Into The Night (Part 1)

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We don't know how. We don't know when. But death comes for us all.

To be human is to wrestle with this truth and with the great unanswered question: How do we live with death in our eye? Do we go gently or raging against the dying light? Do we depart with equanimity or with anger? With clenched fists or more commonly with denial? Or do we see death as something to be fought and even possibly conquered, a challenge increasingly pursued by some of the brightest scientific minds? Finally, what are the stories we tell ourselves? Whether shaped by religion, science, art, the natural world, the power of love, do these narratives sustain us or do they fall away when we suddenly find ourselves 'with skin in the game.'

INTO THE NIGHT: Portraits of Life and Death features fascinating, unexpected voices from various walks of life: old and young, believers and nonbelievers, the dying and the healthy, well known and obscure. However varied their backgrounds, all are unified by their uncommon eloquence and intelligence, and most important by their dramatic experience of death. Each of them has been shocked into an awareness of mortality-and they are forever changed. For them death is no longer an abstraction, far away in the future. Whether through a dire prognosis, the imminence of their own death, the loss of a loved one, a sudden epiphany, or a temperament born to question, these are people who have truly 'awakened' to their own mortality.

In Part 1, nine men and women from all walks of life search for narratives of comfort in the face of death, awakened to their own mortality by staggering moments of loss and revelation. Appearing in Part 1 are actor Gabriel Byrne, bestselling author Caitlin Doughty, religious historian Phyllis Tickle, novelist Jim Crace, Baptist minister Rev. Vernal Harris, and others.

'This exceptional documentary is full of heart, offering a variety of perspectives on death and dying that will prompt viewers to reflect on their own attitudes, beliefs and values, shedding light on life and living. The featured stories cover death, dying and grief from personal, professional, psychological, biological, medical, sociological, philosophical, and spiritual perspectives, serving as an insightful conversation-starter for rich discussion in classroom and community settings.' Erica G. Srinivasan, Director, Center for Grief and Death Education, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

'Moving, beautiful, and multifaceted...The filmmakers masterfully weave together information and observations about biomedical, spiritual, social, and cultural aspects of death and mourning...Into the Night poses probing questions that will generate important conversations about the meaning of life and death, grief, and the ethics of end-of-life care - and these conversations will linger long after the credits roll. The film demystifies and destigmatizes death, and is essential viewing for students enrolled in courses on death, dying, end-of-life care, medical ethics, and more.' Deborah Carr, Professor of Sociology, Boston University, Author, Golden Years? Social Inequality in Later Life

'Apocalyptic and stunning and, for me, even life-changing. An astonishing piece of work which I urge you all to see.' Anna Fels, MD, Weill Medical College of Cornell University at New York Presbyterian Hospital

'A miraculous and courageous film that is so true, and so deep that it should be required viewing for all mortal beings.' Irvin David Yalom, MD, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Stanford University, Co-author, A Matter of Death and Life

'We are all going 'Into the Night'--it's one of the few guarantees in life. This poignant and beautiful film can be used as a catalyst to increase our death literacy and understanding of this integral process in life. The stories and interviews have such diversity and depth that there is something for everyone to connect with. This is just what people need to get conversations about dying, death and living well started.' Katherine Kortes-Miller, Associate Professor of Social Work, Lakehead University, Author, Talking About Death Won't Kill You: The Essential Guide to End-of-Life Conversations

'It can come as a surprise that discussing death with others can bring us closer to them, making us realize that we share many of the same responses to mortality. But reaching out, ending the silence, can be difficult, especially in a classroom setting. Instructors can break the ice by showing this excellent film, which documents the moving and deeply personal thoughts and experiences of several individuals whose lives were transformed by the realization that they are going to die.' Steven Luper, Professor of Philosophy, Trinity University, Author, The Philosophy of Death and Mortal Objects (forthcoming)

'Watching Into the Night makes clear that it's a lot more about life...To potential viewers, Whitney has a simple message: Don't be scared.' David Bauder, Associated Press

'A deep and riveting exploration of life's central mystery - death. Featuring a panoply of voices from all walks of life, the film examines how we inhabit our lives in the shadow of our mortality. Brimming with refreshing insight and radical moments of introspection, this extended visit with death should be required viewing for people of all ages. Its central message reminds us that to live life fully means making friends with death. Masterful. A stunning cultural artifact.' Dr. Anita Hannig, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Author, The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America (forthcoming)

'Not until our own death - or the death of someone we love deeply - do we confront the meaning of death and the life we have lived. Into the Night challenges us to explore profound existential questions: What happens when I die? How do I feel about my own death? Do I fear it, rage against it, or embrace it? Is there life after death? This wonderful film will stimulate viewers - young and old - to think deeply, perhaps for the first time, how they will make sense of their own life and mortality. I highly, highly recommend this film, not just for those students interested in psychology, thanatology, or medicine, but for anyone curious about the meaning of life and of death.' Dr. Christopher Davis, Professor of Psychology, Carleton University

'A uniquely profound portrayal of our common human destiny.' Donald Shriver, former President, Union Theological Seminary, New York

'Into the Night provides the opportunity to consider the fragility of life, the process of dying, and beliefs about the afterlife. Viewers will be challenged to consider connections between living and dying from people who have occupied a variety of roles in life. While appropriate for use in formal death education courses and the training of people involved in end of life care, this resource could also be useful in any setting where the goal is to stimulate conversations among adults who wish to contemplate their mortality.' Carla Sofka, Professor of Social Work, Siena College

'Into The Night accurately examines how our death narratives both fail us and comfort us through stories in religion, science, modern trends, and fascinating prospects of future advances in aging. Through beautifully told stories of loss the film examines powerful questions in a raw, loving, funny, and at times graphic way. The film details the importance of conversations about death in communities, and the real problems associated with continuing to keep death at a distance. The fundamental truth is we all must come to terms with death, and embracing death is essential to living and loving with the fullness of our being.' Angela Knight, Associate Professor of Funeral Service Education, University of Central Oklahoma

'Whitney's ability to wrestle with our most immense uncertainties is astonishing. This is a transformative film for the ages.' Andrew Solomon, President, Pen American Center

'A masterpiece. Every element perfection. A work of surpassing beauty, profound significance, daring emotional and intellectual honesty, towering spiritual courage, breathless intimacy and consummate artistry.' Martha Wilder, Shakespeare scholar, Professor Emerita of English, Pomona College

'Into the Night gives crucial voice to contemporary death perspectives through a rich storytelling approach. The documentary provides both professional and personal accounts of death and dying that reflect a range of philosophical, religious, historical, societal, and medical facets. Interestingly, Into the Night also serves as Whitney's homage to her fellow death researcher, Ted Winterburn, who died before the film's completion. Whitney's cinematic contribution to the Death Positive movement is therefore not only educational and enlightening, it is also a wonderfully intimate glimpse into her own grief process. Those involved in death studies, social sciences, medicine, humanities, and hospice care will find this film especially useful.' Dr. Kassia Wosick, Professor of Sociology, El Camino College

'The power of the individual portraits, the cumulative effect of the different experiences and points of view, the gorgeous images that made me relish more than ever what we mortals have around us in the here and now.' Barbara Weisberg, Author, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

'The documentary...is intended to break the taboo of talking about the inevitable...Whitney's film is one of the first major documents of the Death Positive movement. Taking its name from body positivity, being death positive does not mean having a suicidal streak, or a ghoulish interest in the grave. Instead, it is about rebalancing the modern disconnected relationship with death, by starting the conversation before it becomes a necessity.' Richard Whittaker, Austin Chronicle

'Whitney's film takes death on fearlessly...Death may be sudden, or dementia may steal our capacity to make decisions. But the documentary urges us to allow death to provoke us to live more intensely.' Deborah Quilter, Next Avenue/Forbes

'Existential questions sit at the heart of most of Whitney's work. But making Into the Night would allow her to directly ask the questions she wanted to stop tiptoeing around: How do you live, and live well, with death in our eye?' Religion News

Citation

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Main credits

Stone, Sharon (narrator)
Byrne, Gabriel (performer)
Whitney, Helen (film director)
Whitney, Helen (film producer)
Whitney, Helen (screenwriter)

Other credits

Edited by Kris Liem; director of photography, Paul G. Sanderson III; original music, Edward Bilous, Greg Kalember.

MARC Record See Worldcat record

Keywords

medicine,hospice,mortality,philosophy,; "Into The Night"; Bullfrog Films; documentary; death;

00:00:08.191 --> 00:00:12.808
[ethereal vocalizing]

00:00:49.620 --> 00:00:50.540
- [Narrator] A dying patient

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recounted her last dream to her therapist.

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It's dusk, darkness falls slowly.

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Soon it is pitch-black night.

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I'm alone in my boat,
floating through the harbor.

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I see the lights of many other boats.

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I know I can't reach them,

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can't join with them.

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But how comforting it is to
see all those other lights

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bobbing in the harbor,

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knowing that people are still
up late at night with me--

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here, and everywhere.

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There is nothing that we will ever do

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that feels so alone as dying.

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There is no way we can know what it means.

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Death is our first and last question.

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Why?

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We can learn from others,

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especially those who've
awakened to their mortality.

00:02:06.460 --> 00:02:09.493
For whom death is no
longer an abstraction.

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There are those who go gently or sadly,

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those who go with denial or defiance,

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and some with radiant acceptance.

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We can find ourselves
in their hopes and fears

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and in their richly varied narratives.

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What is our story?

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How do we live with death in our eye?

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It is a choice,

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a choice at the heart
of our shared humanity.

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[uplifting string music]

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- Do not go gentle into that good night.

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Old age should burn and
rave at close of day.

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Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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Though wise men at their
end know dark is right

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because their words had
forked no lightning,

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they do not go gentle
into that good night.

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Good men, the last wave by,

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crying how bright their frail deeds...

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- Dylan Thomas's poem

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has kind of haunted me
for most of my adult life.

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Do not go gentle into
that good night, rage,

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rage against the dying of the light.

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And I say, you're damn right,
I'm going to, you know?

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What is this death stuff?

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Where did I sign?

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I didn't sign up for that--

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I signed up to live, okay?

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And I'm gonna demand--

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I'm gonna go before God and say,

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show me the small print, see?

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- Raging against the dying of the light.

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It's just, why would you want to do that?

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I mean, none of us want to
die, but when the moment comes,

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when the moment comes and there's nothing

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that you can do about it,

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what a crazy way of spending
your last few minutes,

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raging against the--

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something that is
absolutely going to occur.

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Instead, you should be embracing
the dying of the light.

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You should be curious about
the dying of the light.

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That's really the best way of coming.

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It's like, oh, what happens now?

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- In my mind, to accept going,

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to accept the dying
light is to just give up.

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And I'm not somebody who gives up.

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I will not give up until the
very, very end. [laughing]

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- You know, there's this
language about fighting.

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"I'm not ready to give up."

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"He's a fighter.

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"He would want to keep fighting this."

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The problem with that
story that people tell,

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which is a story of courage and willpower,

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is that when that person eventually dies

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or is at the end of his
life, if they were a fighter,

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are they now a loser?

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Are they a quitter?

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Are they a failure?

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How can that be so?

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- What really gets my
heart pumping is rage,

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rage against the dying of the light.

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It's saying, "Hell no,
don't accept this nonsense.

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"Do something about it.

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"Struggle, fight to the very end."

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And if you've reached that very end, okay,

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you're gonna have to let it go

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but not to the very, very last moment.

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We don't know what we can do.

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We don't know what we can do
with life extension research,

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what we can do with cryonics.

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There are always possibilities.

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Just don't go gently, you've got to fight.

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- How can you not want to go gentle?

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Everything you believe,
everything you trust,

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everything that you've lived on.

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Everything that I stood on--

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the resurrection,
believing and understanding

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that, yes, I am going to see my savior.

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I must be gentle, I must embrace it.

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I can't fight against it.

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- I know quite a few
people who get excited

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about having that spiritual
body and being with God.

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I like my body, and I'm not ready to--

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I'm not ready to be a spirit yet.

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- That whole "rage, fight,
don't go into that--

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"gentle into that good night."

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I mean, that was the warrior
spirit I was, you know?

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And I still am to some degree.

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But a lot of years have passed

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and a lot of things have happened,

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and death is right here with me now.

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I have stage 4 cancer.

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I want to go gently into that good night.

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- We can sing, we can dance through it,

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we can accept it or we
can be rageful about it,

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but it's the one demon that we cannot

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appease or subdue.

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- [Narrator] Dylan Thomas's great poem

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taps into our deepest unconscious.

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Death is the roar underneath everything.

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It is the most existentially
threatening event

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any of us will ever experience.

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Some have come close to this great unknown

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and were forever changed.

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They have stories to tell.

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- I like to say that the
Grim Reaper has his hand

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up all of our butts,

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because we really are puppets
of death and mortality

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and puppets of the fear of death.

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And everything that we do,
from building cathedrals

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to having children to
having jobs and careers,

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is all-- the thrust of
it is our fear of death.

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- Hello.
- Hi, so good to see you.

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- [Narrator] Caitlin Doughty
is one of the leaders

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in a new movement to make death visible,

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to break the silence-- a
silence that reverberates.

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Young people are meeting in
death salons and in death cafes.

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Older people are following them.

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These gatherings started in Switzerland,

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moved to England, and are
now spreading throughout

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the Western world.

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There is a new honesty,
even between strangers.

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Caitlin is determined to understand death

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and to end our estrangement
from the dead body.

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- Welcome to Death Salon San Francisco.

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[audience applauding]

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Yes, yes. Joyful noise, joyful noise.

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The moment that I first remember
not knowing death was real

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but, like, knowing death
was real, very deeply,

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was the defining moment of my life.

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I was young, in about the
third or fourth grade.

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I was at a mall in my town.

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I was standing on the second floor,

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and it's one of those big open atriums.

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[foreboding orchestral music]

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And this little girl climbs up
at the edge of the escalator,

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and just fell-- fell off,

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and just-- just smack, just this--

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this thud that I remember now.

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I can hear it as clearly
as when it happened.

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And her mother went
screaming down the escalator,

00:10:08.280 --> 00:10:12.260
just screaming, just, "My
baby, my baby, my baby!"

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And that changed my life.

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I remember everything about
the night that it happened.

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I remember just lying in bed.

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I couldn't sleep at all.

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I went into the living room and
I pulled the blanket over me

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and I just sat there
with every light blazing

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and just waited for morning.

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My parents came out, and they knew,

00:10:48.610 --> 00:10:52.200
but I don't know that they
wanted to talk about it so much.

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I think they were of the opinion

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that if we didn't talk
about it, it would go away.

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Don't bring it up.

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Don't rehash it.

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And I understand why they did that,

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but I wanted somebody to tell me,

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"This happens, people die.

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"It's gonna be okay.

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"This is why you're gonna be okay."

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And I just felt very--

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I felt very lost.

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[mournful orchestral music]

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Many, many nights
following that, I stayed up

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into the night, just fearing
death-- and not specific death,

00:11:32.080 --> 00:11:35.330
but just the weight of the black cloud

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of the fact of death existing.

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I was very loved by my
parents and very loved

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by the people around me.

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But what was wrong was this pervasive,

00:11:49.680 --> 00:11:52.483
intense fear of death and dying.

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I went and majored in medieval history,

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medieval death rituals,

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depictions of the corpse
in the medieval period.

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Something I was always drawn
to was the art of the Macabre,

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and specifically the Danse Macabre.

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It doesn't matter who you are,

00:12:14.670 --> 00:12:17.300
you are going to get caught
up in this Dance of Death.

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You will dance with me eventually.

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I started out working at the crematorium

00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:28.174
to try and confront death,

00:12:28.174 --> 00:12:31.090
to really zero in on my fears

00:12:31.090 --> 00:12:34.070
and face them head-on,
and walk into a place

00:12:34.070 --> 00:12:36.510
that had real dead bodies

00:12:36.510 --> 00:12:39.340
and death in its rawest, purest form.

00:12:39.340 --> 00:12:41.510
And if I could face-- if
I could go into the belly

00:12:41.510 --> 00:12:45.280
of the beast and face it as it really was,

00:12:45.280 --> 00:12:47.853
maybe that would heal me in some way.

00:12:50.137 --> 00:12:52.887
[solemn string music]

00:12:54.060 --> 00:12:58.453
The body on fire in flames is intense.

00:13:00.620 --> 00:13:03.850
This is a big room with skylights,

00:13:03.850 --> 00:13:08.623
and it feels almost like
an industrial temple.

00:13:11.110 --> 00:13:14.080
The first day, I remember my
boss put me in a little room

00:13:14.080 --> 00:13:16.400
back there where we prepare the bodies

00:13:16.400 --> 00:13:19.483
and I shaved a corpse.

00:13:20.333 --> 00:13:23.341
And it was, on one hand,

00:13:23.341 --> 00:13:27.340
this incredibly reverent
experience of being

00:13:27.340 --> 00:13:29.560
with a dead body in the quiet,

00:13:29.560 --> 00:13:32.200
doing this almost ritualistic act.

00:13:32.200 --> 00:13:36.963
And on the other hand, it was
shocking and it was savage.

00:13:37.950 --> 00:13:40.563
I felt like I was in a different world.

00:13:43.530 --> 00:13:47.610
It involved getting bone
dust on your clothes

00:13:47.610 --> 00:13:50.830
and sweating and bizarre fluids

00:13:50.830 --> 00:13:53.653
and decomposing bodies and smells.

00:13:56.560 --> 00:13:59.840
But it was also liberating.

00:13:59.840 --> 00:14:03.100
Death happens, and it can be
messy and it can be gross,

00:14:03.100 --> 00:14:04.563
but it can also be beautiful.

00:14:05.772 --> 00:14:08.939
[solemn string music]
[water flowing]

00:14:32.859 --> 00:14:35.853
[solemn string music and singing]

00:14:35.853 --> 00:14:40.853
♪ Don't go ♪

00:14:41.461 --> 00:14:46.461
♪ I touch your souls ♪

00:14:47.368 --> 00:14:52.368
♪ I'm sold to you ♪

00:14:56.440 --> 00:14:59.615
♪ Show me where to find ♪

00:15:03.130 --> 00:15:08.130
There's not a lot of room to
break down, or to reflect.

00:15:09.110 --> 00:15:10.500
As I kept doing it, though,

00:15:10.500 --> 00:15:12.713
I found things that snuck through.

00:15:15.940 --> 00:15:18.320
There were bodies that did affect me,

00:15:18.320 --> 00:15:19.320
that I couldn't ignore.

00:15:19.320 --> 00:15:24.320
There was a baby that I
cremated, that I clipped her hair

00:15:24.500 --> 00:15:27.750
because her family wanted
little locks of her hair.

00:15:27.750 --> 00:15:30.720
So I clipped and shaved her head,

00:15:30.720 --> 00:15:33.680
and then I placed her into
the crematory machine.

00:15:33.680 --> 00:15:36.540
I placed her into the flames, and it felt

00:15:36.540 --> 00:15:41.540
like I was some bearer of--
an ancient funeral worker

00:15:41.980 --> 00:15:45.470
or someone with this
real profound purpose.

