Journey through dying

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Documentary collaborators Robert Pennybacker, Mitsuo Aoki and Didi Leong visited the Joanna Sullivan Garden at the Honolulu Academy of Arts recently. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser 'Living Your Dying' A private screening will take place tomorrow. It also will air 9 p.m. May 19 on KHET-TV. For more about Mitsuo Aoki and the film, see livingyourdying.com.

The overriding concern of the film is death, or rather, the process of dying. The journey its principal subject, the Rev. Mitsuo Aoki, shepherds his terminally ill charges through is the most dramatic movement of all.

Yet the film is surprisingly uplifting. It is, on many levels, a film about happy endings.

Nearly a decade in the making, the film offers an in-depth look at Aoki — founder of the University of Hawai'i's Department of Religion and one of the seminal figures in Hawai'i's hospice movement — through his work with three people dying of cancer.

"Usually, when there's a catastrophic illness, it's associated with terror, denial and all kinds of negative energy," says Didi Leong, the film's executive producer. "Mits' philosophy sees death in terms of community, caring, togetherness, establishing what resources you have. He understands dying as an opportunity to see life from a different point of view."

It was Leong who first thought about bringing Aoki and his unique views of dying to a wider audience.

Leong, then a hospice volunteer, had befriended a woman named Karen Sugihara, who was dying of cancer. Leong suggested that Sugihara meet with Aoki.

"During that first meeting, she burst into tears," Leong recalls. "She had not admitted to herself how far along she was."

After the meeting, Sugihara told Leong that she felt she was seeing the world in Technicolor, where before it had been black and white. Aoki continued to counsel Sugihara until her death a year and a half later.

"It was amazing," Leong says. "I wished I could have captured that for others to learn from. After that, it was sort of my fantasy to get Mits on film."

The idea stayed with Leong for some eight years until an encouraging word from a New York director finally prompted her to go forward.

Without experience in any aspect of filmmaking or fund-raising, Leong spent the next two years securing backing for the film. The Hawai'i Community Foundation chipped in with $50,000; Hawai'i Public Television agreed to help with in-kind services.

Filming took place over six years, wrapping up in 1999. Of the more than 10 terminal patients who agreed to have their last days caught on tape, three — Joseph Michael Thomson, Fay Nalani Myers and Martha Ululani Mendiola — eventually ended up on the final cut.

A new voice

While the stories captured were poignant and powerful, the process of bringing the film together was full of false starts and dispiriting delays. Directors and producers came and went as the flow of money hiccuped.

Worse, despite a nearly 10 years of emotionally draining work, the piece still lacked a unifying voice. It lacked, Aoki says, authenticity.

"We were prostituting death, trying to squeeze a meaning that it didn't have," says Aoki of an early cut.

Enter Robert Pennybacker, a director and producer with 20 years of experience in local broadcast media. Though he was hesitant at first, Pennybacker agreed to serve as director on the project after meeting with Aoki.

Confronted with 204 half-hour tapes' worth of footage, Pennybacker decided it was best to start at the source.

"After talking to Mits a couple of times, I knew the approach couldn't be the standard documentary approach," Pennybacker says. "Mits kept telling me that the key elements of the whole subject was mystery and emotion. So early on, I got the sense that it would have to be a dramatic film using real footage."

'Courage' helps film

Leong says Pennybacker brought "a sensitivity and courage" to the project, qualities she attributes to the director's own insight into mortality.

Pennybacker was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer and is in remission.

"So this is a subject that is close to me in a lot of ways," he says. "What I got from watching Mits on these tapes was an overriding thought that I wish I had known him when I was going through my struggle with cancer. It really helps to have someone with that perspective to work with you and not treat what you have as a negative."

Says Aoki: "Robert having cancer added a whole new dimension. He wasn't trying to sell anything. Instead, he was manifesting the inner meaning of death itself. My sense was that for Robert to work on this film would complete an understanding for him about death and about himself."

Pictures of life, death

Working methodically with a production committee, Pennybacker crafted a story incorporating interviews with Aoki, documentary footage of Aoki working with the three dying patients, and parabolic transitions featuring original poetry by Gail Harada, who shares writing credits with Diane Mark.

The film includes a short biography of Aoki, tracing the evolution of his beliefs from his Buddhist upbringing in the plantation town of Hawi on the Big Island and his conversion to Christianity on O'ahu to the near-death experience that helped inspire his work as a theologian and scholar. Its real emphasis, however, is on the cleric's work with Thomson, Myers and Mendiola.

Aoki's presence in these segments is subtle, but the effects of his words resonate in the faces of the patients as they move closer to death.

"What I really wanted to do was suggest that whenever a person can embrace their own dying, befriend it, then life becomes very authentic," Aoki says.

"Death and life are remarkably related. The function of death is not just to kill you — that it will — but to enable you to step deeper into your experiences, thoughts and feelings."

And so there is an odd, undeniable beauty captured in the gasping, emaciated figure of Thomson, a Navy officer who loved driving fast cars and competing in triathlons, cradled in the arms of his brother on his deathbed; in the face of Myers as her son removes her oxygen mask for a goodbye kiss; in the cracked voice of Mendiola as she chants in her hospital room about the beauty of the 'olapa tree.

Fulfilling journey

Aoki shares remembrances of his wife, Evelyn, and the powerful emotions she experienced in the last weeks of her life. In the film, he recalls how she was overwhelmed with anger upon seeing a photo of her first husband.

"But then, suddenly, all the stress and anger in her face was gone," he says. "She said she had experienced God forgiving her, and she wanted to share this with (her first husband). Death was actually pushing her to go deeper and, at a certain depth, she was able to experience something in life."

To Leong, getting "Living Your Dying" completed was itself an journey of awakening.

"Someone once told me, do not make a film unless it's an absolute passion," Leong says. "I feel it's complete now, but I'm not sure if I really, fully comprehend what that means."

For Aoki, still embracing his work at age 88, the journey was as fulfilling as the completion.

"I could tell when we all met to view the final cut that within our community of people who interacted with this film things just seemed to flow," he says. "I realized that as a result of dealing with this subject matter, we had all encountered our own death and dying, and all of us got a deeper understanding of what death is really like."

For more about Mitsuo Aoki and the film "Living Your Dying," visit www.livingyourdying.com.

Correction: Gail Harada wrote the poetry used in the documentary "Living Your Dying." Because of a reporter's error, another person was credited in a previous version of this story.