How To Die In Oregon

As people who know me or read my first-person account in the Village Voice about how I assisted in the suicide of my partner, when he was terminally ill from AIDS, I have strong feelings about the "death with dignity" movement.

It's no longer p.c. to call it "assisted suicide" -- nor is it accurate in Oregon, the only state that allows terminally ill patients the option to end their lives. This is because people pick up a prescription for a lethal dose of sleeping pills, but a doctor is not involved. This obviates the objections that doctors cannot violate their oath to "do no harm." (The obvious and glaring example of a doctor who didn't feel that way was Jack Kevorkian, mentioned here.)

The contradictions at the heart of this highly controversial issue are highlighted in the documentary "How to Die in Oregon," perhaps ironically, by the filmmaker's following a Seattle woman who lost her husband and vowed to try to get a Oregon-type law passed in Washington State.

The conflicts in Washington State mirror the profound divide between those who see this as the most fundamental of human rights in the face of modern medical science that can keep alive but just. We see certain religious denominations and doctors on the one side. On the other side are advocates like Derek Humphreys, author of the landmark book "Final Exit," and founder of the Hemlock Society.

The successor to that organization is Compassion and Choices, a group with which I am very familiar. We see a volunteer with the group counseling the terminally ill. She never suggests suicide. What she does is explain the hows and wherefores.

The operative word throughout the documentary is "choice." No one except the patient makes the decision to end his or her life, and no one else takes the pills. Ironically, I am currently finishing the first of part of "The Nazi Doctors," the authoritative examination of how doctors in the Third Reich were co-opted to become part of the vast national killing machine.

The specter of Nazi forced euthanasia of the "useless," which varied from time to time to include the mentally ill, physically handicapped, and eventually, of course, anyone of Jewish background.

Director Peter Richardson deftly gives the lie to the old "it all comes back to Hitler" argument. He follows several patients, but one, an intelligent, articulate woman, especially closely, all the way up to the evening of her death.

The documentary isn't perfect. The folkie background music was not only unnecessary; it reduced the profound pathos of these people's situations to NPR-type "sincere" reportage. I was at times uncomfortably reminded of the film "I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can," a very good dramatic film from the 1970s in which a filmmaker, who's addicted to the mood-altering drum Valium, documents the last days of a friend, a cancer patient.

When she sees the happy-happy ending to her anything-but-happy story, the subject of the film-within-a-film yells at her, "You made a Valium documentary!"

I would never accuse Richardson of such a thing. He has enough respect for his subjects not to give them happy endings. But it's inevitable in a documentary that the camera becomes more than a neutral observer. Through angles, editing, chyrons and, yes, soundtrack, the filmmaker's lens becomes a participant, a commenter and eventually even a player.

Maybe I'm making so much out of it because it's a subject that must inspire passion. I realize that many people won't see this film for the same reason why they don't listen to Adele's music or watch Ingmar Bergman films: They're "depressing."

Well, get over it. Life is depressing, because it always ends in death. I believe in keeping one's eyes open, which includes the possibility of ending life on one's own terms.

"How to Die in Oregon" gives a front-row seat at the most dramatic moment in everyone's life: "in momento mori"; or, the moment of death. Richardson thankfully steers away from the Marianne Williamson New Age hoo-hah about death being a journey, blah blah.

Death is death. It sucks. But we're all going to have to confront it. Unfortunately, only the lucky citizens of Oregon currently have the option of doing anything about it.

The DVD contains a few scrolls about the film, but little else in the way of extras.