00:15:45.470 --> 00:15:47.880
And I cried as I did it.

00:15:47.880 --> 00:15:50.000
And then I took her bones out at the end

00:15:50.000 --> 00:15:52.190
and processed those by hand.

00:15:52.190 --> 00:15:55.290
And it was this strange honor

00:15:56.531 --> 00:15:59.189
that I won't soon forget.

00:16:00.343 --> 00:16:03.439
[solemn string music and singing]

00:16:03.439 --> 00:16:08.439
♪ Don't go ♪

00:16:09.133 --> 00:16:12.300
♪ I touch your souls ♪

00:16:14.160 --> 00:16:17.920
Each of these stories
develop a whole narrative

00:16:17.920 --> 00:16:18.753
in your mind.

00:16:18.753 --> 00:16:20.270
They happen one at a time,

00:16:20.270 --> 00:16:22.230
but they build and they
build and they build,

00:16:22.230 --> 00:16:24.410
and you can't ignore the effect

00:16:24.410 --> 00:16:26.112
that they're having on your life.

00:16:26.112 --> 00:16:29.279
[solemn string music and singing]

00:16:31.343 --> 00:16:34.150
♪ Show me where to go ♪

00:16:34.150 --> 00:16:37.860
I would cry at the drop
of a hat, at a sunset.

00:16:37.860 --> 00:16:38.710
I would feel despair.

00:16:38.710 --> 00:16:40.940
I would be on the ground
weeping and wailing

00:16:40.940 --> 00:16:44.570
and actually gnashing my teeth
and tearing at my clothes,

00:16:44.570 --> 00:16:45.990
which I had never done before.

00:16:45.990 --> 00:16:50.890
It was a high and a low that
I do believe death caused.

00:16:51.970 --> 00:16:54.470
It blew open the doors on either side.

00:16:54.470 --> 00:16:56.890
And I felt it.

00:16:56.890 --> 00:16:58.180
I felt things that were happening.

00:16:58.180 --> 00:17:00.503
I felt happiness, I felt sadness.

00:17:04.460 --> 00:17:07.580
What I began to realize after
I worked here for a while

00:17:07.580 --> 00:17:12.200
is that very rarely did
anybody come in with the body,

00:17:12.200 --> 00:17:14.680
to be here for the final moments.

00:17:14.680 --> 00:17:17.503
It felt weird to me that it was just me.

00:17:19.590 --> 00:17:22.550
There's no connection to the
actual physical corpse at all.

00:17:22.550 --> 00:17:26.296
And I think there's a
huge problem with that.

00:17:26.296 --> 00:17:30.260
[solemn string music]

00:17:30.260 --> 00:17:32.260
The corpse is so important.

00:17:32.260 --> 00:17:34.963
We need to get it back
into our death rituals.

00:17:36.930 --> 00:17:40.900
It allows us to really
see the person transition

00:17:40.900 --> 00:17:42.331
out of this life.

00:17:46.100 --> 00:17:48.500
It allows you to confront
your own mortality.

00:17:48.500 --> 00:17:51.060
There's no better memento mori

00:17:51.060 --> 00:17:53.430
or a reminder that you're gonna die

00:17:53.430 --> 00:17:56.240
than a dead body and being
in the same room with it

00:17:56.240 --> 00:17:58.693
in a calm, rational way.

00:18:00.770 --> 00:18:03.360
If you look at other cultures,

00:18:03.360 --> 00:18:05.710
some of what they do seems very foreign

00:18:05.710 --> 00:18:08.550
and very creepy and horrendous to us--

00:18:08.550 --> 00:18:12.802
the fact of keeping the body
in the home for days or a week,

00:18:12.802 --> 00:18:14.920
or having the body being eaten--

00:18:14.920 --> 00:18:17.428
consumed by vultures, or something.

00:18:17.428 --> 00:18:19.044
But they all have these

00:18:19.044 --> 00:18:22.560
complex belief mechanisms behind that.

00:18:22.560 --> 00:18:25.520
And they have very good reasons

00:18:25.520 --> 00:18:27.590
for what they do, and meaningful reasons

00:18:27.590 --> 00:18:29.390
for what they do with the dead body.

00:18:30.713 --> 00:18:33.648
[serene piano music]

00:18:33.648 --> 00:18:35.933
We need ritual around death.

00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:42.962
Going to visit a cemetery,
especially a cemetery

00:18:42.962 --> 00:18:46.486
that you think you might
eventually be buried in,

00:18:46.486 --> 00:18:49.470
is a really incredible opportunity

00:18:49.470 --> 00:18:51.823
to sit with the idea of your death,

00:18:53.550 --> 00:18:57.203
thinking about your body
being there under the ground.

00:18:59.310 --> 00:19:01.650
And if it were underground right now,

00:19:01.650 --> 00:19:03.113
would you be okay with that?

00:19:04.685 --> 00:19:07.102
[serene piano music]

00:19:09.390 --> 00:19:12.343
What I think about my own death changes.

00:19:14.410 --> 00:19:16.840
And I try and go back to
it every couple months

00:19:16.840 --> 00:19:20.140
and maybe even take an
afternoon so if I start weeping

00:19:20.140 --> 00:19:23.180
or think about losing my
mortal self and it causes

00:19:23.180 --> 00:19:25.520
all of these things to
happen, that's okay.

00:19:25.520 --> 00:19:28.442
And to let that happen,
and to try and come out to

00:19:28.442 --> 00:19:31.410
a little clearing where you
can live for a little longer,

00:19:31.410 --> 00:19:33.210
being comfortable with your death.

00:19:37.080 --> 00:19:39.610
When I'm dead, I'm dead.

00:19:39.610 --> 00:19:42.313
It's like the old film reel flapping,

00:19:42.313 --> 00:19:45.190
and it just goes white and
the screen just flickers

00:19:45.190 --> 00:19:47.690
and I just sail off into nothingness.

00:19:47.690 --> 00:19:49.430
And that brings me a lot of comfort

00:19:49.430 --> 00:19:50.890
that doesn't bring everyone comfort,

00:19:50.890 --> 00:19:52.210
but it brings me comfort.

00:19:52.210 --> 00:19:54.083
And it is a narrative, and it is real.

00:19:55.334 --> 00:19:57.751
[serene piano music]

00:20:19.990 --> 00:20:22.200
- I'm a storyteller and a liar

00:20:22.200 --> 00:20:24.183
and an elaborator, a colorist.

00:20:26.040 --> 00:20:31.040
How can I be hostile against
religion that uses storytelling

00:20:31.960 --> 00:20:35.920
as the Trojan horse in which
to smuggle into your heart

00:20:35.920 --> 00:20:39.093
some sense of solace in the face of death?

00:20:41.530 --> 00:20:43.880
My novel "Being Dead",
the book about death,

00:20:46.160 --> 00:20:50.510
starts with this dead couple
who have been brutally murdered

00:20:50.510 --> 00:20:53.043
when they were making love on the beach.

00:20:54.821 --> 00:20:57.930
[serene orchestral music]

00:21:01.300 --> 00:21:04.353
The bodies were discovered straight away--

00:21:05.280 --> 00:21:09.393
a beetle first, Claudatus maxima, a male.

00:21:10.740 --> 00:21:13.790
Then the raiding parties
arrived, drawn by the summons

00:21:13.790 --> 00:21:17.523
of fresh wounds and the smell of urine.

00:21:18.840 --> 00:21:22.460
Swag flies and crabs,
which normally would have

00:21:22.460 --> 00:21:26.410
had to make do with rat dung
and the carcasses of fish

00:21:26.410 --> 00:21:27.310
for their carrion.

00:21:28.560 --> 00:21:30.150
Then a gull.

00:21:30.150 --> 00:21:33.610
No one except newspapers could say

00:21:33.610 --> 00:21:36.710
that there was only
death amongst the dunes

00:21:36.710 --> 00:21:38.527
that summer's afternoon.

00:21:39.394 --> 00:21:41.811
[serene orchestral music]

00:21:49.260 --> 00:21:51.520
What I wanted to do with
this story was to go

00:21:51.520 --> 00:21:54.970
to the really darkest
corners of our lives,

00:21:54.970 --> 00:21:58.023
to visit death in all
of its biological truth.

00:21:59.670 --> 00:22:04.090
For me, that is the whole story narrative

00:22:04.090 --> 00:22:05.313
that I've come up with.

00:22:06.480 --> 00:22:10.110
Nature has the last say, and takes us back

00:22:10.110 --> 00:22:15.053
and greens us up again even
though our lives are over.

00:22:18.630 --> 00:22:20.643
My father died in 1979.

00:22:21.720 --> 00:22:25.163
I've written about him in a
hidden way through my books.

00:22:26.620 --> 00:22:28.320
Here I am now in 2014,

00:22:28.320 --> 00:22:30.763
still talking with love about my father.

00:22:35.760 --> 00:22:38.993
Came away from his funeral
pretty bruised, really.

00:22:42.200 --> 00:22:44.521
There was something about my reaction

00:22:44.521 --> 00:22:47.255
in which I thought, I
wish I was religious.

00:22:47.255 --> 00:22:49.020
That was the first time in my life.

00:22:49.020 --> 00:22:50.370
I thought, I wish I was religious,

00:22:50.370 --> 00:22:51.625
because then I'd have the answer

00:22:51.625 --> 00:22:52.840
and I'd known what to have done.

00:22:52.840 --> 00:22:55.904
And we would have sorted this problem out.

00:22:55.904 --> 00:22:58.450
And I wouldn't have expected
religion to have provided

00:22:58.450 --> 00:23:00.780
all the answers and to
have made everything okay,

00:23:00.780 --> 00:23:05.220
because the armor that
religion provides you with

00:23:05.220 --> 00:23:06.580
has chinks in it.

00:23:06.580 --> 00:23:10.548
But then nevertheless it is
armor, and it does not stop

00:23:10.548 --> 00:23:14.023
some of those arrows
penetrating into your flesh.

00:23:16.210 --> 00:23:18.853
My dad came from quite a
working class background.

00:23:21.010 --> 00:23:23.623
His father made him work,
selling fish off a barrow.

00:23:24.870 --> 00:23:27.430
He didn't go to school
from the age of 12 onwards,

00:23:27.430 --> 00:23:29.720
and didn't learn to read properly.

00:23:29.720 --> 00:23:31.700
When he was reading us our first books,

00:23:31.700 --> 00:23:34.623
he was learning to read as
we were learning to read.

00:23:36.160 --> 00:23:39.202
One of the things we're aware
of is that when our father,

00:23:39.202 --> 00:23:42.450
who was deeply interested in
literature and art and music,

00:23:42.450 --> 00:23:44.290
was introducing us to those things,

00:23:44.290 --> 00:23:46.883
he was also introducing
himself to those things.

00:23:50.530 --> 00:23:53.350
Somehow or other that made me
feel very stitched into my dad

00:23:53.350 --> 00:23:55.223
and really appreciative of him.

00:23:57.740 --> 00:24:00.040
He was a great companion
to go on a walk with.

00:24:00.962 --> 00:24:02.269
My dad was like, 'What's that tree?,"

00:24:02.269 --> 00:24:04.361
or, "What's that flower?"

00:24:05.750 --> 00:24:07.950
The times when we were most happy was when

00:24:07.950 --> 00:24:10.600
we were encountering natural
history with each other.

00:24:12.830 --> 00:24:16.310
My dad was political
and he was a socialist,

00:24:16.310 --> 00:24:17.360
trade union activist.

00:24:19.850 --> 00:24:21.830
So he saw everything in class terms,

00:24:21.830 --> 00:24:24.200
and everything that was
controlled by the ruling class

00:24:24.200 --> 00:24:26.060
he was hostile to.

00:24:26.060 --> 00:24:28.290
The church was controlled
by the ruling class.

00:24:28.290 --> 00:24:31.420
God was controlled by the ruling class.

00:24:31.420 --> 00:24:33.463
He was a working class atheist.

00:24:34.460 --> 00:24:38.560
This man whose atheism
I had admired so much,

00:24:38.560 --> 00:24:41.440
I now recognize that that
atheism was kind of a striking

00:24:41.440 --> 00:24:43.640
of an attitude rather than something

00:24:43.640 --> 00:24:45.343
that had any real depth to it.

00:24:47.140 --> 00:24:48.720
It wasn't granite hard.

00:24:48.720 --> 00:24:51.333
It was flimsy and class-based.

00:24:52.920 --> 00:24:54.460
And he didn't have any way

00:24:54.460 --> 00:24:56.080
in which he was going to deal with death.

00:24:56.080 --> 00:24:58.623
He'd never thought about
death in spiritual terms.

00:24:59.860 --> 00:25:02.800
When he knew that he was dying of cancer,

00:25:02.800 --> 00:25:06.800
he made it very clear that when he died,

00:25:06.800 --> 00:25:08.650
they weren't gonna be no members
of the ruling class there.

00:25:08.650 --> 00:25:11.350
In other words there were
not gonna be any hymns,

00:25:11.350 --> 00:25:14.930
there was not gonna be any
vicar, that's for sure.

00:25:14.930 --> 00:25:17.110
He didn't even want any
guests because he didn't want

00:25:17.110 --> 00:25:18.370
any fuss being made.

00:25:18.370 --> 00:25:20.320
He didn't want any flowers.

00:25:20.320 --> 00:25:24.940
And the instruction he
gave was that when he died,

00:25:24.940 --> 00:25:28.620
he should be cremated at
the co-op crematorium.

00:25:28.620 --> 00:25:31.090
You know, it had to be
socialist crematorium.

00:25:31.090 --> 00:25:35.290
And we should not even collect his ashes.

00:25:35.290 --> 00:25:38.088
Oh, you know, that is bad.

00:25:39.271 --> 00:25:42.155
[gentle piano music]

00:25:47.760 --> 00:25:50.232
It was the bleakest thing that
we could possibly have done

00:25:50.232 --> 00:25:54.910
to mark the end of this
curmudgeonly, unique,

00:25:54.910 --> 00:25:56.393
warm-spirited man.

00:26:00.980 --> 00:26:03.980
And I remember that day as being
kind of the worst day ever.

00:26:06.570 --> 00:26:10.800
We just foolishly just
let him roll down the ramp

00:26:10.800 --> 00:26:12.453
and turn into smoke and dust.

00:26:15.740 --> 00:26:18.280
And I don't think there's
been a day since that day

00:26:18.280 --> 00:26:21.873
that I've not regretted it and
knew that that was a mistake.

00:26:26.900 --> 00:26:29.250
That point was the time
when I started questioning

00:26:29.250 --> 00:26:32.500
my own atheism, and wanting to come up

00:26:32.500 --> 00:26:37.500
with a version of atheism
which could offer the comforts

00:26:38.212 --> 00:26:41.190
that the great narrative
religions have offered

00:26:41.190 --> 00:26:43.013
so efficiently over the millennia.

00:26:46.170 --> 00:26:48.311
The key thing about it for me was that

00:26:48.311 --> 00:26:49.911
these stories don't have to be true--

00:26:51.760 --> 00:26:54.080
the narratives of comfort
in the Jewish religion,

00:26:54.080 --> 00:26:55.870
the Christian religion,
the Muslim religion,

00:26:55.870 --> 00:26:57.660
the Indian religions.

00:26:57.660 --> 00:27:01.090
The important thing is not
that the story is true,

00:27:01.090 --> 00:27:02.633
but the comfort is real.

00:27:03.983 --> 00:27:06.350
[gentle piano music]

00:27:06.350 --> 00:27:08.567
Just because you're a scientific person.

00:27:08.567 --> 00:27:11.370
You don't have to come up
with a non-fiction story.

00:27:11.370 --> 00:27:13.170
You can come up with something fictional,

00:27:13.170 --> 00:27:15.773
but the comfort has to be
real, that was the challenge.

00:27:15.773 --> 00:27:17.320
I wasn't looking for the truth.

00:27:17.320 --> 00:27:19.563
I was looking for real comfort.

00:27:25.260 --> 00:27:29.040
Soon after he died and we
were cleaning his stuff up

00:27:29.040 --> 00:27:33.710
and throwing things out, and
I felt my dad's trousers,

00:27:33.710 --> 00:27:35.423
I felt a weight in the pocket.

00:27:37.330 --> 00:27:39.290
I plunged my hand in and I pulled it out,

00:27:39.290 --> 00:27:40.573
and it was an acorn.

00:27:41.506 --> 00:27:44.760
The seed of a British oak tree.

00:27:44.760 --> 00:27:48.350
Now, my dad, whenever you
went for a walk with him,

00:27:48.350 --> 00:27:50.370
would have a pocket full of acorns.

00:27:50.370 --> 00:27:53.130
And without any sense of introspection,

00:27:53.130 --> 00:27:55.260
he would throw them into the hedgerow

00:27:55.260 --> 00:27:58.550
and grind them into the
ground with his heel,

00:27:58.550 --> 00:28:00.810
planting the landscape with oaks,

00:28:00.810 --> 00:28:03.770
the tree that survives longest
in the United Kingdom--

00:28:03.770 --> 00:28:06.190
they can be 400 or 500 years old.

00:28:06.190 --> 00:28:09.600
And there was my father with
no sense of before and after,

00:28:10.530 --> 00:28:15.530
a simple man, nevertheless
planting oaks for the future.

00:28:17.330 --> 00:28:21.050
And there's a stalwart square of oaks

00:28:21.050 --> 00:28:23.893
that my dad had planted
throughout his life.

00:28:26.756 --> 00:28:30.180
If you wanted evidence
of a life well lived,

00:28:30.180 --> 00:28:33.210
that's what he's left.

00:28:33.210 --> 00:28:34.323
That's his gift.

00:28:36.670 --> 00:28:39.270
It goes to the heart of him as a man.

00:28:39.270 --> 00:28:41.730
And I think it also goes to
the heart of our experience

00:28:41.730 --> 00:28:45.840
of the world-- that if you
start to see the world,

00:28:45.840 --> 00:28:49.110
which is what I had to do,
if I started to see the world

00:28:49.110 --> 00:28:52.510
not as an outside job, in other words

00:28:52.510 --> 00:28:55.077
a universe created by God, but everything

00:28:55.077 --> 00:28:57.978
and it was an inside job-- in other words,

00:28:57.978 --> 00:29:01.420
the world itself created
and recreated itself

00:29:01.420 --> 00:29:03.590
through natural processes--

00:29:03.590 --> 00:29:08.297
then the idea of a seed
and a tree says it all.

00:29:08.297 --> 00:29:10.980
[droning ambient music]

00:29:10.980 --> 00:29:13.870
I now know what it is
that gives me comfort

00:29:13.870 --> 00:29:15.023
in the face of death.

00:29:17.930 --> 00:29:20.570
Finding that acorn in my dad's pocket

00:29:21.470 --> 00:29:23.443
was the absolute clue for me.

00:29:27.460 --> 00:29:29.103
It's not meaningless.

00:29:31.870 --> 00:29:33.910
There is that continuity there.

00:29:34.908 --> 00:29:36.183
There is a future.

