In “Alternate Endings” the words of the dying and the grieving are given their due space and time. They deserve to be listened to
LESS THAN ten minutes into “Alternate Endings: Six New Ways to Die in America”, a brief conversation between the widow and the sister of a man who is about to have an unconventional funeral highlights just how much attitudes to death, dying and grieving are starting to change in America. The sister begins by saying that she and her brothers used to hate going to funerals; they were always big old-fashioned affairs on a Sunday in the family plot in a Brooklyn cemetery.
Guadelupe , a terminally-ill man, has a “living wake” with all his family and friends surrounding him several months before he dies. Barbara Jean, who has pancreatic cancer, goes with her best friend TJ to see the “green burial” plot where she will be laid. As they view the site in a golf buggy, the woman who works at the burial ground tells her that people, when viewing their prospective plots, tend to lie on the ground and look up at the sky, to take in their burial view.
The most striking episode in the hour-long documentary, however, is the segment following Dick Shannon, a former Silicon Valley engineer whose cancer has stubbornly remained despite treatment, and has now metastasised into his lungs. He wants to end his life on his own terms, and lives in California, a state with a “death with dignity” law which allows him to do so.
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