Dying Into Life

“Dying,” declared Sylvia Plalh’s Lady Lazarus. “Is an art. like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real.” A specialized approach, perhaps. But there’s no reason that most of us should not strive for amateur knowledge of the subject. Dying is something that can be learned about and prepared for.

So. evidently, was the thought of the film director Michael Roemer when in 1974 he prepared to shoot his film Dying (shown on Public Broadcasting television channels on April 29). A gifted and experienced filmmaker (the winner of a Venice Film Festival prize for his Nothing But a Man), Roemer, like many middle-aged men. thought it was time for him to get over his fear of death. When he was approached by the television producer Michael Ambrosino to make a film about dying for WGBFITV in Boston, he swallowed hard and said yes.

The original, rather grandiose idea for a film comparing wavs of dying throughout the world soon proved impertinent. Roemer narrowed the focus to one part of the United States, in fact to the area around Boston, lie began a search of hospitals, surveying doctors and social workers to find people, known to be dying, who might participate in his film. The people had to he aware that they were dying, had to be willing to lend their deaths, as it were, to Roemer.

This presented a problem far different from those faced in such documentaries as Frederick Wiseman’s about high schools and police forces, in which passersby were filmed nearly by accident. because they happened to stray within range of the camera. Michael Roemer’s collaborators in Dying were to some extent self-selected. But they had to tolerate the presence of Roemer. his cameraman, and his sound man. They obviously had to be compatible with Roemer. And ultimately, in order to allow the recording presence of director and machinery, they had to be motivated by an awareness, however unconseious, that their living and dying had some meaning, that much was being lost, that there was something to be gained by dying easily, or dying well, or dying under protest. As a practical matter it turned out that the most suitable subjects were cancer patients. Others either died too suddenly to be filmed—or survived. For the purposes of art. cancer is the twentieth century’s substitute for consumption.

Roemer and his small crew found making the film an overwhelming experience. This is clear in every foot of the film, and in the impact it makes on the viewer. If you want to learn about something important, it is useful to send an artist to do the job: send Agee to the Black Belt, send Waugh to Ethiopia, send Mailer to The Fight, and Chekhov to Sakhalin. What Roemer learned, and what his film teaches us, is that the essence of a human being can survive his existence. Unlike a great many other documentaries. Dying does not simply record, it evokes; it does not simply depict the machinery and the procedure of dying, it renders the spirit as well as the form. The three patients who are the heroes are treated with the utmost tenderness: yet they remain wholly, even harshly, themselves. Who would wish to be otherwise, to have his essence altered by his or her dying? Roemer, by the most adept editing, by a superb sense of rhythm, by an ear for the authenticity in a voice, by seizing upon symbols of life like the sound of music or birdsong, the color of a rose, a smear of red paint, the splash of water in a lake, the strange privacy that comes to people in automobiles, has constructed a work of art.

Yet he was not alone in creating it. More completely than the stars in any Hollywood spectacular, the characters in this movie made it. Sometimes they are talking directly to the camera about their illness, their approaching death; sometimes they appear to be talking for the record: sometimes Roemer has caught them in moments of absolute spontaneity. Are they playing to the camera? At times, yes. And why not? “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” They speak to us; we listen. And our minds become wonderfully concentrated too. for in the dying men and women and their families we encounter people whom from this evening forward we will know better than we know some of our best friends. In their dying they have given themselves to us; they have enriched our lives.

A chorus of women, singing. Soon one of them is talking to you about her husband, Mark’s, final illness, lymphosarcoma. At last Mark asked to have the plug pulled. “Our doctor honored our request ... In a strange way it was a good day.” Their friends came to the hospital to take their leave. Brownies and ginger ale were found so that they could “break bread” together. Then the end came: Mark said. “Let’s call it quits. Pooh.” and died. Now. much later, the camera catches Mark’s face in a snapshot on a table, while the widow moves about her kitchen teaching her young children how to knead and bake bread. She has survived: so have you. So much for prelude, now for introduction.

The next face you see is that of Maynard Mack, the Yale professor of English who acted as consultant for the film. Mack speaks of what was intended in Dying—an attempt at the outset to see what roles the arts, ritual, play in people’s accommodations to death. The filmmakers encountered some surprises. These dying men and women were eager to speak directly to the viewer, without mediation, out of strength and weakness alike: they were not ashamed of their frailty in the face of death. Mack quotes King Lear on their behalf: “Thou, ” he emphasizes slightly, “art the thing itself.” It is the viewer alone who can take the pulse of this film.

Now we get down, as you might say, to cases, to three death stories filmed from the life, three real people dying. The first is Sally, sitting up in a hospital bed to have a brace fitted on her leg in preparation for physiotherapy. Her appearance comes as a shock: one side of her skull is sunken after a brain operation. (“The cancer is growing inside my head like moss.”) Her head is shaved, one arm is paralyzed, vet she talks very cheerfully: “Before 1 was sick. I was a big. healthy redhead climbing mountains and mowing lawns . . . And then, down, down, down . . (Her voice rising in opposition to the words. How old can she be. how many years ago was all this?) Sally chatters to the nurses as they feed and buckle her. she talks to fellow’ patients in the physiotherapy rooms, and finally she chats with the ambulance attendant who takes her home to a brown clapboard house in the suburbs. Once Sally is home, peace settles in. She looks very old as her mother, who shifts, changes, and feeds her, spoons scrambled eggs into Sally’s mouth. Dogwood blooms outside the kitchen window. The Brahms Violin Concerto sounds on the radio, and Sally lies in bed, her face suffused by a strange smile, drumming her fingers in time to the music. She has spoken of wishing to lapse into coma and drift away; but meantime every sensation, every pleasure that comes her way. from Brahms to scrambled eggs, will be relished. The film stops. Sally went into a coma and died.