00:29:37.373 --> 00:29:40.064
[gentle ambient music]

00:29:41.540 --> 00:29:46.540
I learned with my father that
if you are really to love

00:29:46.542 --> 00:29:49.120
and understand the natural world,

00:29:49.120 --> 00:29:52.123
you have to embrace it all, or none of it.

00:29:57.590 --> 00:30:01.850
You can't just only embrace
kingfishers and rainbows

00:30:01.850 --> 00:30:03.813
and daffodils, 'cause that's too easy.

00:30:06.170 --> 00:30:09.350
If you are prepared to
look at the soil and study

00:30:09.350 --> 00:30:11.870
the lice that run around your body,

00:30:11.870 --> 00:30:14.130
treat them all with interest,

00:30:14.130 --> 00:30:16.790
what you're doing is you're
training yourself to embrace

00:30:16.790 --> 00:30:18.690
the whole of the natural world.

00:30:18.690 --> 00:30:21.950
And then you end up not
feeling disgust at all,

00:30:21.950 --> 00:30:24.033
because you have a rounded view.

00:30:25.950 --> 00:30:27.787
For me, that helps a hell of a lot.

00:30:34.725 --> 00:30:37.950
You're not gonna be able to
deal with death entirely.

00:30:37.950 --> 00:30:42.233
All you can do is kind of
defend yourself in a few places.

00:30:46.960 --> 00:30:48.730
So I thought I would write a book

00:30:48.730 --> 00:30:50.978
about the death of my parents,

00:30:50.978 --> 00:30:54.775
and try and find an
afterlife for my parents.

00:30:55.800 --> 00:30:58.167
[gentle piano music]

00:30:59.094 --> 00:31:00.740
I carry in my wallet--

00:31:00.740 --> 00:31:02.720
and I've carried it all
my years in my wallet--

00:31:02.720 --> 00:31:04.570
a little photograph of me and my dad,

00:31:05.920 --> 00:31:10.920
little tousled head, three-year-old
me in my father's arm.

00:31:11.223 --> 00:31:13.654
And he's standing in the sea.

00:31:13.654 --> 00:31:18.654
There I am, absolutely safely
encased in my father's arms

00:31:19.200 --> 00:31:21.850
as if that can never end.

00:31:21.850 --> 00:31:24.853
And for me, that is
the moment that I think

00:31:24.853 --> 00:31:27.570
that I will rediscover when
I walk along the beach,

00:31:27.570 --> 00:31:31.442
that I will find me in my
father's arms in the sea.

00:31:31.442 --> 00:31:35.090
[gentle piano music]

00:31:35.090 --> 00:31:39.870
That picture is not just
my personal picture.

00:31:39.870 --> 00:31:42.400
The photograph of the
family by the seaside,

00:31:42.400 --> 00:31:44.930
and the children being held by the father

00:31:44.930 --> 00:31:47.040
or the mother while they stand in the sea,

00:31:47.040 --> 00:31:49.076
is almost universal.

00:31:50.301 --> 00:31:53.218
[gentle piano music]

00:31:59.010 --> 00:32:03.110
When my wife saw that
photograph in my wallet,

00:32:03.110 --> 00:32:05.730
she went to her wallet and she brought out

00:32:05.730 --> 00:32:09.090
an identical photograph, and
she's standing in the sea

00:32:09.090 --> 00:32:12.270
next to her mum, holding her mom's hand.

00:32:12.270 --> 00:32:15.300
My wife's mum died within three months

00:32:15.300 --> 00:32:16.850
of that photograph being taken.

00:32:19.830 --> 00:32:22.650
So what I thought that I would do was that

00:32:22.650 --> 00:32:27.233
I would find that beach
in a story in my novel.

00:32:28.126 --> 00:32:29.170
And I would find my father,

00:32:29.170 --> 00:32:31.123
and I would find my father's arms.

00:32:33.010 --> 00:32:35.283
And I would also find my wife's mother.

00:32:36.430 --> 00:32:39.360
This novel would be a gift to my wife.

00:32:39.360 --> 00:32:42.170
I would give my wife
something she never had,

00:32:42.170 --> 00:32:43.433
which was her mum.

00:32:44.610 --> 00:32:46.518
[gentle piano music]

00:32:47.460 --> 00:32:49.380
This is the arrogance of writers.

00:32:49.380 --> 00:32:52.020
I would find the place
where all of our parents

00:32:52.020 --> 00:32:54.093
and all of our dead dogs
and all of our dead friends

00:32:54.093 --> 00:32:56.770
and all of those people
that we've loved and lost

00:32:56.770 --> 00:32:59.245
can be relocated.

00:32:59.245 --> 00:33:01.460
This is just a story,
this is just a novel,

00:33:01.460 --> 00:33:03.630
but I'm sure that it's
reverberating in your mind

00:33:03.630 --> 00:33:06.660
with kind of the Christian
stories and religious stories

00:33:06.660 --> 00:33:10.440
about being reunited with people
that we've loved and lost.

00:33:10.440 --> 00:33:12.690
So that was what I did.

00:33:12.690 --> 00:33:14.870
And I wrote 40,000 words.

00:33:14.870 --> 00:33:17.560
And the hubristic end to
this story is that the novel

00:33:17.560 --> 00:33:19.760
was a total failure and
had to be abandoned.

00:33:24.260 --> 00:33:26.583
For the moment, that's
unfinished business.

00:33:34.100 --> 00:33:37.440
I want to think that there's
some kind of eternity,

00:33:37.440 --> 00:33:38.560
a kind of immortality,

00:33:38.560 --> 00:33:40.960
but I'm sensible enough
to know immortality

00:33:40.960 --> 00:33:42.253
and eternity are wrong.

00:33:43.460 --> 00:33:45.373
Sometime you are going to die.

00:33:47.840 --> 00:33:52.190
What happens when I go to the
doctors, and the doctor comes

00:33:52.190 --> 00:33:56.300
through the room with my
chest x-ray, and he puts it up

00:33:56.300 --> 00:33:59.760
on the light and there's
the cancer in my chest.

00:33:59.760 --> 00:34:04.430
So, how good are these
narratives of comfort then?

00:34:04.430 --> 00:34:07.763
So I fear that everything
I've told you is gonna fail.

00:34:09.330 --> 00:34:13.190
And I make sense of that
inevitability by reminding myself

00:34:13.190 --> 00:34:16.540
again and again that I've
won a kind of a lottery.

00:34:16.540 --> 00:34:18.230
So what's to be sorry for?

00:34:18.230 --> 00:34:22.290
The alternative to this
situation that I am sitting here,

00:34:22.290 --> 00:34:25.330
age 68, with little of my life left

00:34:25.330 --> 00:34:29.690
and the great nothingness coming in,

00:34:29.690 --> 00:34:32.000
the solace that I can
think I can provide myself

00:34:32.000 --> 00:34:35.150
is to remind myself that of all the eggs

00:34:35.150 --> 00:34:37.342
that there were in the universe,

00:34:37.342 --> 00:34:39.620
of all the sperm there is in the universe,

00:34:39.620 --> 00:34:41.540
of all the places that there could be,

00:34:41.540 --> 00:34:43.630
of all the times there could be,

00:34:43.630 --> 00:34:46.650
of all the creatures that
there could have been,

00:34:46.650 --> 00:34:51.570
it is me and it is here and it is now.

00:34:51.570 --> 00:34:53.500
And the chances of that happening

00:34:53.500 --> 00:34:58.050
in the great big unthinking
teaming world of possibilities

00:34:58.050 --> 00:35:01.873
and sperm and eggs and
time, are infinitesimal.

00:35:07.320 --> 00:35:10.183
So we should never lose sight of the fact

00:35:10.183 --> 00:35:12.203
that we are that lucky.

00:35:18.930 --> 00:35:20.620
I don't live my life like this, though.

00:35:20.620 --> 00:35:22.070
I don't go around having conversations

00:35:22.070 --> 00:35:23.700
like this with friends.

00:35:23.700 --> 00:35:26.000
I don't go into the pub
and talk at this level.

00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:27.510
I wouldn't talk like this to my wife.

00:35:27.510 --> 00:35:29.020
She'd say, "Get a grip."

00:35:29.020 --> 00:35:30.490
You know, we have interior lives.

00:35:30.490 --> 00:35:34.650
So all that's happened today
is-- very unusually for me,

00:35:34.650 --> 00:35:36.770
I've revealed my interior life.

00:35:36.770 --> 00:35:38.020
That sounds a very pompous thing to say,

00:35:38.020 --> 00:35:39.830
but it's the fact of the matter.

00:35:39.830 --> 00:35:42.520
We don't live our lives
having these conversations.

00:35:42.520 --> 00:35:44.463
These are rare conversations.

00:35:46.258 --> 00:35:48.270
And isn't it odd that we
don't have these conversations

00:35:48.270 --> 00:35:49.120
in these big issues?

00:35:49.120 --> 00:35:50.440
We don't grapple with them.

00:35:50.440 --> 00:35:51.273
I'm embarrassed.

00:35:51.273 --> 00:35:55.240
I've embarrassed myself today
talking so self-regardingly

00:35:55.240 --> 00:35:57.280
about these things.

00:35:57.280 --> 00:35:58.660
I don't think that's
just an English thing.

00:35:58.660 --> 00:36:01.410
I mean, we are particularly
anti-intellectual in England.

00:36:01.410 --> 00:36:03.610
We consider it ill-mannered
to be serious about anything

00:36:03.610 --> 00:36:04.843
for more than a minute.

00:36:09.860 --> 00:36:10.960
But in our hearts,

00:36:10.960 --> 00:36:13.623
we have these private
conversations, I'm sure.

00:36:16.223 --> 00:36:18.200
Yeah, so I feel a bit embarrassed

00:36:18.200 --> 00:36:20.973
but I also feel a bit shriven.

00:36:27.466 --> 00:36:30.608
[gentle ambient music and vocalizing]

00:36:38.600 --> 00:36:41.080
- [Narrator] For Adam
Frank, death opened him up

00:36:41.080 --> 00:36:43.900
to the stars and shaped a narrative

00:36:43.900 --> 00:36:46.317
of adventure and possibility.

00:36:49.000 --> 00:36:51.030
- I'm absolutely agnostic about death,

00:36:51.030 --> 00:36:52.703
about what happens after death.

00:36:58.380 --> 00:37:00.390
I would consider myself an atheist,

00:37:00.390 --> 00:37:02.880
but when it comes to death,

00:37:02.880 --> 00:37:06.397
the idea of taking a
strident, knowing position

00:37:06.397 --> 00:37:08.327
just seems a little antithetical

00:37:08.327 --> 00:37:10.583
to the whole scientific
enterprise in some sense.

00:37:12.000 --> 00:37:13.640
Death is really--

00:37:13.640 --> 00:37:16.143
it's what wraps around
all of our questions.

00:37:17.480 --> 00:37:20.303
It's the central mystery.

00:37:24.310 --> 00:37:27.510
My brother's death put me on a path.

00:37:27.510 --> 00:37:31.393
It opened me up to this
enigma that inhabits all life.

00:37:34.370 --> 00:37:39.110
We have all of this care
and concern and fear

00:37:39.110 --> 00:37:42.713
and anxiety and love and joy,
and then it just goes away.

00:37:44.700 --> 00:37:47.720
Sometimes I imagine-- when I'm meditating,

00:37:47.720 --> 00:37:50.470
I'll imagine, like, the
asteroid with my name on it,

00:37:50.470 --> 00:37:53.475
or the meteorite that's
out there right now

00:37:53.475 --> 00:37:56.110
on some crazy orbit and is
just about to be tugged by Mars

00:37:56.110 --> 00:37:58.390
so that it changes its orbit
and it's heading for me.

00:37:58.390 --> 00:37:59.780
So that, like, I'm gonna
be driving down the road

00:37:59.780 --> 00:38:02.067
some random time, BAM!

00:38:02.067 --> 00:38:05.941
And, y'know, right?
'Cause that's sort of--

00:38:05.941 --> 00:38:09.200
that is the instantiation for
me of the randomness of death.

00:38:09.200 --> 00:38:11.040
There's just some random
chunk of rock out there

00:38:11.040 --> 00:38:12.440
that's got my name on it.

00:38:12.440 --> 00:38:14.900
So that the idea that at any moment,

00:38:14.900 --> 00:38:17.768
the contract can be canceled, you can go.

00:38:17.768 --> 00:38:21.501
[thunder crashing]
[raindrops splashing]

00:38:26.910 --> 00:38:29.535
In our house in New Jersey we had a porch,

00:38:29.535 --> 00:38:31.720
and everybody sort of hung
out there alot in the summer.

00:38:31.720 --> 00:38:34.020
And there was a torrential rainstorm.

00:38:34.020 --> 00:38:36.270
And I remember my father
saw my terror and he said,

00:38:36.270 --> 00:38:39.740
"No, no, no, wait, let me
tell you what thunder is."

00:38:39.740 --> 00:38:42.293
And he gave this beautiful,
cogent explanation--

00:38:43.400 --> 00:38:46.610
the electron streaming through
the air, super heating it,

00:38:46.610 --> 00:38:47.810
forcing the air to explode.

00:38:47.810 --> 00:38:49.730
It was just a great image.

00:38:49.730 --> 00:38:52.870
And it was like, oh, wow, yeah, whatever.

00:38:52.870 --> 00:38:54.470
Like, it's not-- so it's a loud noise.

00:38:54.470 --> 00:38:56.170
That's all it is, is a loud noise.

00:38:58.490 --> 00:39:00.480
That idea that there are explanations,

00:39:00.480 --> 00:39:04.253
and the explanations take
away the uncertainty.

00:39:05.730 --> 00:39:08.710
That became very important
to me, that in some sense,

00:39:08.710 --> 00:39:10.630
by knowing what's actually happening,

00:39:10.630 --> 00:39:15.100
it can alleviate some of the sense of

00:39:15.100 --> 00:39:17.653
fear, despair, anxiety.

00:39:23.330 --> 00:39:25.452
I was often being picked
on, or I was often--

00:39:25.452 --> 00:39:28.633
I was getting beat up a
lot in the neighborhood.

00:39:29.560 --> 00:39:32.390
My brother David was seven
years older than I was,

00:39:33.706 --> 00:39:36.350
and he was my protector
because he was a big guy.

00:39:36.350 --> 00:39:39.740
And I remember him --like
one time when somebody

00:39:39.740 --> 00:39:42.313
was coming after me for
whatever, and I ran home.

00:39:43.150 --> 00:39:44.940
And I remember David just
stepping out of the house

00:39:44.940 --> 00:39:47.540
and the dude who was
chasing me just stopped.

00:39:48.840 --> 00:39:49.673
And David didn't even say anything,

00:39:49.673 --> 00:39:51.620
the guy just turned
around and walked away.

00:39:51.620 --> 00:39:55.940
So he was really-- he was the
guy who was protecting me.

00:39:55.940 --> 00:39:57.883
He was paying attention, in some sense.

00:39:59.080 --> 00:40:01.080
And he took me to the baseball games,

00:40:01.080 --> 00:40:03.040
he turned me on to the Beatles.

00:40:03.040 --> 00:40:05.403
His presence in my life
was really important.

00:40:06.250 --> 00:40:09.380
And then when I was nine,

00:40:09.380 --> 00:40:11.993
he was killed in a car
accident by a drunk driver.

00:40:14.770 --> 00:40:17.780
The loss of my brother, in so many ways,

00:40:17.780 --> 00:40:20.680
marked a turning point for me.

00:40:20.680 --> 00:40:23.990
That moment, that changed everything.

00:40:23.990 --> 00:40:27.890
I can definitely say there
was before David's death,

00:40:27.890 --> 00:40:29.830
and after David's death.

00:40:29.830 --> 00:40:33.970
And it's hard to even to
express what the loss meant,

00:40:33.970 --> 00:40:37.100
because it did, it just-- it
completely redirected my life.

00:40:37.100 --> 00:40:38.970
I was alone, in many ways.

00:40:38.970 --> 00:40:40.372
There was nobody in the
house kinda who was gonna be

00:40:40.372 --> 00:40:41.688
paying attention anymore.

00:40:43.540 --> 00:40:47.840
And it was just, it was...

00:40:47.840 --> 00:40:49.330
At nine years old, you just don't know

00:40:49.330 --> 00:40:50.840
what the hell is going on.

00:40:50.840 --> 00:40:52.150
You don't really understand it.

00:40:52.150 --> 00:40:54.000
You know something has happened.

00:40:54.000 --> 00:40:58.730
And the idea that he's gone,
he's just irrevocably gone?

00:40:58.730 --> 00:41:01.270
It just takes so much time to process--

00:41:01.270 --> 00:41:02.993
if I ever processed it.

00:41:04.302 --> 00:41:07.490
[sorrowful orchestral music]

00:41:07.490 --> 00:41:12.333
There's this ache, this
unresolvable absence.

00:41:17.910 --> 00:41:18.743
I still have it,

00:41:18.743 --> 00:41:21.096
it's a little thing I wrote
where it said something like,

00:41:21.096 --> 00:41:23.730
"Love can be good, but it can also be bad.

00:41:23.730 --> 00:41:25.320
I lost my brother David today.

00:41:25.320 --> 00:41:26.153
It hurts."

00:41:27.277 --> 00:41:29.694
[sorrowful orchestral music]

00:41:34.410 --> 00:41:36.260
My experience of my brother's death

00:41:36.260 --> 00:41:39.043
certainly opened me up
to the weirdness of life.

00:41:42.708 --> 00:41:45.530
I didn't feel some sort of
existential dread over that.

00:41:45.530 --> 00:41:50.530
It was just sort of an overwhelming
sense of irrefutability

00:41:53.159 --> 00:41:55.909
[ethereal ambient music]

00:41:58.090 --> 00:42:00.313
My love of the stars started very early.

00:42:03.070 --> 00:42:06.543
The beauty of the stars, the
sense of calling to them--

00:42:10.080 --> 00:42:13.130
I think because of the
difficulty of my childhood,

00:42:13.130 --> 00:42:15.120
I thought of the stars as
my friends, in some sense.

00:42:15.120 --> 00:42:17.523
They were someone to talk
to, in this weird way.

00:42:17.523 --> 00:42:19.400
But really, with my brother's death

00:42:19.400 --> 00:42:22.770
and the fact of his
death, the timelessness,

00:42:22.770 --> 00:42:26.870
the apparent timelessness
of celestial objects,

00:42:26.870 --> 00:42:30.962
of the stars, became a source
of enormous comfort to me.

00:42:32.329 --> 00:42:34.746
[ethereal ambient music]

00:42:36.700 --> 00:42:39.563
The sense of vastness,
the sense of scale--

00:42:41.730 --> 00:42:42.870
because I was already learning about

00:42:42.870 --> 00:42:45.730
how big a light year was and
how immense the distances

00:42:45.730 --> 00:42:48.423
between the stars were and
the timescales involved.

00:42:49.280 --> 00:42:53.610
I found a great sense of
whatever is happening in my life,

00:42:53.610 --> 00:42:58.603
whatever loss I felt, it
just doesn't matter, y'know?

