking, I volunteered for hospice. I wanted to have more first-hand experience with dying. I also hoped it might provide some additional leads for my film. The results were so much more. Hospice is required by law to address both the spiritual and medical side of dying. Similar to the Buddhists, hospice provides a generic, nondenominational kind of spirituality that anyone can embrace. But here the focus is more on completing life, finishing up loose ends and saying goodbye. From hospice I learned about the communal aspect of dying – the family of the dying; the nurses, social workers, chaplains, volunteers, aids and others that assist the family; and the community of people I’ve met at team meeting, volunteer trainings and social event that support all of us in our work. It was such a relief to be around people who were not only comfortable with the subject but also understood what I was doing as a filmmaker. Hospice not only provided encouragement for my films but insight into why I’ve spent so many years of my life making and sharing them. It is, I have discovered, both a practice and a healing. But, you’ll have to wait for the last film in the series, Healing Loss, Helping Other, for that story.
The San Francisco Day of the Dead was another source of material for my films. It is one of the principal characters in the third film, The Heart of Grieving, but not as history or cultural underpinnings. There are no interviews here about the Day of the Dead, just emersion into its exuberance, celebration and embracement of death, in its parades, its costumes, its altars and other events. The Day of the Dead, brought to the Bay Area by Mexican immigrants many years ago and now thoroughly imbedded into San Francisco culture, teaches us a different way to deal with death. It brings death out into the open rather than hide it -- to play with it, to be creative, to immerse yourself, to laugh as well as cry. And that’s what it brings to my film.
Not all the people I interviewed make it into the films. This was not because they were unworthy, or their stories were not good enough, or they did not teach me something. They simply did not fit with the other stories that were central to the films. I recall, early on in the editing process, having a dream about a yard full of baby chickens running all over the place and my not being able to corral them. That was my film.
Originally I planned to make a single film with four parts. My editor, Elaine Trotter, the person I hired to tweak my editing and make the film more professional, told me that what I planned would not work. I would either have to rethink all my editing or break it into four films. I struggled with this information for months. I tried reediting and reediting. But each time the film lost something of its heart and so I would abandon it. Then, while co-facilitating a hospice support group, I decided to screen the films for the group members. They loved all four films. They told me to stop dithering and get them out, as is, four separate films. And that is what I have done.
I thank all the people who helped me make these films, particularly those who do not appear. I have learned from you all and I am grateful. And don’t be surprised if one of these days you find an excerpt from one of those neglected interviews streaming from my website, encouraging others to share in cyberspace and expanding the dialogue on this vast subject we call death.
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