VIDEO REVIEW
Video reveals painful beauty of death
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
It's an experience shared by all humanity, and yet nobody can say what it's like. Is it any wonder that dying is a subject that inspires so much trepidation?
Greg Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
Death is a wonder, an integral part of life, Mitsuo "Mits" Aoki insists in a documentary set to air tonight on PBS Hawai'i. If viewers can get beyond its shocking images, they may appreciate the stark beauty of the human process.
The makers of "Living Your Dying" want viewers of the video to see how death is part of the beauty of the human process.
That's the hope of director Robert Pennybacker, producer Didi Leong and others associated with "Living Your Dying," a project 10 years in the making that centers on the counseling Aoki, a retired minister and University of Hawai'i religion professor, gives to three terminal patients.
Pennybacker, who is himself a survivor of advanced colon cancer, winnowed 104 hours of documentary footage, directed by Joy Chong-Stannard, to a 57-minute video.
The deathbed scene of the first patient, Joseph Michael Thomson, first seen still energetic and communicative and then gaunt and unable to speak, is the most wrenching.
"When I first saw the footage, I said, 'I don't think this should be in,'" he said. "Mits said, 'It really should be in, because it shows what we're talking about; it shows death. Then it became an integral part of the story."
'Living Your Dying'
Pennybacker wove the stories of Thomson, Fay Nalani Myers and Martha Ululani Mendiola around themes of resources that can be tapped by the dying and their loved ones: family, community and spirituality. Adding to the documentary's appeal: The spiritual resource exemplified here, Mendiola's surrender to the meditative quality of hula, is not bound up in a single conventional religious tradition.
Supplemented by beautiful imagery and the narrative verse of poet Gail Harada, the finished product is a credit to PBS Hawai'i.
Pennybacker said, "This is about real suffering and real pain, but there's redemption at the end of it."