00:42:58.603 --> 00:43:01.511
It just-- I mean, it's there, it's real,

00:43:01.511 --> 00:43:03.950
but it has to be set against this context

00:43:05.260 --> 00:43:10.113
that lifted me out of the
feeling like I was stuck--

00:43:11.770 --> 00:43:14.833
stuck in my pain, stuck in my loss.

00:43:16.990 --> 00:43:19.110
Being part of that large cosmic drama

00:43:19.110 --> 00:43:22.243
made my little drama less painful.

00:43:24.283 --> 00:43:27.033
[clanging ambient music]

00:43:34.980 --> 00:43:36.690
I'll play these games with myself,

00:43:36.690 --> 00:43:38.300
start off with my own size-scale.

00:43:38.300 --> 00:43:39.900
I'll imagine, like, okay, I'm one meter.

00:43:39.900 --> 00:43:41.690
I'm approximately one meter.

00:43:41.690 --> 00:43:43.060
And then I go, okay, 100 meters.

00:43:43.060 --> 00:43:45.103
Well, 100 meters is
about a football field.

00:43:48.210 --> 00:43:50.150
Then I'll go out to like,
oh, the size of the Earth.

00:43:50.150 --> 00:43:51.810
Then I'll imagine, well,
what about the Earth's orbit,

00:43:51.810 --> 00:43:55.128
the Earth and Sun, the
entire solar system?

00:43:55.128 --> 00:43:59.033
Zoom past Mars, past Jupiter,
like I'm a spaceship.

00:44:00.926 --> 00:44:03.968
[spirited instrumental music]

00:44:11.805 --> 00:44:13.240
And then you get a sense for just

00:44:13.240 --> 00:44:15.423
how much more universe there is.

00:44:18.572 --> 00:44:19.450
How can that not be comforting?

00:44:19.450 --> 00:44:23.600
There's just so much more
universe than what we experience.

00:44:23.600 --> 00:44:25.550
So how can death be scary?

00:44:25.550 --> 00:44:28.351
It's just something that happens.

00:44:35.400 --> 00:44:38.880
I've spent a good part
of my professional career

00:44:38.880 --> 00:44:41.807
trying to understand what
happens to stars like the Sun

00:44:41.807 --> 00:44:43.120
as they die.

00:44:43.120 --> 00:44:45.910
I also picked up studying how stars form,

00:44:45.910 --> 00:44:49.030
and some of the most beautiful
images from astronomy

00:44:49.030 --> 00:44:51.890
are of these interstellar gas wombs.

00:44:51.890 --> 00:44:53.680
They're stellar wombs, in some sense,

00:44:53.680 --> 00:44:55.320
where you'll get hundreds,
thousands of stars

00:44:55.320 --> 00:44:57.283
all being formed at once.

00:45:03.200 --> 00:45:07.369
Science is a gateway to a sense of awe.

00:45:09.577 --> 00:45:13.369
[tranquil orchestral music
and operatic singing]

00:45:55.630 --> 00:45:58.800
I know many people look
at the stars and feel

00:45:58.800 --> 00:46:01.120
this sort of sense of existential terror

00:46:01.120 --> 00:46:04.420
of being absolutely alone
in a meaningless universe.

00:46:04.420 --> 00:46:06.170
And I don't understand that at all.

00:46:08.120 --> 00:46:10.580
Just because the cosmic drama is large

00:46:10.580 --> 00:46:15.344
doesn't mean that my place in
it is any less significant.

00:46:19.610 --> 00:46:23.700
In fact, it makes me feel
part of this vast drama,

00:46:23.700 --> 00:46:26.343
like I absolutely belong to the universe.

00:46:30.580 --> 00:46:33.180
But it's not like this
perspective on the stars

00:46:33.180 --> 00:46:34.403
makes fear go away.

00:46:35.420 --> 00:46:37.540
I certainly have all
that fear and anxiety.

00:46:37.540 --> 00:46:39.953
I am full of fear and anxiety every day,

00:46:39.953 --> 00:46:41.243
just like everybody else.

00:46:42.200 --> 00:46:43.890
I get a spot on my leg,
I'm like, "I'm gonna die!

00:46:43.890 --> 00:46:45.500
"That's it, I gotta go
to the doctor, this is--

00:46:45.500 --> 00:46:46.360
"I knew what it gonna happen.

00:46:46.360 --> 00:46:47.730
"See, I told you."

00:46:47.730 --> 00:46:52.730
So I'm absolutely-- my
perspective on the stars

00:46:53.040 --> 00:46:55.183
does not inoculate me.

00:46:56.060 --> 00:46:58.050
There's just a little bit less sting.

00:46:58.050 --> 00:46:59.733
There's less scorpion sting.

00:47:01.640 --> 00:47:03.940
We're gonna call it
B-E, and we're gonna use

00:47:05.791 --> 00:47:08.450
the flux freezing condition,
which is that the field

00:47:08.450 --> 00:47:11.310
at the maximum radius...

00:47:11.310 --> 00:47:14.100
So the other thing that
happened with my brother's death

00:47:14.100 --> 00:47:16.460
that launched me on a trajectory

00:47:16.460 --> 00:47:17.695
is that I was seeking certainty.

00:47:17.695 --> 00:47:21.060
I was seeking in astronomy
and in these laws of physics,

00:47:21.060 --> 00:47:24.080
I was seeking solace in them.

00:47:24.080 --> 00:47:28.559
And as I started to get
deeper into mathematics,

00:47:28.559 --> 00:47:29.667
I fell in love with it.

00:47:29.667 --> 00:47:32.530
And the fact that there were
these mathematical expressions,

00:47:32.530 --> 00:47:35.190
detailed mathematical expression
that described the world,

00:47:35.190 --> 00:47:37.800
described how the radiation from the sun,

00:47:37.800 --> 00:47:41.250
what its patterns of
energy would look like--

00:47:41.250 --> 00:47:44.637
I was struck by enormously,
and I became a Platonist.

00:47:45.580 --> 00:47:48.600
I came to believe that,
as Plato had argued,

00:47:48.600 --> 00:47:52.833
that there was a world of
ideals beyond this world,

00:47:54.063 --> 00:47:55.270
and these ideals were mathematical--

00:47:55.270 --> 00:47:58.020
y'know, every triangle
that we see is just kind of

00:47:58.020 --> 00:47:59.520
a crappy version of the ideal

00:47:59.520 --> 00:48:01.413
mathematically expressed triangle.

00:48:02.670 --> 00:48:05.493
When you're doing Maxwell's
equations-- y'know,

00:48:05.493 --> 00:48:07.910
which are the equations for
electromagnetism in light--

00:48:07.910 --> 00:48:10.590
what you're really doing is
you're reading the mind of God.

00:48:10.590 --> 00:48:13.174
You're thinking God's
thoughts because these--

00:48:13.174 --> 00:48:15.162
We don't, obviously, most
scientists wouldn't put--

00:48:15.162 --> 00:48:16.720
some would, but wouldn't say God--

00:48:16.720 --> 00:48:20.530
but just that these are
the eternal timeless laws

00:48:20.530 --> 00:48:22.380
built into the universe.

00:48:22.380 --> 00:48:24.100
The way I like to think
of it is, these are--

00:48:24.100 --> 00:48:26.350
the mathematical
expressions are the skeleton

00:48:26.350 --> 00:48:28.563
upon which the flesh of the world is hung.

00:48:31.140 --> 00:48:34.930
It's a beautiful idea, and very seductive

00:48:34.930 --> 00:48:36.627
for all of us as physicists.

00:48:36.627 --> 00:48:41.627
But as time went on, I kind
of became a lapsed Platonist.

00:48:42.420 --> 00:48:46.230
Wouldn't it be awesome if this
equation was timeless? Right?

00:48:46.230 --> 00:48:49.050
That I could write down these
equations and these things

00:48:49.050 --> 00:48:53.750
were immutable, and that
they lived beyond time.

00:48:53.750 --> 00:48:56.630
Oh my God, and I could contemplate them

00:48:56.630 --> 00:48:59.250
by reading them and learning about them,

00:48:59.250 --> 00:49:00.460
and learning how to manipulate them.

00:49:00.460 --> 00:49:05.460
I am actually working with the
alphabet of creation itself.

00:49:05.470 --> 00:49:09.273
You can see why that is so powerful.

00:49:14.120 --> 00:49:16.860
What the problem with that
view is, is that it becomes

00:49:16.860 --> 00:49:18.220
a kind of another kind of certainty

00:49:18.220 --> 00:49:20.970
and a kind of absolute certainty that--

00:49:20.970 --> 00:49:23.060
'Cause we're always seeking
the timeless, right?

00:49:23.060 --> 00:49:27.060
Because of death, we
yearn for the timeless,

00:49:27.060 --> 00:49:30.000
the idea that something
out there doesn't decay

00:49:30.000 --> 00:49:34.010
and doesn't change, and will
be there long after I'm there.

00:49:34.010 --> 00:49:37.000
And I just now have come
to believe that, actually,

00:49:37.000 --> 00:49:39.016
that's too simple a view.

00:49:40.408 --> 00:49:43.167
[gentle orchestral music]

00:49:48.520 --> 00:49:51.140
The lust for certainty is
the most damaging thing

00:49:51.140 --> 00:49:52.453
that humanity has.

00:49:55.620 --> 00:49:59.180
It's what drives people to
take these rigid stances.

00:49:59.180 --> 00:50:03.603
And it's in that rigidity
that so much violence occurs.

00:50:04.766 --> 00:50:07.824
[ominous ambient music]

00:50:27.470 --> 00:50:29.310
- This lust for the absolute,

00:50:29.310 --> 00:50:34.310
this thirst for knowing
what happens when we die

00:50:35.770 --> 00:50:36.813
is universal.

00:50:38.392 --> 00:50:40.150
That's the nature of being human.

00:50:41.760 --> 00:50:44.220
It's something that Christianity,

00:50:44.220 --> 00:50:48.030
the Old Testament and Judaism
have gone through in the past

00:50:49.660 --> 00:50:51.033
and throughout time.

00:50:53.330 --> 00:50:57.030
But there is a particular
challenge in today's times

00:50:57.030 --> 00:50:58.453
with a version of Islam,

00:50:59.640 --> 00:51:03.850
which seems to be specifically
vulnerable at the moment

00:51:03.850 --> 00:51:06.293
to this thirst.

00:51:21.050 --> 00:51:25.973
The fear of death, this
desire for certainty,

00:51:28.420 --> 00:51:30.363
led me into the darkest of places.

00:51:43.830 --> 00:51:48.500
I grew up in a relatively
middle-class to upper middle-class

00:51:48.500 --> 00:51:50.860
integrated British Pakistani family.

00:51:52.190 --> 00:51:56.140
From about the age of 15, I became aware

00:51:59.459 --> 00:52:02.623
of how close-- how
fragile my own life was.

00:52:04.394 --> 00:52:07.344
[tense ambient music]

00:52:12.610 --> 00:52:15.203
It was 1990 to 1995.

00:52:16.360 --> 00:52:18.590
A genocide began to unfold in Bosnia

00:52:18.590 --> 00:52:20.123
against Bosnian Muslims.

00:52:24.500 --> 00:52:26.990
That genocide really made me
start thinking about death

00:52:26.990 --> 00:52:27.823
in a different way.

00:52:27.823 --> 00:52:30.308
What if I, as a Muslim in the UK,

00:52:30.308 --> 00:52:32.733
started being targeted in that way?

00:52:34.455 --> 00:52:37.205
[tense ambient music]

00:52:38.180 --> 00:52:41.190
And it happened at the same
time when neo-Nazis skinheads

00:52:41.190 --> 00:52:43.220
in Essex where I was born

00:52:43.220 --> 00:52:46.163
would engage in what they
called "Paki-bashing."

00:52:48.430 --> 00:52:49.480
That was a sport to them.

00:52:49.480 --> 00:52:52.080
They would go around in
the back of white vans

00:52:52.080 --> 00:52:53.913
and look for people of color.

00:52:55.238 --> 00:52:56.771
Then they would jump out fully armed,

00:52:56.771 --> 00:52:58.830
with machetes and
hammers and screwdrivers.

00:53:03.520 --> 00:53:05.723
The first time they
attacked my group and me,

00:53:06.860 --> 00:53:08.800
we saw running towards us

00:53:08.800 --> 00:53:11.970
this group of men with Nazi salutes

00:53:11.970 --> 00:53:14.043
shouting racist slogans.

00:53:18.020 --> 00:53:20.370
I was walking around in those early days

00:53:20.370 --> 00:53:23.270
on the streets of Essex
with a bullseye on my face,

00:53:23.270 --> 00:53:25.830
because I can't shed the color of my skin.

00:53:25.830 --> 00:53:29.003
And so I felt that I was
literally being hunted.

00:53:32.570 --> 00:53:36.190
I became very mixed-up about identity.

00:53:36.190 --> 00:53:40.243
Was I British, was I
Pakistani, was I Muslim?

00:53:41.370 --> 00:53:46.370
And into that mix came
friends of mine who began

00:53:46.800 --> 00:53:49.340
giving me some of the
answers to these questions

00:53:49.340 --> 00:53:50.523
in a more certain way.

00:53:52.550 --> 00:53:55.120
They said Muslims are
under siege everywhere.

00:53:55.120 --> 00:53:57.530
And the solution to this
siege is to have a state

00:53:57.530 --> 00:53:59.720
that only looks after
and protects Muslims,

00:53:59.720 --> 00:54:01.460
and will fight on behalf of Muslims.

00:54:01.460 --> 00:54:03.200
The so-called caliphate.

00:54:03.200 --> 00:54:05.220
Now that made sense to me politically,

00:54:05.220 --> 00:54:08.490
to my young, naive, angry,
vulnerable teenage mind.

00:54:08.490 --> 00:54:09.780
It was a black and white answer

00:54:09.780 --> 00:54:11.780
to what I saw as a
black and white problem.

00:54:12.700 --> 00:54:15.890
But then equally or more importantly came

00:54:15.890 --> 00:54:17.433
the religious answer to this.

00:54:19.120 --> 00:54:22.120
You are of the chosen religion.

00:54:22.120 --> 00:54:24.900
You have chosen the truth, Islam,

00:54:24.900 --> 00:54:27.090
and you're going to Paradise.

00:54:27.090 --> 00:54:30.270
That embracing the afterlife in that way

00:54:30.270 --> 00:54:32.830
allowed me to really feel secure and safe

00:54:32.830 --> 00:54:34.223
in whatever happened next.

00:54:37.870 --> 00:54:40.173
So I joined the Islamist group.

00:54:41.440 --> 00:54:43.720
We would hold private study circles.

00:54:43.720 --> 00:54:46.180
Some of them would be on one topic alone,

00:54:46.180 --> 00:54:48.030
and that would be the topic of death.

00:54:50.350 --> 00:54:52.871
I remember in some of these study circles

00:54:52.871 --> 00:54:56.653
receiving vivid description
of the afterlife.

00:55:01.150 --> 00:55:02.010
On the day of judgment,

00:55:02.010 --> 00:55:05.043
I remember being told that
we would be petrified.

00:55:06.000 --> 00:55:08.520
There would be a burning
sun, right above us.

00:55:08.520 --> 00:55:11.820
We'd be drowning in our
own sweat, hoards of us,

00:55:11.820 --> 00:55:13.520
thousands of, millions of us

00:55:13.520 --> 00:55:15.490
that had been resurrected
at the same time.

00:55:15.490 --> 00:55:18.620
We'd be panicking, running
around, begging people

00:55:18.620 --> 00:55:21.170
to forgive us for the sins
we've committed against them.

00:55:24.770 --> 00:55:27.860
We'd have to cross
what's called the Siraat,

00:55:27.860 --> 00:55:32.310
which is the bridge from the
plane of the day of judgment

00:55:32.310 --> 00:55:33.950
to the reckoning with God.

00:55:33.950 --> 00:55:36.540
And the bridge is the width of a hair,

00:55:36.540 --> 00:55:38.560
and only the true believers could cross it

00:55:38.560 --> 00:55:39.860
without falling into Hell.

00:55:41.550 --> 00:55:44.973
And then we get to the
reckoning with God himself.

00:55:45.870 --> 00:55:48.943
Every single one of
our deeds is recounted,

00:55:49.900 --> 00:55:51.970
and it's all written in the ledger.

00:55:51.970 --> 00:55:53.600
But don't forget it recorded it all

00:55:53.600 --> 00:55:55.250
before you were even born,

00:55:55.250 --> 00:55:56.900
so those sins were already there.

00:55:58.813 --> 00:56:00.610
So then God says to me,

00:56:00.610 --> 00:56:02.590
"Do you deserve Paradise
because of your good deeds

00:56:02.590 --> 00:56:03.740
"or because of my mercy?"

00:56:04.850 --> 00:56:06.570
And obviously I'm gonna say, "My mercy,"

00:56:06.570 --> 00:56:08.063
because I'm shit-scared right now.

00:56:09.850 --> 00:56:11.600
I'm not sure I'm going to Paradise.

00:56:16.230 --> 00:56:19.195
There was one solution

00:56:19.195 --> 00:56:22.360
that will definitely
circumvent the uncertainty

00:56:22.360 --> 00:56:25.680
that comes with judgment,
and that was martyrdom.

00:56:26.910 --> 00:56:30.730
Martyrdom was a one way ticket, nonstop,

00:56:30.730 --> 00:56:31.893
directly to Paradise.

00:56:33.110 --> 00:56:35.740
While everyone else is waiting
for the day of reckoning,

00:56:35.740 --> 00:56:38.520
the martyrs will be small green birds

00:56:38.520 --> 00:56:40.420
flying around the throne of their Lord

00:56:41.370 --> 00:56:43.390
until the day of judgment.

00:56:43.390 --> 00:56:46.250
And then they will be resurrected
as fully formed beings

00:56:46.250 --> 00:56:47.453
straight in Paradise.

00:56:50.020 --> 00:56:52.160
This wasn't made up.

00:56:52.160 --> 00:56:55.476
The religious side was
true to traditional Muslim

00:56:55.476 --> 00:56:58.497
interpretations of the
faith in the afterlife.

00:57:02.150 --> 00:57:05.396
The innovation was to take
that religion and link it

00:57:05.396 --> 00:57:06.596
to a political ideology.

00:57:08.940 --> 00:57:12.563
And I saw then the power
of not fearing death--

00:57:13.850 --> 00:57:16.690
the power that I could
yield against my enemies

00:57:16.690 --> 00:57:19.610
in being so certain that
the truth was on my side

00:57:19.610 --> 00:57:21.520
that I was prepared to die for it.

00:57:21.520 --> 00:57:23.440
And it was the first life lesson.

00:57:25.380 --> 00:57:27.400
We had factions within Islamism.

00:57:27.400 --> 00:57:30.660
My faction didn't subscribe
to terrorism, which is why,

00:57:30.660 --> 00:57:32.320
thankfully, I never killed anyone

00:57:32.320 --> 00:57:33.920
and I have no blood on my hands.

