DEATH COMES TO LIFE

...The essential character of each person intensifies as death approaches...

...This fact bad not gone entirely unnoticed before, not by those facing the mysterious passage out of this world, not by their families, not by the booming funeral industry, not by a few philosophers, psychiatrists, and poets who believed that confronting death and confronting life were of a single piece...

...A growing dissatisfaction with medical technology...

...Dying is a film made by Michael Roemer for Boston's WGBH and scheduled to be aired by Public Broadcasting Service stations at the end of April or after...

...The young woman whose description of her husband's death opens the film does employ the phrase "die with dignity" and does speak of the cold and dehumanizing atmosphere of the hospital...

...Newspapers and TV news reported opinions on the "right to die" and developments in "thanatology...

...finally his physician removes all the tubes...

...Dying began as a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...in the flourishing of his grandchildren he sees God's covenant...

...Editors in publishing houses were soon discussing whether their spring or fall lists would include a "death book...

...After which reflection Peter Ivanovich felt reassured, and began to ask with interest about the details of Ivan Ilych's death, as though death was an accident natural to Ivan Ilych but certainly not to himself...

...Her husband had to return there when he wanted to die at home...

...The circle of non-communication could not have become more vicious...

...Doubts linger in my mind about the degree of exposure in this episode...

...Why this attitude changed, and changed so suddenly, no one has yet explained...

...The dying man is a Mack preacher...

...But once Roemer had finished the portraits there could be no didacticism...

...A young man is in the early stages of a slow but certain death from cancer...

...It would be transformed into sentimentality-we will all float downward like autumn leaves in the great cycle of nature-or info a social problem...

...This is not meant to be another lament for a social change gone awry...

...It is hard to say...

...the arrows of each life follows a trajectory long since set That view makes sense, but then so did Job's consolers...

...But- he did not himself know how-the customary reflection at once occurred to him that this had happend to Ivan Ilych and not to him, and that it should not and could not happen to him, and to think that it could would be yielding to depression which he ought not to do...

...Yet the emphasis here is on a family's attempt to accept and care for the altered and unpredictable, the ornery and childish individual which Gramp had become...

...truly he walks in the shadow of death and he does not fear...

...In this case the strands of continuity were held by others, though they were certainly the family ties that Gramp himself had lived by in his prime...

...The rest of us, it seemed, were more likely to react like Peter Ivanovich at the funeral service for Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych...

...The spare text and unsparing photographs of tins book, taken by a family that was in the habit of photographing one another, offer no easy resolution...

...they are spoken when someone removes a bedpan, yet spoken as though for a life viewed as an exchange of kindnesses...

...death with dignity can be assured by reforming medicine, allowing euthanasia, or developing new institutions...

...Death, the great mystery, would be stamped, molded, die-cut, glued, baked, enameled and packaged in cardboard and plastic...

...Dying includes one of the most painful episodes I have ever observed on film...

...In their neat home with roses, trimmed lawn, and patio, husband and wife have built themselves a hell of Sartrean dimensions...

...There was certainly a great gain in this explosion of interest, but also the discomforting sense of a jerry-built movement, the almost inevitable result whenever the machinery of popular culture fastens upon some idea that has raised its head above the horizon...

...Like Dying, Gramp contains the elements of medical drama-should the old coal miner be consigned to a nursing home he would hate, should he be hospitalized and kept alive through intravenous feeding when he finally refuses to eat...

...by breaking the taboo we would liberate death the way the pioneers of candor were alleged to have liberated sex...

...Dying does not focus on the questions of medical care that, however important, are still not central...

...His last words in the film are a gentle "thank you...

...how could it be...

...Why, that ought suddenly, at any time, happen to me,' he thought, and for a moment felt terrified...

...In the way each dying person takes food and drink, alone or with family, one sees summed up not only the immediate predicament but whole lives...

...but they are left in the background, where they belong...

...In what sense can we say that we die as we live...

...One way of seeing Dying is as a statement about living...

...The question is examined in another way by Gramp (Grossman/Viking, $5.95), a photographic record of an old man's passage through senility to an apparently willed death...

...In our society, however, those close to death are at any given moment but a small proportion of the breathing, chatting population, and the poets and philosophers an even smaller group...

...His wife confesses to the doctor, and to the camera, that she would prefer him dead quickly so that she could marry again and her young boys have a father...

...Once we make it our premise, we can read backwards into a past what we might not have been able to read there otherwise- that one man's marriage was weak, that another's faith was strong...

...Death was not denied outright in our society...

...It was instead kept from cracking into the sphere of public reality where the germ of terror locked in our hearts might be confirmed...

...From that sad episode the film moves to a concluding portrait mat is virtually an Easter Gloria...

...On the contrary it is prelude to noting two works about death that do redeem the hope that honesty and an end to euphemism could liberate...

...The makings of medical drama are here...

...Here was a victory of sorts, but was it the victory of the old Gramp of family fun and hard work, or the new Gramp of hardened arteries and fanciful illusions, or of both...

...The film was left in its simple state: Nothing further was added except an explanation of the film's evolution and an expression of gratitude to those who, in hope of assisting others, had revealed themselves in their weakness...

...At the end Gramp removes his false teeth, spits out all solids, and declares he is just going to lie on his bed "until it happens...

...it would combine a didactic presentation of the way art, poetry, drama, fiction and music had handled the theme of death with documentary portraits of several dying individuals...

...He is withdrawn...

...After the service Peter Ivanovich leaves to play cards...

...From adult education classes to medical and divinity school courses, death and dying was suddenly an astonishingly popular educational topic...

...but the couple's tragedy, one feels certain, is not a rare one, and it would be the exceptional man or woman who could view it without humbly searching his or her own heart...

...By the time Robert M. Veatch and I edited a collection of articles on death {Death Inside Out, Harper & Row) in 1974, the book's natural centerpiece was a debate over what Paul Ramsey termed the growing "Indignity of 'Death with Dignity...

...The funeral that follows is the com-munity's, and the film's, "thank you" for him...

...like the portraits of Dying, they provoke our thought and purge our fears.and purge our fears...

...his church' is the kind with nothing on the walk but a neon cross behind the pulpit In the love and courage of his wife and...

...his marriage is dissolving...

...Three weeks later it does...

...The assassinations of the Sixties...

...Not medical technology but the ordinary, sacramental moments of life-eating, drinking, getting in and out of bed, going to sleep-are in the film's forefront...

...A suspiciously self-congratulatory tone crept into the repeated characterization of death as a tabooed topic...

...At any rate when the change came, it came with the force of a dam breaking...

...Vietnam...

...Continued on page 253) Steinfels (Cont...