Death Watch

"You can't learn to die as though it were a skill. People die in the way they have lived. Death becomes the expression of everything you are, and you can bring to it only what you have brought to your life."

So says Producer-Director Michael Roemer in summary of the stern message of Dying, his searing 97-minute television documentary made for Boston's WGBH, to be aired this Thursday on PBS channels across the country. It is an intimate portrait of how three cancer patients who know they are going to die contend with this reality to the very end. Dying is a camera probe into forbidden reaches of our fears.

In youth-conscious America, the subject of death has, until recently, remained one of the last unmentionables. Now there are signs of a more realistic approach to the inevitable. Colleges offer courses in thanatology, and churches present seminars on coping with death. Few viewers, however, will quite be prepared for the overpowering impact of Roemer's immensely humane yet all too chilling treatment of the subject. The show begins with an interview that is not one of the case histories:

"In a strange way it was a good day.

We were able to share things. I read to Mark. I gave him his last bath. Then early in the evening he kissed me and said, 'Let's call it quits, Pooh.' And he died about half an hour later."

The speaker is Sandy, a pretty, warm-eyed young widow who had been pregnant with her second child when doctors had diagnosed her husband's lymphosarcoma. At first she hesitated to tell Mark, then 29, that he had but five months to live. But there was a tradition of honesty in their marriage, and she realized she needed to draw strength from him. "The truth set us free," she says. "When I told him, he cried ... But a huge weight lifted because we could share it." Sneaking her new baby into the hospital under a poncho, Sandy nursed her by Mark's bedside. This homey act gave her husband a peaceful sense of the continuity of life, she explains. For the viewer, this serene prologue to the dying patients awakens a sense that lives and relationships are as important as death. Says Roemer: "I felt a good way to ease into the fears was to start with something that was already over." But there are few easy moments after that.

First comes Sally. "Oh, Mama, it's good to be home," she tells her elderly mother. With her withering limbs and head covered by fine gray stubble, Sally, 46, appears ancient. When she turns to peer out the window, her skull bears the surgical dent that is brain cancer's trophy. "It's just like when you look at a little baby," she says. "Someday that baby will be an old man or an old woman if they live long enough. And so, I have no fear of death." Sally may not, but hers is a Yankee stoicism hard to share.

With Harriet and Bill, 33, there is another kind of horror, a wrenching failure of nerve. Frustrated by uncertainty, angry and agonized, Harriet makes her mortally ill husband feel guilty for dying and leaving her with two sons, age 8 and 10. "The longer this is dragged out, the worse this is going to be for all of us," she tells him in Dying's most unsettling moment. Viewers may be tempted to compare her torment with Sandy's calm, but the show does not do this directly, and Roemer did not intend it. As Harriet said when she saw the completed film: "Different people come to death with different inner circumstances. So they act differently. That's all."

When a person has led a satisfying life, death can be accepted as a natural and appropriate end. "Right now I'm living some of my greatest moments," says the Rev. Bryant, 56, the dying pastor of a predominantly black Baptist church. "I don't think Rockefeller could be as happy a man as I am." Surrounded by wife, children, grandchildren and his congregation, he puts his life in order. He reads his Bible, takes a trip South to visit the house of his birth, teaches a toddler to say grace. There are sounds of babies in the background and rhythm and blues on the radio when he closes his eyes the final time. "He's asleep," the choir sings at his funeral. As mourners file past the bier to a spirited gospel organ, some pat his chest in a friendly farewell.

Two years in the making, Dying cost $330,000, most of which came from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Roemer, 48, is a veteran film maker whose previous credits include both dramatic and documentary films, most notably the award-winning Nothing but a Man. Yet he found filming the very private act of dying was extraordinarily difficult. The patients, all of whom came from the Boston area, and their families had to consent to the presence of a three-man film crew in their hospital rooms and homes. Out of a list, provided by doctors, of more than 100 terminal cancer cases, only a dozen patients were filmed, with just the three appearing in the final version. It took five to six months to shoot each segment. Once filming began, the subjects did not mind. "They wanted us there very much," says Roemer, "perhaps just to know someone cared." In many ways, the film makers suffered too. As Roemer puts it, "We were always aware of our own guilt; we knew we were living, and they were not."

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