00:57:35.600 --> 00:57:39.330
The only way I could get martyrdom
was by holding to account

00:57:39.330 --> 00:57:43.243
some of the dictators that I
was attempting to destabilize.

00:57:45.940 --> 00:57:48.123
If they killed me, then I'd be a martyr.

00:57:49.580 --> 00:57:52.952
And so then that became the
dream, to die in the cause

00:57:52.952 --> 00:57:54.823
of resurrecting their utopian caliphate.

00:57:56.207 --> 00:57:59.124
[crowd shouting and arguing]

00:58:01.285 --> 00:58:03.690
When I went to Egypt,
that was the martyrdom

00:58:03.690 --> 00:58:06.503
I was seeking, I needed, I craved.

00:58:14.660 --> 00:58:16.840
One night, the state
security agents had burst

00:58:16.840 --> 00:58:18.253
through my apartment door.

00:58:19.130 --> 00:58:22.030
They blindfolded me and they
tied my hands behind my back.

00:58:22.920 --> 00:58:25.232
They drove me to the dungeons of their

00:58:25.232 --> 00:58:27.850
state security headquarters in Cairo,

00:58:27.850 --> 00:58:30.850
where I was placed with hundreds
of others, all blindfolded.

00:58:32.110 --> 00:58:33.430
We were all numbered.

00:58:33.430 --> 00:58:35.132
My number was 42.

00:58:36.290 --> 00:58:39.040
[ominous percussive music]

00:58:40.180 --> 00:58:43.340
They proceeded to roll
call through these numbers,

00:58:43.340 --> 00:58:46.090
and each one they would take
to the interrogation room.

00:58:47.020 --> 00:58:48.770
And we would all hear their screams.

00:58:52.730 --> 00:58:54.890
By the time my number was called

00:58:54.890 --> 00:58:56.992
I had heard 41 people tortured.

00:58:56.992 --> 00:58:58.275
And I was 42.

00:59:00.234 --> 00:59:04.530
So 41 times, I relived
the experience of death.

00:59:06.924 --> 00:59:09.674
[crowd chanting and protesting in Arabic]

00:59:12.510 --> 00:59:14.680
On the day we were
sentenced to five years,

00:59:14.680 --> 00:59:15.860
in the Egyptian courtroom,

00:59:15.860 --> 00:59:20.158
all of us erupted in jubilation and cheers

00:59:20.158 --> 00:59:23.158
[crowd shouting in Arabic]

00:59:25.540 --> 00:59:28.763
celebrating the fact that we
had sacrificed for our cause.

00:59:29.600 --> 00:59:32.110
We would go down in history
as those who had fallen

00:59:32.110 --> 00:59:32.993
in the struggle.

00:59:34.210 --> 00:59:35.492
Our blood would form the ink

00:59:35.492 --> 00:59:37.487
that would write the history books.

00:59:39.470 --> 00:59:42.170
[frantic oud music]

00:59:46.460 --> 00:59:48.970
When I was in solitary
confinement for four months,

00:59:48.970 --> 00:59:51.403
it was the beginning of my introspection.

00:59:55.440 --> 00:59:57.833
The beginning of a long
journey of questioning.

01:00:01.580 --> 01:00:04.733
After my release, when
I returned to the UK,

01:00:05.840 --> 01:00:09.543
I was full of doubts about
my political narrative,

01:00:11.390 --> 01:00:14.463
but I still had my religious
dogmatic convictions.

01:00:16.470 --> 01:00:18.910
And then I began questioning,
how realistic is it?

01:00:18.910 --> 01:00:22.730
The plateau of the afterlife
and the thin bridge

01:00:22.730 --> 01:00:26.250
the width of a hair, and this
book that records everything,

01:00:26.250 --> 01:00:29.100
all of your deeds and misdeeds
from even before creation--

01:00:30.600 --> 01:00:32.573
how realistic is all of this?

01:00:34.380 --> 01:00:37.070
Eventually I became uncertain
about some of the more

01:00:37.070 --> 01:00:38.503
rigid religious dogma.

01:00:39.770 --> 01:00:42.013
And eventually, I'm very happy to say,

01:00:42.013 --> 01:00:45.960
I became incredibly
comfortable with my uncertainty

01:00:45.960 --> 01:00:48.920
to a point now where I think
that if there is a holy grail,

01:00:48.920 --> 01:00:50.393
it has to be uncertainty.

01:00:51.394 --> 01:00:52.743
And that's the beauty of it.

01:00:57.440 --> 01:01:01.223
There are many moments
that I regret in my past.

01:01:02.580 --> 01:01:04.650
There are regrets in
the people I recruited.

01:01:04.650 --> 01:01:06.730
Some of them went on to leave my group

01:01:06.730 --> 01:01:07.890
and joined more violent groups.

01:01:07.890 --> 01:01:09.470
And some of them went on to get convicted

01:01:09.470 --> 01:01:11.150
for acts of terrorism.

01:01:11.150 --> 01:01:13.970
Everyone in this society--
Muslims, non-Muslims,

01:01:13.970 --> 01:01:15.350
whether they're Islamic societies,

01:01:15.350 --> 01:01:16.183
whether they're government--

01:01:16.183 --> 01:01:18.300
everyone needs to do more
to challenge extremism...

01:01:18.300 --> 01:01:21.270
Now, what I want to do is send the message

01:01:21.270 --> 01:01:23.880
to those who are seeking to recruit

01:01:23.880 --> 01:01:26.330
the young, angry
16-year-old version of me...

01:01:26.330 --> 01:01:27.440
I've been detained without charge--

01:01:27.440 --> 01:01:31.855
...that democratic societies
can re-embrace people

01:01:31.855 --> 01:01:34.150
who had been its avowed enemy.

01:01:34.150 --> 01:01:35.884
One of the beauties of
democracy is it's openness.

01:01:35.884 --> 01:01:37.100
You haven't spent a day in prison.

01:01:37.100 --> 01:01:38.730
You haven't suffered
one bit for your views.

01:01:38.730 --> 01:01:40.080
You're allowed to sit here right now

01:01:40.080 --> 01:01:41.520
because of freedom and democracy.

01:01:41.520 --> 01:01:43.120
In your so-called caliphate,

01:01:43.120 --> 01:01:44.630
you'd have me killed, wouldn't you?

01:01:44.630 --> 01:01:45.463
Wouldn't you have me killed?

01:01:45.463 --> 01:01:47.510
Am I an apostate that deserves death?

01:01:47.510 --> 01:01:49.480
- Well, I mean, obviously--

01:01:49.480 --> 01:01:53.180
- There are people who still
subscribe to all of the dogma,

01:01:53.180 --> 01:01:56.790
political and religious,
who are incredibly upset,

01:01:56.790 --> 01:02:00.413
angry that I make it my business
to challenge that dogma.

01:02:01.260 --> 01:02:02.650
- You're not gonna answer the question?

01:02:02.650 --> 01:02:03.696
- Well, it's a ridiculous question.

01:02:03.696 --> 01:02:05.610
He knows the answer to it already.

01:02:05.610 --> 01:02:08.900
- The bullseye that was on my
skin because of my skin color

01:02:08.900 --> 01:02:10.830
is now because of my thoughts.

01:02:10.830 --> 01:02:12.756
And there's still a target on me.

01:02:14.223 --> 01:02:16.832
[gentle piano music]

01:02:18.710 --> 01:02:22.343
So if I'm in a cafe, I'm
aware of people staring at me.

01:02:24.950 --> 01:02:27.320
I'm aware of sudden movements.

01:02:27.320 --> 01:02:28.793
I'm aware of sudden noises.

01:02:29.740 --> 01:02:31.853
I'm aware of exit points and entry points.

01:02:34.170 --> 01:02:37.400
The shadow of violent death is
still there over me, looming.

01:02:37.400 --> 01:02:38.583
It hasn't gone away.

01:02:42.600 --> 01:02:44.100
So I live with that every day.

01:02:45.230 --> 01:02:47.370
And yet I'm happy to say I'm a Muslim

01:02:47.370 --> 01:02:49.910
who has embraced
skepticism and uncertainty

01:02:49.910 --> 01:02:51.460
about what will happen when I die

01:02:54.110 --> 01:02:57.940
by taking an almost
serene view about anything

01:02:57.940 --> 01:02:59.284
that might happen.

01:03:07.190 --> 01:03:10.290
[intense string music]

01:03:16.440 --> 01:03:19.100
- [Narrator] For some,
equanimity in the face of death

01:03:19.100 --> 01:03:20.710
is giving up.

01:03:20.710 --> 01:03:23.770
True wisdom lies in resistance

01:03:23.770 --> 01:03:25.903
and going beyond our natural limits.

01:03:27.870 --> 01:03:29.700
- Cryonics is a safety belt.

01:03:29.700 --> 01:03:31.663
You could call it true life insurance.

01:03:32.570 --> 01:03:34.033
It's the last and final step.

01:03:37.930 --> 01:03:39.550
I wanna make it very clear--

01:03:39.550 --> 01:03:41.220
nobody wants to be cryo-preserved.

01:03:41.220 --> 01:03:42.990
I don't want to be one
in one of these tanks.

01:03:42.990 --> 01:03:44.820
But it may be necessary.

01:03:44.820 --> 01:03:47.160
It's the second worst thing
that can happen to you.

01:03:47.160 --> 01:03:48.790
The idea of sitting in a
tank of liquid nitrogen,

01:03:48.790 --> 01:03:50.490
unable to control my destiny,

01:03:50.490 --> 01:03:52.233
it's not appealing to me at all.

01:03:52.233 --> 01:03:53.940
But then I think, well,
what's the alternative?

01:03:53.940 --> 01:03:56.530
Well, I guess I could just
die and be gone forever

01:03:56.530 --> 01:03:59.390
and have no more life,
no more relationships,

01:03:59.390 --> 01:04:01.830
no more love, no more
experiences, no more learning.

01:04:01.830 --> 01:04:03.780
That doesn't sound like
a very good alternative.

01:04:03.780 --> 01:04:06.180
- Often, I wonder what
the world would be like

01:04:06.180 --> 01:04:09.750
if death were not a forgone conclusion?

01:04:09.750 --> 01:04:14.245
What would it be like if we
didn't have the haunting memory

01:04:14.245 --> 01:04:16.370
of death lurking behind us?

01:04:16.370 --> 01:04:18.050
Tick tock, tick tock.

01:04:18.050 --> 01:04:20.361
That's what I think,
it's second by second,

01:04:20.361 --> 01:04:21.811
moment by moment.

01:04:21.811 --> 01:04:23.900
We don't know what's
gonna happen tomorrow,

01:04:23.900 --> 01:04:25.720
we don't know what's
gonna happen next year.

01:04:25.720 --> 01:04:27.750
But what if we could remove that?

01:04:27.750 --> 01:04:30.150
How freeing would that be for people?

01:04:30.150 --> 01:04:32.285
- Ignition sequence start.

01:04:32.285 --> 01:04:37.280
Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero,

01:04:39.584 --> 01:04:42.801
Liftoff, we have a liftoff.

01:04:42.801 --> 01:04:44.627
- One clear memory I have as a child

01:04:44.627 --> 01:04:47.650
if of sitting on the floor
during the Apollo 11 launch,

01:04:47.650 --> 01:04:50.500
watching that rocket take
off and that enormous burst

01:04:50.500 --> 01:04:53.650
of energy and-- seemed to struggle.

01:04:53.650 --> 01:04:56.100
And then launching out of the atmosphere,

01:04:56.100 --> 01:04:58.753
I remember that being an
incredible rush to me.

01:04:58.753 --> 01:05:00.030
I really wanted to be an astronaut.

01:05:00.030 --> 01:05:02.763
I loved the idea of leaving
the Earth's gravity well.

01:05:03.860 --> 01:05:06.210
If we can get beyond
that, what else can we do?

01:05:08.160 --> 01:05:10.050
So from a very early age

01:05:10.050 --> 01:05:11.780
the limitations of
human beings just seemed

01:05:11.780 --> 01:05:12.613
to be frustrating to me,

01:05:12.613 --> 01:05:14.457
and I was looking for ways beyond that.

01:05:14.457 --> 01:05:16.879
And one very obvious
one is aging and death.

01:05:16.879 --> 01:05:18.170
I mean, that's the ultimate limitation.

01:05:18.170 --> 01:05:20.080
It doesn't matter how smart you are,

01:05:20.080 --> 01:05:22.170
whether you can fly or
whatever else you can do--

01:05:22.170 --> 01:05:23.660
turn invisible, levitate.

01:05:23.660 --> 01:05:25.520
None of that matters if
you're gonna die at some point

01:05:25.520 --> 01:05:27.220
and it's all gonna come to an end.

01:05:29.480 --> 01:05:32.010
After university, after
Oxford, I came to America,

01:05:32.010 --> 01:05:33.440
I went to University
of Southern California,

01:05:33.440 --> 01:05:36.330
did my PhD in philosophy,
taught philosophy for awhile,

01:05:36.330 --> 01:05:40.090
but I still had the same
impulses I had from as early

01:05:40.090 --> 01:05:41.120
as I can think.

01:05:41.120 --> 01:05:43.593
I was just not satisfied
with the human condition.

01:05:44.440 --> 01:05:46.170
But I realized if we're
gonna do something about it,

01:05:46.170 --> 01:05:49.120
it would have to be through
science and technology.

01:05:49.120 --> 01:05:51.723
That's the only way to
overcome aging and death.

01:05:54.080 --> 01:05:58.510
Cryonics is essentially an
extension of emergency medicine.

01:05:58.510 --> 01:06:00.143
Think back 50 years or so--

01:06:02.420 --> 01:06:04.850
somebody just collapsed and
you've checked for the pulse.

01:06:04.850 --> 01:06:06.737
They had no pulse, no breathing.

01:06:06.737 --> 01:06:07.853
They're dead, and that was it.

01:06:08.830 --> 01:06:09.700
Today, that's not true.

01:06:09.700 --> 01:06:11.580
We'll pounce on them and do defibrillation

01:06:11.580 --> 01:06:13.390
and CPR and all kinds of things.

01:06:13.390 --> 01:06:15.770
And in many cases, they come back to life.

01:06:15.770 --> 01:06:17.190
So you have to ask yourself,

01:06:17.190 --> 01:06:19.040
were they actually dead 50 years ago?

01:06:20.020 --> 01:06:21.050
Well, not really.

01:06:21.050 --> 01:06:24.180
We call them dead because we
couldn't do anything about it.

01:06:24.180 --> 01:06:26.450
So what we're saying is,
when today's medicine

01:06:26.450 --> 01:06:29.150
has reached its limits, let us take over,

01:06:29.150 --> 01:06:31.500
freezing you in a state--
not literally freezing,

01:06:31.500 --> 01:06:33.530
but we're stopping all molecular motion

01:06:33.530 --> 01:06:35.470
and then taking you to
a time in the future

01:06:35.470 --> 01:06:37.870
when there's more advanced
medical capabilities

01:06:37.870 --> 01:06:40.970
that may be capable of repairing
and reviving the person

01:06:40.970 --> 01:06:43.143
into a fresh, healthy, rejuvenated body.

01:06:47.110 --> 01:06:50.080
We are sitting in the
Alcor Patient Care Bay.

01:06:50.080 --> 01:06:52.173
We have 141 patients here.

01:06:53.300 --> 01:06:56.083
They're in these large
vessels, which are custom made.

01:06:57.190 --> 01:06:59.550
You can touch these, they're
just room temperature cool.

01:06:59.550 --> 01:07:01.303
But inside they're incredibly cold.

01:07:04.420 --> 01:07:06.727
To be cryo-preserved people
will make arrangements

01:07:06.727 --> 01:07:08.620
generally well in advance,
hopefully years or decades

01:07:08.620 --> 01:07:09.453
in advance.

01:07:11.611 --> 01:07:14.111
In most cases we will
actually be right there

01:07:14.111 --> 01:07:15.660
at the point of clinical death.

01:07:16.970 --> 01:07:19.460
We have a watchlist of people
who are in bad condition,

01:07:19.460 --> 01:07:21.193
and we stay in touch.

01:07:23.170 --> 01:07:25.370
You're in your hospital bed,

01:07:25.370 --> 01:07:28.220
we're in the room next door
with all our equipment.

01:07:28.220 --> 01:07:31.220
As soon as the doctor declares
you legally, clinically dead,

01:07:32.280 --> 01:07:34.650
we immediately within seconds
start lifting the patient

01:07:34.650 --> 01:07:36.130
out of the hospital bed,

01:07:36.130 --> 01:07:38.640
placing them in the ice bath to accelerate

01:07:38.640 --> 01:07:39.690
the external cooling.

01:07:41.960 --> 01:07:44.410
We'll also take over respiration.

01:07:44.410 --> 01:07:47.343
We have a mechanical CPR device.

01:07:52.260 --> 01:07:55.660
It's very much like the early
stages of organ donation.

01:07:55.660 --> 01:07:57.960
You want to keep the
tissues fresh and viable.

01:08:00.920 --> 01:08:03.360
Then we'll transport you
here to our location,

01:08:03.360 --> 01:08:05.260
where we can do the surgical procedures.

01:08:07.200 --> 01:08:09.060
So we were able to access
the vascular system

01:08:09.060 --> 01:08:11.303
and remove the blood and other fluids,

01:08:12.730 --> 01:08:15.533
replace it with a kind of
a medical-grade antifreeze.

01:08:21.470 --> 01:08:23.640
You commonly say we freeze
people, but we really don't.

01:08:23.640 --> 01:08:25.840
We try not to, because freezing implies

01:08:25.840 --> 01:08:28.650
the formation of ice crystals,
which are very destructive.

01:08:28.650 --> 01:08:30.370
They don't completely demolish the cells,

01:08:30.370 --> 01:08:32.620
as some people incorrectly make it,

01:08:32.620 --> 01:08:34.553
but they definitely do a lot of damage.

01:08:37.400 --> 01:08:38.413
And then we wait.

01:08:40.490 --> 01:08:42.270
We wait for a time when
we have sufficiently

01:08:42.270 --> 01:08:44.480
advanced technology to repair physical--

01:08:44.480 --> 01:08:45.830
whatever was it killed you.

01:08:46.710 --> 01:08:48.050
We want to fix the aging process,

01:08:48.050 --> 01:08:50.443
there's no point bringing
you back as an old person.

01:08:51.290 --> 01:08:53.100
And then we need to repair
the additional damage

01:08:53.100 --> 01:08:54.700
that is definitely caused by

01:08:54.700 --> 01:08:56.600
the cryopreservation procedure itself.

01:08:58.380 --> 01:09:00.940
We know from studies that
we are preserving tissue

01:09:00.940 --> 01:09:03.630
in good conditions, meaning that

01:09:03.630 --> 01:09:06.013
your memories are almost surely intact.

01:09:07.588 --> 01:09:10.180
[gentle piano music]

01:09:13.300 --> 01:09:15.930
We are preserving the
essential physical structure

01:09:15.930 --> 01:09:17.853
that is you, your memory.

01:09:20.412 --> 01:09:21.665
That's where we live.