The next is the most harrowing of the deaths, because no one involved can accept its imminence, neither the dying man nor his wife nor their children. Bill, a silent man in his thirties, has melanoma. He sits motionless in hospital waiting rooms and beds, in a car. on his terrace, in his house, by the side of a lake. His two young sons, faces gradually staining with guilt and anger, play or swim, moving hesitantly and jerkily, in petulance and ill temper.

His wife. Harriet, unlike Bill, cannot stop talking, moving around, tense in her face and limbs, harsh in her voice. “I’m going out every day and every night!” she announces challengingly on the eve of Bill’s return to the hospital for more examinations. She shoves the family lawn mower as though she were cutting off her husband’s legs at the knees. She scolds her children for not practicing the clarinet or for scuffling with each other, and she complains aloud to doctors, a psychiatrist, a friend, about the present, the future: “The longer this thing is dragged out. the worse this is going to be on all of us.”“I’m a young woman. I don’t want to be left with teen-age children, 1 want to marry again.”“1 prayed that that chemotherapy wouldn’t work.”

Harriet is paralyzed, just as Bill is. by the imminence of death, but she is enraged too. and she doesn’t care who knows it. For Harriet and Bill the ultimate fact is somehow unthinkable. Its consequences are more real than the fact itself: they cannot accept the dying, even though they can discuss with seeming insouciance the purchase of a burial plot. The only sound in this episode, except for the rasp of Harriet’s outraged voice, is an occasional moment of birdsong.

The episode ceases, as it opened, with Harriet’s hysteria. Death is a question to which there can be no answer for Harriet, and Bill does not seem to hear the question. But at least Harriet can express her indignation, can give voice to the fury that everyone feels at the death of one she loves. There is bravery, not only in her attitude, but even more in her knowing that everything she says will he recorded and shown. Death is an eventuality for which nothing had prepared her, an eventuality beyond the reaches of imagination. The film stops. Bill is dead.

Third episode: a haggard black man and his bounteous wife are seated across the desk from a doctor who tells Reverend Bryant that he has incurable cancer of the liver. Bryant, in a nervous gesture of defense, puts his hand to his mouth, warily, cautiously. It is the last time we shall see him try to defend himself. As he and his wife drive away from the hospital after the interview, he says how wrong doctors can be, how often they are wrong. And then, with a smile, “It ain’t going to hurt the doctor for me to feel like that.”

The Reverend Bryant, sitting alone, speaks: “I was a foster child . . . very lonely ... I always wished for a big family.” Then he met his wife. “She gave me something Eve never had. A family ... a blessing from God.” Suddenly we are in church; the choir, in bright green robes, are singing hymns. When they fall silent the Reverend Bryant, a gaunt black lion of a man, rises in his black robes behind the pulpit to preach. He speaks to his people of cancer, of his term on this earth, of what is to come hereafter, and he accepts it all. “Yes. Lord.” repeated, spoken, shouted, sung. Yes, Lord.

Reverend Bryant is at home, saving grace before a meal and teaching the words to his tiny grandchildren. The apartment is crowded, children coming and going, a sense of bustle, of interaction with the world outside, that none of the previous sickrooms has contained. Now we are suddenly in a car. traveling somewhere. Reverend Bryant is reading his Bible, one of his sons drives. They stop by the waterside, and Bryant gazes out. “The time I have on the topside of this earth. I’m going to jive it out the happiest, the best. I know how.” Back in the car he talks further to his wife, who wholly listens: “If you don’t go through it one way. you’ll go through it another.” It seems we are on a trip south. Reverend Bryant has undertaken an impromptu journey to his birthplace, a tumbledown frame bouse in a field. He looks for his father’s grave but he can’t find it—the burial ground is overgrown. So in the fading light the family gets back into the car and turns north along the superhighway.

Now Reverend Bryant is dying in earnest. He lies in bed in his apartment, apparently not in pain, while children and grandchildren come in and out. His wife, as always, sits by his side, saying little, comforting him with a look, a touch, a reminder of how often he is loved. “Turn him over.” she tells two of the grown sons. “Make some music for Granddaddy,” she says to the littlest grandchild. The child kisses him. Through a doorway we see a grave girl sitting up on top of a bright red washing machine. It is a pieta, “Thank you,” says the Reverend Bryant. The film stops. He dies.

Mrs. Bryant, a monument in mourning, sits in a pew at the funeral, rocking slightly backward and forward. Other women dab her eves and fix her veil, but she seems unaware of them. “Yes, yes, oh yes,” she says, as the choir in white robes sing, as the prayers are chanted. “Yes. yes. oh ves.”The coffin is laid open at the front of the church: the black lion is laid out in his best suit. His friends file by, kiss his cheek, touch his body, pause by his side. The mourners, the widow, are elevated in a transport of resignation. At last we see a procession of cars leaving the church—cars that had taken the living and the dying on their journeys to hospitals and home again: cars that had contained silences and quarrels. Bible readings and gossip, searches for origins; cars that had been laden with failing bodies and bad news.

This funeral, like others, is for the living. So also is Michael Roemer’s film, with its mixture of kindness and truthfulness, for the living, for those of us still on this side of the barrier. Roemer has performed an inestimable service in helping us learn something about the art of dying, in reminding us how indissolubly our dying is part of our life, even or perhaps especially—if cancer gives us the lime to prepare, to make ready. Yes. yes. oh yes.