01:09:25.880 --> 01:09:28.880
People will ask, "Well,
how will I come back?

01:09:28.880 --> 01:09:31.540
"What actually will
the experience be like?

01:09:31.540 --> 01:09:33.816
"Could I come back as a cyborg,

01:09:33.816 --> 01:09:35.080
"or could I be uploaded onto a computer?"

01:09:35.080 --> 01:09:37.983
Well, those are
possibilities, we don't know.

01:09:42.126 --> 01:09:45.840
What we expect is that you will
come back in your own body.

01:09:45.840 --> 01:09:48.993
It will be a repaired body,
but it still be your body.

01:09:52.510 --> 01:09:54.450
Now some of our members
choose just to cryopreserve

01:09:54.450 --> 01:09:57.150
their brains-- I'm one of
those, for various reasons.

01:09:57.150 --> 01:09:58.650
I think that's not a bad idea.

01:09:59.600 --> 01:10:01.620
The idea being that the kind of technology

01:10:01.620 --> 01:10:03.100
that can reverse the aging process,

01:10:03.100 --> 01:10:05.490
that can reverse the damage
to the cells in the brain--

01:10:05.490 --> 01:10:08.250
by comparison, regrowing the
body, it's gonna be trivial.

01:10:08.250 --> 01:10:11.090
We're already making big
strides in that direction.

01:10:11.090 --> 01:10:13.310
- I made a choice to be a neuro patient

01:10:14.370 --> 01:10:15.730
when I signed up for cryonics,

01:10:15.730 --> 01:10:18.760
because it is the mind that
I value more than anything.

01:10:18.760 --> 01:10:19.920
It's in my brain.

01:10:19.920 --> 01:10:22.800
The brain has all my
memories and my experiences.

01:10:22.800 --> 01:10:25.860
I can have a different
body, or another body,

01:10:25.860 --> 01:10:28.243
but I can't have another Natasha.

01:10:35.830 --> 01:10:37.646
- We have friends who are
already cryo-preserved,

01:10:37.646 --> 01:10:38.888
and relatives.

01:10:40.730 --> 01:10:41.790
We have families signing up.

01:10:41.790 --> 01:10:43.890
We have three generations
of some families.

01:10:48.090 --> 01:10:50.970
You're really saying goodbye
for a very long time.

01:10:50.970 --> 01:10:52.040
You're not gonna speak to that person,

01:10:52.040 --> 01:10:53.943
you're not gonna hug them anymore.

01:10:57.120 --> 01:10:59.223
So it is still gonna be a terrible loss,

01:11:00.670 --> 01:11:03.450
but I think it does blunt
it somewhat to know that

01:11:03.450 --> 01:11:05.856
it's not necessarily
forever that they're gone.

01:11:05.856 --> 01:11:09.203
[solemn string music and singing]

01:11:09.203 --> 01:11:14.203
♪ I touch your souls ♪

01:11:15.156 --> 01:11:19.164
♪ I'm sold to you ♪

01:11:20.181 --> 01:11:21.990
There are so many little
things and big things in life

01:11:21.990 --> 01:11:23.563
that I would hate to lose.

01:11:25.240 --> 01:11:28.338
Experiences I've had like
scuba diving have been amazing,

01:11:28.338 --> 01:11:29.993
sitting on the bottom
of the ocean at night

01:11:29.993 --> 01:11:31.518
with all the lights off.

01:11:32.660 --> 01:11:34.910
It's like being in
another world or in space.

01:11:37.220 --> 01:11:41.850
This idea that having
a short, limited life

01:11:41.850 --> 01:11:44.280
makes it more valuable, more meaningful--

01:11:44.280 --> 01:11:46.430
I think is a horrible rationalization.

01:11:48.160 --> 01:11:51.560
What's beautiful is the idea that

01:11:51.560 --> 01:11:53.523
we can not just keep surviving.

01:11:55.274 --> 01:11:57.130
It's about growth, it's
about improving ourselves.

01:11:57.130 --> 01:12:00.080
It's about never giving up and
always trying to get better.

01:12:05.592 --> 01:12:08.080
To me, one of the most amazing
experiences was sitting

01:12:08.080 --> 01:12:09.635
on the edge of the Grand Canyon

01:12:09.635 --> 01:12:11.623
and you can see a mile
there and a mile across.

01:12:13.560 --> 01:12:16.733
Oh my goodness, it's
just so vast and open.

01:12:21.010 --> 01:12:23.260
I take it as a challenge, a
challenge to my existence.

01:12:23.260 --> 01:12:25.750
And rather than thinking,
well, my life span is so short

01:12:25.750 --> 01:12:28.160
compared to this natural marvel,

01:12:28.160 --> 01:12:29.971
I get a little bit competitive.

01:12:29.971 --> 01:12:31.247
I think, you know what?

01:12:31.247 --> 01:12:33.010
I'm gonna outlive you.

01:12:33.010 --> 01:12:35.010
I'm gonna be here when
this planet is gone.

01:12:35.852 --> 01:12:38.330
And one day you will be a tiny memory,

01:12:38.330 --> 01:12:39.780
a tiny fleck in my existence,

01:12:39.780 --> 01:12:40.760
and I'll have been here for billions

01:12:40.760 --> 01:12:42.600
or trillions of years maybe.

01:12:42.600 --> 01:12:45.150
And I'll just have a
memory of the Grand Canyon.

01:12:45.150 --> 01:12:47.720
So I get a little bit
competitive. [laughing]

01:12:51.770 --> 01:12:55.250
- [Narrator] The longing
for more life is primordial.

01:12:55.250 --> 01:12:57.353
It is mankind's oldest story.

01:12:58.570 --> 01:13:02.220
But there are also those
who yearn for the light.

01:13:02.220 --> 01:13:04.843
This too is an enduring story.

01:13:07.459 --> 01:13:10.209
[droning ambient music]

01:13:36.250 --> 01:13:39.505
- [Woman] I remember dying in 1994.

01:13:40.600 --> 01:13:44.410
- [Man] Every vital organ in
my body started shutting down.

01:13:44.410 --> 01:13:48.350
- [Woman 2] I was in the
coma, but I was aware.

01:13:48.350 --> 01:13:50.710
- [Woman 3] I remember
floating up to the ceiling

01:13:50.710 --> 01:13:53.760
and I let go.

01:13:53.760 --> 01:13:58.760
- [Woman 4] And then it
was black, pure black.

01:13:59.270 --> 01:14:01.133
Why am I not scared?

01:14:02.010 --> 01:14:05.600
- [Man 2] And the next thing
I know I was in a dark tunnel,

01:14:05.600 --> 01:14:08.290
moving into a bright white light.

01:14:08.290 --> 01:14:10.220
- [Woman 1] I had no
belief in an afterlife.

01:14:10.220 --> 01:14:13.810
And greeting me at the
entrance to the light

01:14:13.810 --> 01:14:15.980
was my grandmother and mother.

01:14:15.980 --> 01:14:20.610
- [Woman 4] I only saw complete
darkness, no attachments.

01:14:20.610 --> 01:14:22.400
There's nothing.

01:14:22.400 --> 01:14:27.400
And yet within that nothing,
there is so much peace.

01:14:28.790 --> 01:14:32.090
- [Woman 5] I started to
go down into a very deep,

01:14:32.090 --> 01:14:33.883
black, bottomless pit.

01:14:35.020 --> 01:14:39.060
There were people
everywhere with such torment

01:14:39.060 --> 01:14:41.020
on their faces.

01:14:41.020 --> 01:14:43.583
I knew I was in the presence of Satan.

01:14:44.430 --> 01:14:47.100
- [Man 3] What you see is you see heaven.

01:14:47.100 --> 01:14:48.756
- [Woman 6] The joy of a homecoming.

01:14:48.756 --> 01:14:51.760
- [Man 4] Nothing but pure bliss.

01:14:51.760 --> 01:14:54.860
- [Woman 7] The emotional sense
was you'd never wanna leave.

01:14:54.860 --> 01:14:57.690
- [Man 5] And all of a sudden,
God said, "You're not ready."

01:14:57.690 --> 01:15:00.310
- [Woman 8] "Now that you know this truth,

01:15:00.310 --> 01:15:03.180
you need to go back and live fearlessly."

01:15:03.180 --> 01:15:05.150
- [Man 2] I turned around,

01:15:05.150 --> 01:15:09.350
I stepped back into the
dark tunnel, and I was back.

01:15:09.350 --> 01:15:12.120
- [Woman 4] When it is my time to die,

01:15:12.120 --> 01:15:14.140
I know that this is where I'm going,

01:15:15.199 --> 01:15:17.765
and I will do so without fear.

01:15:23.410 --> 01:15:26.370
- The near-death experience
has really shaped

01:15:26.370 --> 01:15:31.230
many people's views of death
and what might be beyond.

01:15:31.230 --> 01:15:34.160
Now this is an experience
that people have when dying,

01:15:34.160 --> 01:15:35.400
or even when their heart has stopped

01:15:35.400 --> 01:15:37.020
when they are in a sense dead,

01:15:37.020 --> 01:15:38.430
but they're revived and they come back

01:15:38.430 --> 01:15:40.923
and they remember having
experienced something.

01:15:48.150 --> 01:15:50.260
We find these throughout history.

01:15:50.260 --> 01:15:52.070
They're becoming much more common now,

01:15:52.070 --> 01:15:55.150
because now people are dying
in hospital and being revived.

01:15:55.150 --> 01:15:58.860
We have the technology to bring
people back from the brink.

01:15:58.860 --> 01:15:59.880
And for those who have them,

01:15:59.880 --> 01:16:02.290
these are deeply meaningful experiences--

01:16:02.290 --> 01:16:03.665
often life-changing.

01:16:05.680 --> 01:16:08.133
But the question is, how
do we interpret them?

01:16:09.860 --> 01:16:12.250
- I understand why people
have put so much faith

01:16:12.250 --> 01:16:14.070
in those experiences.

01:16:14.070 --> 01:16:17.293
For them, that is proof
of life after death.

01:16:18.780 --> 01:16:22.110
And then for another camp,
the more skeptical camp

01:16:22.110 --> 01:16:24.520
that's gonna sort of look
at the science and say,

01:16:24.520 --> 01:16:27.450
"Well, you know that you
weren't really dead there.

01:16:27.450 --> 01:16:30.310
"We don't have high-resolution
enough understanding

01:16:30.310 --> 01:16:32.410
"of the relationship between
the brain and consciousness

01:16:32.410 --> 01:16:34.010
"to say you actually were dead.

01:16:34.010 --> 01:16:35.530
"So what was really was
happening is your brain

01:16:35.530 --> 01:16:38.280
"was shutting down,
being deprived of oxygen.

01:16:38.280 --> 01:16:40.670
"Maybe these lights that
you're seeing and everything

01:16:40.670 --> 01:16:42.460
"are part of that deprivation of oxygen,

01:16:42.460 --> 01:16:44.110
"and then your brain is rebooting."

01:16:45.630 --> 01:16:48.810
But there's a third
way you could interpret

01:16:48.810 --> 01:16:50.320
the near-death experiences, is dreams.

01:16:50.320 --> 01:16:51.623
Dreams of a dying mind.

01:16:52.980 --> 01:16:55.690
And it's the dying process
that we should be focusing on.

01:16:55.690 --> 01:16:57.990
Not the "what happens
after the dying" process.

01:17:07.000 --> 01:17:09.930
- I can say death is a blessing.

01:17:09.930 --> 01:17:13.020
And I kind of yearn for
the opportunity to say it.

01:17:13.020 --> 01:17:17.050
Intelligent discussion about,
and from, near-death people

01:17:17.950 --> 01:17:21.143
has something to say to
the rest of humanity.

01:17:23.450 --> 01:17:24.593
Because it matters.

01:17:29.370 --> 01:17:31.800
Five weeks ago, they
called me in and they said,

01:17:31.800 --> 01:17:35.920
"What you've got is stage 4 lung cancer

01:17:35.920 --> 01:17:38.513
"with metastasis already to the spine.

01:17:40.320 --> 01:17:43.063
"The prognosis usually
is four to six months.

01:17:44.450 --> 01:17:46.000
"You're not gonna beat this one."

01:17:50.490 --> 01:17:53.980
I said to the oncologist,
"Look, I've reared my children.

01:17:53.980 --> 01:17:55.730
"I've buried my husband.

01:17:55.730 --> 01:17:58.998
"I have done the work
I think I came to do.

01:17:58.998 --> 01:18:00.513
"Now I can go."

01:18:02.810 --> 01:18:06.600
The near-death experience
clearly has affected

01:18:06.600 --> 01:18:09.010
my own reaction to this whole thing,

01:18:09.010 --> 01:18:13.590
and it has from, what,
good night, 50 years ago--

01:18:13.590 --> 01:18:15.043
60 years ago, almost.

01:18:21.660 --> 01:18:23.533
The year is 1955.

01:18:25.600 --> 01:18:29.793
I'm all of 21, a new bride,
desperately want children.

01:18:30.960 --> 01:18:34.453
I get pregnant, but something is wrong.

01:18:35.400 --> 01:18:36.740
The doctor is saying to me,

01:18:36.740 --> 01:18:39.690
"There really is a danger,
and we must prevent

01:18:39.690 --> 01:18:41.660
"this miscarriage if possible."

01:18:41.660 --> 01:18:43.103
And he gave me a drug.

01:18:44.110 --> 01:18:45.530
I wake up in the middle of the night,

01:18:45.530 --> 01:18:49.700
the door to our apartment
bedroom is wide open.

01:18:49.700 --> 01:18:52.452
Sam is on top of me beating and screaming,

01:18:52.452 --> 01:18:55.426
"Ms. Jim! Ms. Jim!," who is our landlady.

01:18:55.426 --> 01:18:56.959
"Quick, quick, somebody help!"

01:19:01.330 --> 01:19:02.420
We made it to the hospital.

01:19:02.420 --> 01:19:03.523
I don't remember that.

01:19:05.250 --> 01:19:10.250
And then suddenly Sam is
screaming and beating on my chest,

01:19:10.530 --> 01:19:15.020
and I'm aware that I'm up in the corner

01:19:15.020 --> 01:19:17.963
where the walls come
together with the ceiling.

01:19:19.080 --> 01:19:21.713
Like a gargoyle, I'm sitting up there.

01:19:22.561 --> 01:19:27.559
And I am aware that that's my body

01:19:27.559 --> 01:19:29.192
and it's quit breathing.

01:19:31.310 --> 01:19:36.043
And then abruptly, with no
segue, I'm in the tunnel.

01:19:38.010 --> 01:19:39.630
My tunnel is quite lovely.

01:19:39.630 --> 01:19:41.952
It's grass all the way around.

01:19:41.952 --> 01:19:45.840
There's no ceiling, but it's all totally

01:19:45.840 --> 01:19:47.440
lovely green grass.

01:19:47.440 --> 01:19:49.530
And at the end of it

01:19:49.530 --> 01:19:54.530
there is light as I have never
known light before or since,

01:19:54.557 --> 01:19:58.270
and I'm moving toward
the light with great joy

01:19:58.270 --> 01:20:00.010
and great peace.

01:20:00.010 --> 01:20:03.210
And the voice says, "Are you ready?"

01:20:03.210 --> 01:20:06.600
And I remember, more than
anything I've ever said,

01:20:06.600 --> 01:20:08.083
as distinctly saying,

01:20:09.747 --> 01:20:13.857
"No, I think I'd like to go
back and have his children."

01:20:14.800 --> 01:20:17.593
And the voice said, "All right."

01:20:18.534 --> 01:20:19.367
That was it.

01:20:24.330 --> 01:20:29.293
I was back in bed, but it
changed every part of what I was.

01:20:32.610 --> 01:20:34.830
This experience

01:20:39.680 --> 01:20:44.680
is the nearest I've ever
come to touching the sacred.

01:20:46.170 --> 01:20:50.218
And it's not just touching it,

01:20:50.218 --> 01:20:53.151
it was being absorbed in it.

01:20:57.570 --> 01:21:02.570
Knowing that there was a
rightness and a wholeness,

01:21:03.220 --> 01:21:06.261
a goodness, a peace,

01:21:08.178 --> 01:21:10.153
belief in God ceased to be

01:21:10.153 --> 01:21:12.210
something you were
taught in Sunday school,

01:21:12.210 --> 01:21:17.210
ceases to be something in your
head that's thought about.

01:21:17.483 --> 01:21:19.263
It's real.

01:21:19.263 --> 01:21:20.910
It's just there.

01:21:20.910 --> 01:21:22.490
God is real.

01:21:22.490 --> 01:21:25.614
I felt like I had been birthed out

01:21:27.265 --> 01:21:30.274
into a whole new world.

01:21:45.150 --> 01:21:48.533
I needed desperately to
tell Sam what had happened.

01:21:52.050 --> 01:21:55.650
And he absolutely couldn't handle it.

01:21:55.650 --> 01:21:58.623
He would not let me have
those conversations.

01:22:00.420 --> 01:22:03.553
It defied everything he had
been taught in two years

01:22:03.553 --> 01:22:05.040
of med school.

01:22:05.040 --> 01:22:06.940
It had to be physiological.

01:22:06.940 --> 01:22:08.480
It had to be the result of

01:22:08.480 --> 01:22:10.480
some kind of neurological disturbance.

01:22:10.480 --> 01:22:13.020
It had to be the result of the
fact that I went brain dead,

01:22:13.020 --> 01:22:15.260
that I clearly was not breathing

01:22:15.260 --> 01:22:19.690
and was in every way clinically dead.

01:22:19.690 --> 01:22:22.620
And I kept saying, "If that be true--

01:22:22.620 --> 01:22:25.150
"if that be true, if I
were clinically dead,

01:22:25.150 --> 01:22:27.360
"then what I've got to tell
you is, on the other side

01:22:27.360 --> 01:22:29.783
"of being clinically
dead, it's really nice."

01:22:30.810 --> 01:22:33.373
And I understood that I had a choice.

01:22:34.760 --> 01:22:38.823
I think part of what bothered
him was I yearned toward it.

01:22:40.037 --> 01:22:42.290
It got to be such an emotional overlay

01:22:42.290 --> 01:22:45.423
that it became the first thing
we could never talk about.

01:22:47.360 --> 01:22:49.143
I just learned to shut up.

01:22:50.810 --> 01:22:52.860
I was essentially 25, 30 years removed

01:22:52.860 --> 01:22:55.140
from the near-death experience itself

01:22:55.140 --> 01:22:57.180
when it began to dawn on me--

01:22:57.180 --> 01:22:59.140
Sam was right about the fact that

01:22:59.140 --> 01:23:01.610
there's science involved here.

01:23:01.610 --> 01:23:02.570
And there's no question

01:23:02.570 --> 01:23:04.260
there's a neurological consequence,

01:23:04.260 --> 01:23:07.090
and there's no question that
there is all of the things

01:23:07.090 --> 01:23:10.600
that physiology and
physiologists and neuroscientists

01:23:10.600 --> 01:23:13.030
are telling us absolutely happened.

01:23:13.030 --> 01:23:16.960
That doesn't change the
fact that the experience--

01:23:16.960 --> 01:23:20.460
that doesn't make the
experience any less vital

01:23:20.460 --> 01:23:22.570
or alive or accurate

01:23:22.570 --> 01:23:24.480
simply because it describes the mechanism

01:23:24.480 --> 01:23:25.733
by which it happens.

01:23:27.720 --> 01:23:30.330
I will praise thee, o
Lord, before the peoples,

01:23:30.330 --> 01:23:33.490
and I will sing praise to
thee before the nations.

01:23:33.490 --> 01:23:34.850
For thy mercy is great,

01:23:34.850 --> 01:23:37.963
even to the heavens, and
thy truth into the clouds.

01:23:39.200 --> 01:23:43.438
Many of my fellow Christians,
people whom I admire,

01:23:43.438 --> 01:23:45.450
find the near-death

01:23:45.450 --> 01:23:50.060
totally threatening, and
even perhaps heretical.

01:23:50.060 --> 01:23:52.284
And from their point of view--

01:23:52.284 --> 01:23:54.550
I can understand their point of view,

01:23:54.550 --> 01:23:56.720
because what goes is fear.

01:23:58.670 --> 01:24:01.310
And there's a whole body
of American Protestantism,

01:24:01.310 --> 01:24:03.623
especially, but it's fear-based.

01:24:06.810 --> 01:24:08.820
And when you take away the fear of death,

01:24:08.820 --> 01:24:11.320
you have knocked the
cornerstone out of a great deal

01:24:11.320 --> 01:24:13.003
of Western civilization.

01:24:19.334 --> 01:24:22.250
What I care about is the fact that fear

01:24:22.250 --> 01:24:25.863
is not the same as awe,
and awe is the holy thing.

01:24:30.117 --> 01:24:32.750
- In the unity of the Holy
Spirit, all honor and glory

01:24:32.750 --> 01:24:34.380
is yours Almighty Father...

01:24:34.380 --> 01:24:38.196
- The Eucharist, it's the
ultimate near-death experience.

01:24:38.196 --> 01:24:40.455
- Amen.
- [All] Amen.

01:24:41.740 --> 01:24:44.460
- It's where you, on this side of death,

01:24:45.500 --> 01:24:47.963
experience a moment of union.

01:24:51.433 --> 01:24:53.270
You can't enter prayer without entering

01:24:53.270 --> 01:24:55.060
into the memory of that tunnel.

01:24:55.060 --> 01:24:56.510
It is your prayer chapel.

01:24:56.510 --> 01:24:59.160
It is your bridge into it.

01:25:01.117 --> 01:25:03.823
And you can't be afraid again.

01:25:04.880 --> 01:25:06.433
- Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.

01:25:14.570 --> 01:25:17.743
- So once the fear of death goes,

01:25:19.380 --> 01:25:24.380
then you're not so afraid of
life and you're free to love.

01:25:26.070 --> 01:25:27.620
You're just a different person.

01:25:32.410 --> 01:25:37.130
There are moments out on the
deck, looking at the farm,

01:25:37.130 --> 01:25:40.520
watching the seasons change,
watching the animals.

01:25:40.520 --> 01:25:44.120
That will be, I hope
my last place on earth.

01:25:44.120 --> 01:25:46.600
The last thing, I hope I die on that deck.

01:25:46.600 --> 01:25:48.840
I hope I die on that deck
with a bottle of Jack Daniels

01:25:48.840 --> 01:25:49.990
sitting in front of me.

01:25:56.240 --> 01:25:58.190
Now the trip has begun.

01:26:00.830 --> 01:26:04.030
To be given the ticket and
not know where you're going,

01:26:04.030 --> 01:26:07.170
it would be awful.

01:26:07.170 --> 01:26:11.582
I can't fathom what it would be like.

01:26:13.754 --> 01:26:16.796
[congregation singing]

01:26:41.550 --> 01:26:43.250
- [Narrator] And yet death can become

01:26:43.250 --> 01:26:47.672
the ultimate challenge even
for those of secure faith.

01:26:47.672 --> 01:26:50.283
It can call everything into question.

01:26:51.300 --> 01:26:55.700
- Death will come in your life
and cause so much anguish,

01:26:55.700 --> 01:26:59.503
so much pain, so much
distraught, praise God.

01:27:00.623 --> 01:27:04.061
When death came in my house, I hurt.

01:27:04.061 --> 01:27:07.560
...discouragement, until you
don't want to be bothered!

01:27:07.560 --> 01:27:12.560
I have asked myself many
times, how do you do this?

01:27:12.900 --> 01:27:17.900
How have you been able
to continue this journey

01:27:18.230 --> 01:27:23.230
after what you've experienced,
and the dying of Paul

01:27:23.852 --> 01:27:26.512
and the death of Solomon?

01:27:26.512 --> 01:27:31.380
And it's not just the dying,
it's not just the death,

01:27:31.380 --> 01:27:32.863
but the suffering.

01:27:35.450 --> 01:27:37.490
Then again, I think about that night

01:27:38.810 --> 01:27:39.910
in that little church,

01:27:41.970 --> 01:27:44.311
the change that took place in my life.

01:27:55.660 --> 01:28:00.660
My faith was born when
I was nine years old,

01:28:00.710 --> 01:28:02.183
I'll never forget it,

01:28:02.183 --> 01:28:06.293
in a little small town
called Kingsland, Georgia.

01:28:08.970 --> 01:28:10.700
I remember one night,

01:28:10.700 --> 01:28:13.950
my mother was invited to
go to this church service

01:28:15.580 --> 01:28:18.113
and I decided I would follow her.

01:28:20.040 --> 01:28:25.030
I walked down that rock
road and all of a sudden

01:28:25.030 --> 01:28:29.446
I heard this beating of a bass drum--

01:28:29.446 --> 01:28:32.960
boom-pah, boom-pah, boom, boom, boom.

01:28:32.960 --> 01:28:36.358
I went to the door and I pushed my way in.

01:28:37.975 --> 01:28:41.625
[ecstatic gospel music]

01:28:44.510 --> 01:28:45.773
I saw my mother.

01:28:47.350 --> 01:28:52.350
It was like she was in
a seance, and she said,

01:28:53.100 --> 01:28:57.483
"I'm saved! I'm saved! I
met Jesus, I met Jesus!"

01:28:59.430 --> 01:29:00.683
She was crying.

01:29:01.640 --> 01:29:04.610
And the people were
clapping and there was just

01:29:04.610 --> 01:29:09.383
such an atmosphere of jubilation.

01:29:11.610 --> 01:29:14.293
And after the minister finished preaching,

01:29:15.680 --> 01:29:17.128
there was an invitation--

01:29:17.128 --> 01:29:19.729
"Those of you who wanna get to know Jesus,

01:29:20.737 --> 01:29:22.087
"come to the alter."

01:29:23.663 --> 01:29:25.060
I was a kid.

01:29:25.060 --> 01:29:26.060
I didn't know.

01:29:26.060 --> 01:29:29.460
So I went and I got on my knees,

01:29:29.460 --> 01:29:33.930
and these old church mothers,
they was standing around me

01:29:33.930 --> 01:29:37.620
and they were playing the
tamborines and they was telling me

01:29:37.620 --> 01:29:41.117
to say, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

01:29:41.117 --> 01:29:43.560
And they were saying, "Call
Him like you want him.

01:29:43.560 --> 01:29:44.720
"Call him fast."

01:29:44.720 --> 01:29:47.933
And I began to call
them the name of Jesus.

01:29:48.910 --> 01:29:53.777
Oh my God, even as I think
about it, this moment now,

01:29:53.777 --> 01:29:57.530
my spirit goes back to that night.

01:29:57.530 --> 01:30:01.863
I felt an unbelievable presence

01:30:01.863 --> 01:30:03.946
like I'd never felt before.

01:30:05.350 --> 01:30:07.140
When I think of the goodness of Jesus...

01:30:07.140 --> 01:30:11.273
And out of that experience was
born a relationship with God.

01:30:11.273 --> 01:30:14.330
Hallelujah, thank God for saving me.

01:30:14.330 --> 01:30:16.591
How many thank God for another chance?

01:30:16.591 --> 01:30:21.350
Hallelujah.
[audience applauding]

01:30:21.350 --> 01:30:24.080
My wife and I had three
children, and two of them

01:30:25.210 --> 01:30:28.463
were sickle cell children.

01:30:29.887 --> 01:30:34.670
It's a disease that affects the blood,

01:30:34.670 --> 01:30:38.003
and it causes excruciating pain.

01:30:39.614 --> 01:30:44.614
And our children lived in
and out of the hospitals

01:30:44.710 --> 01:30:46.273
all their lives.

01:30:48.820 --> 01:30:50.833
They suffered, oh my God.

01:30:52.770 --> 01:30:55.880
- There's a great sense of helplessness

01:30:55.880 --> 01:31:00.880
when you have to watch
your child suffer that way

01:31:01.228 --> 01:31:06.220
and they're crying out with
pain, in agonizing pain--

01:31:07.620 --> 01:31:11.380
just the agony that you
would see in their faces.

01:31:11.380 --> 01:31:16.380
And sometimes they would be in
such pain that they stopped--

01:31:16.900 --> 01:31:18.900
they couldn't even cry.

01:31:18.900 --> 01:31:23.390
The sounds were like moaning and groaning

01:31:23.390 --> 01:31:27.320
and they would have--
they would be in that pain

01:31:27.320 --> 01:31:31.766
and then they'd look
at me as though to say,

01:31:31.766 --> 01:31:34.274
"Mom, help me."

01:31:40.580 --> 01:31:41.413
So...

01:31:48.750 --> 01:31:51.741
- When Paul died,

01:31:53.402 --> 01:31:55.027
I had no clue.

01:32:10.357 --> 01:32:12.807
I didn't-- I didn't know.

01:32:13.902 --> 01:32:15.043
I didn't know.

01:32:20.560 --> 01:32:24.033
I thought he was just
having another crisis.

01:32:27.883 --> 01:32:29.050
I didn't know

01:32:31.824 --> 01:32:34.271
he was getting ready to leave me.

01:32:34.271 --> 01:32:35.104
I couldn't...

01:32:37.830 --> 01:32:40.033
I couldn't wrap my mind--

01:32:42.320 --> 01:32:45.703
I could not wrap my mind

01:32:46.735 --> 01:32:50.726
around the fact that my Paul...

01:32:58.661 --> 01:33:03.661
I could not believe that the God that I

01:33:03.923 --> 01:33:08.921
preached about so and
talked about so and...

01:33:15.190 --> 01:33:19.143
At a time when I needed Him, to me,

01:33:24.470 --> 01:33:29.253
He left me to bear this by myself.

01:33:33.540 --> 01:33:35.743
I don't talk about it too much,

01:33:38.100 --> 01:33:42.130
but it interrupted my
relationship with God.

01:33:42.130 --> 01:33:47.130
Death of my son interfered

01:33:48.337 --> 01:33:50.503
with the way I felt about God.

01:33:56.670 --> 01:34:01.323
Paul died at 26, Solomon died at 33.

01:34:04.080 --> 01:34:07.460
It has really taken an
unbelievable toll on us

01:34:08.520 --> 01:34:09.983
as faith believers.

01:34:16.880 --> 01:34:21.157
- It made me so doubtful that

01:34:21.157 --> 01:34:23.582
what I was believing was true.

01:34:26.900 --> 01:34:30.640
I was angry with God
and I didn't understand

01:34:30.640 --> 01:34:31.760
why he would take the boys,

01:34:31.760 --> 01:34:33.670
and I didn't understand
why he wouldn't give them--

01:34:33.670 --> 01:34:35.020
give Paul a miracle.

01:34:35.020 --> 01:34:38.800
I was just angry and I
just didn't understand it.

01:34:38.800 --> 01:34:42.350
And I felt my faith-- I was
just like, where's my faith?

01:34:42.350 --> 01:34:44.480
I don't have that faith anymore.

01:34:44.480 --> 01:34:46.662
I'm doubting, I don't have, I just--

01:34:46.662 --> 01:34:47.753
there's so much going on.

01:34:47.753 --> 01:34:51.373
And when I would talk
to him, he would cry.

01:34:53.050 --> 01:34:56.283
And so I felt like, okay,
I've got to console him now.

01:34:59.160 --> 01:35:01.909
- I was a sad person.

01:35:03.634 --> 01:35:06.051
[gentle piano music and singing]

01:35:23.691 --> 01:35:24.841
I would get up at night

01:35:26.470 --> 01:35:31.470
and come down and just be
here sometime for hours.

01:35:31.840 --> 01:35:36.183
It didn't matter whether
it was snowing, or hot.

01:35:41.970 --> 01:35:45.830
A lot of the hurt and the
bitterness that I felt,

01:35:46.813 --> 01:35:51.530
I just found relief in
being able to come here

01:35:52.708 --> 01:35:53.991
and remember.

01:36:05.115 --> 01:36:07.615
So I walk around this cemetery

01:36:09.610 --> 01:36:11.563
and look at these many graves.

01:36:16.050 --> 01:36:20.423
Some people lived to be
90, didn't have children.

01:36:23.540 --> 01:36:28.540
And I just prayed to God
that-- just prayed that they

01:36:29.730 --> 01:36:33.773
found the peace that my son Paul found.

01:36:40.350 --> 01:36:44.400
Both my sons knew that they were going to

01:36:45.240 --> 01:36:46.725
go to a better place.

01:36:53.535 --> 01:36:55.280
- You never get over this,

01:36:55.280 --> 01:36:59.750
it's not something that you
should expect to get over it,

01:36:59.750 --> 01:37:04.750
but how you deal with
each moment gets better.

01:37:05.000 --> 01:37:06.390
It changes.

01:37:06.390 --> 01:37:11.065
And just knowing that my boys

01:37:11.065 --> 01:37:12.090
are in a better place--

01:37:12.090 --> 01:37:13.490
I know that.

01:37:13.490 --> 01:37:18.490
In spite of how angry I
was, how much I doubted God,

01:37:19.040 --> 01:37:23.919
how much I didn't understand

01:37:23.919 --> 01:37:25.520
about what was going on,

01:37:25.520 --> 01:37:29.479
in the back of my mind

01:37:29.479 --> 01:37:32.412
and in the deepest part of my heart--

01:37:32.412 --> 01:37:35.190
in that little corner back there--

01:37:35.190 --> 01:37:40.190
I always knew that God was there.

01:37:42.802 --> 01:37:45.219
[gentle instrumental music]

01:37:47.043 --> 01:37:51.523
- I just wanted to know
that Paul was all right.

01:37:54.318 --> 01:37:58.285
And I remember one night, I
had a dream more like a vision.

01:37:59.200 --> 01:38:01.970
I was walking through this valley

01:38:03.040 --> 01:38:05.083
and there were trees overhead.

01:38:10.498 --> 01:38:15.231
I heard a voice say "Oh,
so you wanna see Paul?"

01:38:17.750 --> 01:38:19.023
I said, "Yes."

01:38:20.940 --> 01:38:23.473
And the voice said,
"Well, come go with me."

01:38:25.738 --> 01:38:27.987
And I heard this laughter.

01:38:27.987 --> 01:38:30.963
[boy laughing]

01:38:30.963 --> 01:38:32.250
That's Paul!

01:38:32.250 --> 01:38:33.083
That's Paul.

01:38:35.610 --> 01:38:40.393
There was this huge lighted area,

01:38:40.393 --> 01:38:44.203
and there was a merry-go-round
and a swing set.

01:38:47.400 --> 01:38:49.917
The voice said, "You wanna see Paul?"

01:38:51.290 --> 01:38:53.756
Pointed and said, "There.

01:38:53.756 --> 01:38:55.370
"There he is."

01:38:55.370 --> 01:38:58.620
And I looked, I said, "Paul."

01:39:01.827 --> 01:39:03.690
And he was laughing.

01:39:03.690 --> 01:39:05.833
He was on the merry-go-round.

01:39:06.890 --> 01:39:09.193
He was just so happy.

01:39:10.820 --> 01:39:13.045
I said, "Paul."

01:39:14.527 --> 01:39:18.610
And he jumped off, and he got in the swing

01:39:18.610 --> 01:39:22.424
and he was just going up and down.

01:39:22.424 --> 01:39:25.590
And the voice said, "Now, see?"

01:39:27.258 --> 01:39:32.102
And I started backing up,
the leaves were backing me up

01:39:32.102 --> 01:39:37.014
back to that valley, I said,
"He didn't say anything!"

01:39:37.014 --> 01:39:40.981
And the voice said, "Oh,
no, that was for you.

01:39:42.803 --> 01:39:44.370
"It wasn't for him."

01:39:46.500 --> 01:39:49.313
And when I saw that,

01:39:49.313 --> 01:39:53.112
my faith in God was renewed.

01:39:54.238 --> 01:39:59.238
Because before then, it
had been almost a year.

01:39:59.330 --> 01:40:01.159
Even as a preacher,

01:40:01.159 --> 01:40:06.159
I had not experienced
the presence of the Lord.

01:40:06.616 --> 01:40:08.348
There was a void.

01:40:10.130 --> 01:40:11.820
Death had robbed me.

01:40:14.850 --> 01:40:19.017
And now this new experience

01:40:20.422 --> 01:40:24.088
showed me that death

01:40:24.088 --> 01:40:25.693
didn't have the last say-so.

01:40:27.127 --> 01:40:31.520
For I am convinced-- woo, Jesus.

01:40:31.520 --> 01:40:33.517
I am persuaded

01:40:34.842 --> 01:40:39.309
that neither death-- not even death,

01:40:39.309 --> 01:40:44.309
death don't have the power to
come between me and my God.

01:40:44.333 --> 01:40:47.143
Did you hear what I said?
I said, not even death...

01:40:47.143 --> 01:40:50.657
I have that confidence
that death is not the end.

01:40:52.157 --> 01:40:57.157
I will see my Solomon and Paul again.

01:41:02.180 --> 01:41:06.711
And that's the faith that I live on.

01:41:09.963 --> 01:41:13.785
♪ Slumber my darling ♪

01:41:13.785 --> 01:41:16.785
♪ My mother is near ♪

01:41:17.760 --> 01:41:21.880
- Sometimes just sitting
quietly by the window

01:41:21.880 --> 01:41:24.373
and the breeze comes through,

01:41:25.340 --> 01:41:26.987
gives me a sense of presence

01:41:26.987 --> 01:41:29.253
that the boys are still up there.

01:41:29.253 --> 01:41:31.440
Knowing that they're still watching,

01:41:31.440 --> 01:41:33.253
that they're still looking down on me,

01:41:34.540 --> 01:41:35.690
I have to believe that.

01:41:36.676 --> 01:41:38.207
It gives me comfort.

01:41:38.207 --> 01:41:40.663
♪ Slumber my darling ♪

01:41:40.663 --> 01:41:44.246
♪ The night's going on ♪

01:41:46.234 --> 01:41:47.409
- Love you all.

01:41:47.409 --> 01:41:50.363
And since-- and if I see you again,

01:41:50.363 --> 01:41:52.320
it will be a pleasure.

01:41:52.320 --> 01:41:54.170
And wish me luck.

01:42:20.600 --> 01:42:23.223
- I'm jealous of someone who can say,

01:42:24.750 --> 01:42:26.870
"Gonna be eternal joy,

01:42:26.870 --> 01:42:28.820
"much better than anything we have here."

01:42:30.900 --> 01:42:33.063
That is a powerful vision.

01:42:35.670 --> 01:42:39.683
I have looked and dug
and scratched for that--

01:42:42.558 --> 01:42:45.221
that answer, that solution,

01:42:46.355 --> 01:42:49.354
that key, that door

01:42:50.640 --> 01:42:52.813
that's gonna make it all right.

01:42:54.872 --> 01:42:58.781
[serene piano music]

01:43:02.950 --> 01:43:07.950
This has been a voyage through storms,

01:43:08.632 --> 01:43:11.507
through whirlpools,

01:43:13.130 --> 01:43:18.130
through moments of beautiful blissful sun

01:43:18.320 --> 01:43:20.537
and everything in between.

01:43:21.564 --> 01:43:24.450
And moments of sheer terror,

01:43:24.450 --> 01:43:26.743
and moments of indescribable peace.

01:43:32.170 --> 01:43:35.053
All of this has been part of this.

01:43:36.467 --> 01:43:39.384
[cascading piano music]

01:43:40.480 --> 01:43:43.460
When I was practicing medicine,

01:43:43.460 --> 01:43:46.590
"circling the drain" was
a term that was used,

01:43:46.590 --> 01:43:51.590
acknowledging that things
were getting out of control

01:43:51.680 --> 01:43:55.703
and the inevitable was fast approaching.

01:43:57.990 --> 01:44:02.130
I feel, as do my oncologists,
that that's the spot

01:44:02.130 --> 01:44:04.351
where I am now.

01:44:04.351 --> 01:44:09.210
I have prostate cancer and it
has spread to, at a minimum,

01:44:09.210 --> 01:44:11.653
to practically every bone in my body.

01:44:15.526 --> 01:44:19.184
[melancholy string music]

01:44:29.945 --> 01:44:34.112
The first time that I went
to get my chemotherapy,

01:44:35.445 --> 01:44:38.833
I went in there and I paused at the door.

01:44:40.260 --> 01:44:43.770
And I looked around at
everyone sitting there,

01:44:43.770 --> 01:44:47.070
and I mean I thought I had
entered Dante's Inferno.

01:44:47.070 --> 01:44:50.923
This was incredibly sobering--

01:44:55.170 --> 01:44:58.160
people that looked sick.

01:45:01.685 --> 01:45:05.433
And I stood at the
doorway and I said, well,

01:45:06.980 --> 01:45:10.410
I look as good as the
people helping out here.

01:45:10.410 --> 01:45:11.950
I think maybe I can just, you know,

01:45:11.950 --> 01:45:15.200
go in there and get this
done and come through

01:45:15.200 --> 01:45:17.440
just as nice as the people accompanying--

01:45:19.160 --> 01:45:22.663
which was a monumental delusion.

01:45:27.360 --> 01:45:31.630
About halfway into this
therapy, I looked in the mirror

01:45:33.560 --> 01:45:37.630
and I said, "My God, you look just like

01:45:38.800 --> 01:45:40.250
"everyone in the waiting room.

01:45:42.590 --> 01:45:43.848
"You're one of them."

01:45:46.490 --> 01:45:48.382
I knew, as a physician standing

01:45:48.382 --> 01:45:50.115
in that doorway the first time,

01:45:50.115 --> 01:45:52.823
that most of those people were gonna die.

01:45:54.810 --> 01:45:59.810
And I knew, looking in
the mirror at that point,

01:46:00.820 --> 01:46:03.760
that I was too, and that
the next person coming

01:46:03.760 --> 01:46:08.760
to that door looking in for
their first dose of chemotherapy

01:46:10.660 --> 01:46:13.280
was gonna look at me and say,

01:46:13.280 --> 01:46:16.603
"Wow, I hope I never look like that guy."

01:46:22.150 --> 01:46:23.713
- 27 Years,

01:46:27.870 --> 01:46:30.450
12 of which have been fighting cancer.

01:46:33.770 --> 01:46:36.150
- Bruschetta with artichoke dip.

01:46:36.150 --> 01:46:37.540
How could you turn that down?

01:46:37.540 --> 01:46:38.630
- I could not.

01:46:38.630 --> 01:46:41.740
- There have been periods
of respites and breaks,

01:46:43.400 --> 01:46:46.050
and there have also been
times when you just don't know

01:46:46.050 --> 01:46:47.250
which way it's gonna go.

01:46:48.870 --> 01:46:53.870
Going into the hospital,
things look frightening.

01:46:54.430 --> 01:46:59.430
And in the back of your mind

01:47:00.289 --> 01:47:01.530
you just start wondering,

01:47:01.530 --> 01:47:02.693
is he coming home?

01:47:04.700 --> 01:47:05.533
Or is this it?

01:47:08.161 --> 01:47:09.478
So, it's hard.

01:47:14.460 --> 01:47:17.050
- I think that something happens

01:47:20.270 --> 01:47:23.460
that there's a fundamental
sort of restructuring

01:47:23.460 --> 01:47:28.460
of your thinking when you realize

01:47:29.270 --> 01:47:31.060
that your days are numbered.

01:47:31.060 --> 01:47:33.185
- We've had the gift of time.

01:47:35.000 --> 01:47:39.975
And time allows you to process.

01:47:41.810 --> 01:47:45.163
- All the thoughts are just
going to the important places.

01:47:46.240 --> 01:47:49.032
And the other stuff,

01:47:51.133 --> 01:47:52.108
I mean it's just gone.

01:47:52.108 --> 01:47:53.850
It's not there, it's not important.

01:47:55.547 --> 01:47:56.650
It's just vapor.

01:47:56.650 --> 01:47:59.970
- But where we are now, a
decade and some years later,

01:47:59.970 --> 01:48:04.970
is that, you just see
everything so differently.

01:48:06.479 --> 01:48:07.776
[both laughing]

01:48:07.776 --> 01:48:10.810
- I love you.
- I love you, too.

01:48:10.810 --> 01:48:14.633
- I had this idea that what
the process is, is letting go.

01:48:15.710 --> 01:48:19.513
And that each step of
letting go would reward you.

01:48:20.770 --> 01:48:23.547
And as it turns out, I found
out that to be the case,

01:48:23.547 --> 01:48:27.950
but it is not a linear journey.

01:48:29.330 --> 01:48:30.690
I had to give up operating

01:48:30.690 --> 01:48:33.283
because my fingers went
numb from chemotherapy.

01:48:35.266 --> 01:48:37.637
And that was a very hard thing to do.

01:48:37.637 --> 01:48:39.120
But there are a lot of
things that I've given up

01:48:39.120 --> 01:48:42.793
that I am so happy that I have jettisoned.

01:48:45.460 --> 01:48:48.823
I've given up any thoughts
for material things.

01:48:52.770 --> 01:48:57.728
Things like envy and jealousy,

01:48:59.950 --> 01:49:03.800
and I've given up a lot of
regrets-- not all of them.

01:49:09.490 --> 01:49:11.500
But the problem is that just when I think

01:49:11.500 --> 01:49:15.320
I've got this thing down,
something will happen,

01:49:15.320 --> 01:49:16.593
just a small thing.

01:49:19.070 --> 01:49:22.280
My daughter will come down
the stairs in the morning,

01:49:23.400 --> 01:49:26.503
and just a simple, "Hi, Daddy.

01:49:28.980 --> 01:49:30.480
"How'd you sleep last night?"

01:49:33.190 --> 01:49:36.003
And then I realize what's going,

01:49:37.850 --> 01:49:39.358
what ends,

01:49:41.279 --> 01:49:46.012
what I'll never know anything more about,

01:49:50.020 --> 01:49:51.910
and then I'm back--

01:49:55.966 --> 01:49:57.724
back to stage one.

01:50:01.028 --> 01:50:04.761
[gentle orchestral music]
[seabirds calling]

01:50:11.470 --> 01:50:16.463
I've tried to leave things

01:50:16.463 --> 01:50:20.673
as taken care of as they
can be for my family.

01:50:21.600 --> 01:50:26.600
So I envisioned myself in
a nice-looking mahogany box

01:50:27.540 --> 01:50:31.621
with fancy brass handles,

01:50:31.621 --> 01:50:33.663
velour or silk pillow.

01:50:35.170 --> 01:50:39.880
I just couldn't envision my
dead body in that environment.

01:50:39.880 --> 01:50:43.990
And I said, "I know what I want to do.

01:50:43.990 --> 01:50:46.783
"I wanna build my own coffin."

01:50:48.640 --> 01:50:49.693
- "Are you kidding me?"

01:50:50.920 --> 01:50:52.020
I couldn't believe it.

01:50:53.338 --> 01:50:55.380
And I thought he was warped and morose.

01:50:55.380 --> 01:50:58.160
- And I said, "Peter, you
know, what do you think about

01:50:58.160 --> 01:50:59.223
"building a coffin?"

01:51:01.257 --> 01:51:05.374
He said, "Well, okay, yeah, you know,

01:51:05.374 --> 01:51:07.363
"I'm not so uncomfortable with that."

01:51:09.490 --> 01:51:12.453
- My friend Peter is an
artist who works in wood.

01:51:13.700 --> 01:51:17.610
So I said, "Well, let's head
on down to the hardware store

01:51:17.610 --> 01:51:18.823
"and get us some plywood."

01:51:21.460 --> 01:51:23.607
Peter said, "We're gonna
make it out of this,"

01:51:23.607 --> 01:51:28.190
and he pointed to this pile
of wood that he had rescued

01:51:28.190 --> 01:51:30.283
from the floor of some old factory.

01:51:32.320 --> 01:51:34.520
And we took it all apart, this wood,

01:51:34.520 --> 01:51:36.340
sawed it all apart,

01:51:36.340 --> 01:51:38.520
and then organized it and flipped it over

01:51:38.520 --> 01:51:40.563
and then put it all back together.

01:51:42.509 --> 01:51:45.259
[sprightly piano music]

01:51:48.730 --> 01:51:51.083
There were certainly
a lot of hard moments.

01:51:52.650 --> 01:51:54.843
Probably the hardest initial moment was,

01:51:56.110 --> 01:51:58.860
"Well, Jeff, we got to figure out how long

01:51:58.860 --> 01:52:00.700
"to make this thing.

01:52:00.700 --> 01:52:02.453
"Why don't you you hop
up here on the bench."

01:52:05.410 --> 01:52:09.743
He squared up my head on
one end, took a pencil

01:52:10.590 --> 01:52:12.083
and marked me out.

01:52:14.960 --> 01:52:16.410
And that was the moment that--

01:52:17.642 --> 01:52:20.150
hmm, this isn't just a
woodworking project, is it?

01:52:23.510 --> 01:52:25.420
You know, we have some jokes about it.

01:52:25.420 --> 01:52:27.313
Are my feet like this, or like this?

01:52:29.093 --> 01:52:30.670
I need a little room for
a pillow behind my head,

01:52:30.670 --> 01:52:32.610
or you're just going to kind
of crunch me up in there?

01:52:32.610 --> 01:52:33.743
We had a lot of jokes.

01:52:35.473 --> 01:52:38.456
[sprightly piano music]

01:52:43.939 --> 01:52:48.340
- As soon as we glued it up
into the panels was like,

01:52:48.340 --> 01:52:50.483
whoa, this is no joke.

01:52:51.490 --> 01:52:54.130
Just, like, got quiet, we
stopped doing everything.

01:52:54.130 --> 01:52:57.000
We just like, looked at it, like...

01:52:59.320 --> 01:53:01.933
There wasn't any sound, nothing.

01:53:03.620 --> 01:53:06.423
Kind of almost like you'd
really imagine, at the end.

01:53:08.110 --> 01:53:10.563
Is there any sound when I go in here?

01:53:12.610 --> 01:53:16.027
Really intense.

01:53:17.025 --> 01:53:19.370
Just was like, you know, "Maybe we should

01:53:19.370 --> 01:53:24.370
"step outside and have a
beer, lighten up a little bit.

01:53:25.404 --> 01:53:26.304
"What do you think?

01:53:27.204 --> 01:53:29.299
"Come on, let's go." [laughing]

01:53:31.466 --> 01:53:35.616
[sprightly piano music]

01:53:37.710 --> 01:53:41.170
- It started out that Peter
and I were making the coffin,

01:53:41.170 --> 01:53:44.213
and in pretty short order
the coffin was making us.

01:53:45.360 --> 01:53:48.760
- They'd really created
something beautiful--

01:53:48.760 --> 01:53:52.026
simple, elegant.

01:53:54.218 --> 01:53:55.318
Perfect.

01:53:57.105 --> 01:53:58.491
It's perfection.

01:54:04.260 --> 01:54:08.580
- You know, I don't welcome
assuming that position

01:54:08.580 --> 01:54:09.633
of the corpse.

01:54:11.140 --> 01:54:15.700
On the other hand, the
knowledge that that's where

01:54:15.700 --> 01:54:16.710
this is all leading--

01:54:18.540 --> 01:54:21.873
and that's what's accepting mortality is.

01:54:25.684 --> 01:54:27.220
- All right, come here.

01:54:27.220 --> 01:54:28.053
Come on.

01:54:30.550 --> 01:54:34.090
I don't have any illusions
about the process of dying--

01:54:34.090 --> 01:54:35.623
it can get pretty ugly--

01:54:36.890 --> 01:54:38.540
and particularly dying of cancer.

01:54:39.960 --> 01:54:43.948
Wouldn't it be easier
if I just moved myself

01:54:43.948 --> 01:54:45.783
into the white light?

01:54:46.749 --> 01:54:48.948
My family would be spared all this?

01:54:51.230 --> 01:54:53.310
- But pain is part of living,

01:54:53.310 --> 01:54:56.113
and death and dying is part of life.

01:54:58.256 --> 01:55:02.570
One of his greatest fears is
that you're completely reliant

01:55:02.570 --> 01:55:06.003
upon, you know, somebody to
help you and take care of you

01:55:06.003 --> 01:55:07.143
and wash you.

01:55:08.210 --> 01:55:12.880
He so doesn't want to
make anybody uncomfortable

01:55:12.880 --> 01:55:16.310
and wants it all to be
squeaky clean and tied up

01:55:16.310 --> 01:55:17.723
in a bow and done.

01:55:18.820 --> 01:55:22.080
And there's just no way to do that.

01:55:22.080 --> 01:55:23.313
There's no way to do that.

01:55:25.180 --> 01:55:26.720
I've seen this.

01:55:26.720 --> 01:55:29.543
And, you know, like, it's ugly.

01:55:30.720 --> 01:55:33.553
But it's not the worst situation, either.

01:55:35.303 --> 01:55:37.360
And I will be there.

01:55:37.360 --> 01:55:38.280
I'll help you.

01:55:38.280 --> 01:55:39.570
I'll take care of you.

01:55:39.570 --> 01:55:40.403
I'll wash you.

01:55:40.403 --> 01:55:41.530
I'll bath you.

01:55:41.530 --> 01:55:43.410
I'll wipe your ass.

01:55:43.410 --> 01:55:45.680
If that's what it needs, if
you need to be cleaned up,

01:55:45.680 --> 01:55:46.580
I'll clean you up.

01:55:47.800 --> 01:55:50.560
And his family would do it for him, too.

01:55:50.560 --> 01:55:52.460
And, you know, I think
that that was a really

01:55:52.460 --> 01:55:54.863
powerful moment for both of us.

01:55:57.190 --> 01:56:00.113
- He said, "I will come to your bedside.

01:56:03.290 --> 01:56:04.343
"I will bathe you.

01:56:10.130 --> 01:56:11.680
"I'll carry you to the bathroom.

01:56:14.680 --> 01:56:16.430
"I'll do whatever has to be done.

01:56:18.590 --> 01:56:20.053
"I have to do this for you.

01:56:22.442 --> 01:56:23.792
"And I have to do it for me."

01:56:36.940 --> 01:56:38.690
Can you imagine a friend like that?

01:56:42.260 --> 01:56:44.920
Having a friend

01:56:47.640 --> 01:56:48.580
say that to me

01:56:52.670 --> 01:56:57.630
makes all of this worthwhile.

01:57:08.380 --> 01:57:13.380
Acknowledging my mortality is absolutely

01:57:14.610 --> 01:57:16.660
the path that has taken me to where I am.

01:57:19.090 --> 01:57:22.724
If I had to say in a nutshell

01:57:23.949 --> 01:57:25.549
what it has done to me,

01:57:26.970 --> 01:57:31.478
it has rewritten

01:57:32.829 --> 01:57:34.695
my capacity to love

01:57:36.056 --> 01:57:38.056
and my ability to see love in the world.

01:57:42.040 --> 01:57:43.780
People ask me, they say,

01:57:43.780 --> 01:57:46.330
"Can you do this without
having a death sentence?"

01:57:46.330 --> 01:57:47.473
And I don't know.

01:57:49.120 --> 01:57:52.712
But I've come to believe

01:57:54.047 --> 01:57:57.540
that I would never go back

01:57:57.540 --> 01:58:01.763
to the way I was before
I had incurable cancer.

01:58:03.370 --> 01:58:04.483
I would never go back.

01:58:07.184 --> 01:58:10.242
[serene string music]

01:58:11.380 --> 01:58:13.980
There is a power

01:58:16.151 --> 01:58:20.140
of beauty in the world now.

01:58:20.140 --> 01:58:24.150
And I see it when I'm on
the first step on the way

01:58:24.150 --> 01:58:25.303
to the newspaper.

01:58:27.130 --> 01:58:32.130
And I walk out, and I smell,

01:58:33.502 --> 01:58:36.635
and I see the leaves moving

01:58:36.635 --> 01:58:40.350
and I look at the weeds and I say,

01:58:40.350 --> 01:58:44.573
wow, this guy is really
growin', isn't that great?

01:58:45.880 --> 01:58:48.810
But there's such concentration
of desire to live

01:58:48.810 --> 01:58:50.333
in this stupid little plant.

01:58:52.700 --> 01:58:54.923
I mean, life is so much better.

01:58:57.183 --> 01:59:01.057
It's life in Technicolor as
opposed to black and white.

01:59:02.705 --> 01:59:05.538
[serene string music]

01:59:32.630 --> 01:59:34.830
- [Narrator] Jeffrey
had the death he chose.

01:59:36.250 --> 01:59:37.573
But many cannot.

01:59:38.500 --> 01:59:41.380
Those whose deaths are
unsupported, sudden,

01:59:41.380 --> 01:59:44.550
out of season or in dementia--

01:59:44.550 --> 01:59:48.040
they cannot go gentle or
rage against the dying

01:59:48.040 --> 01:59:48.933
of the light.

01:59:51.230 --> 01:59:54.510
But for those of us who
are given the gift of time,

01:59:54.510 --> 01:59:57.820
we can be awakened to our lives now,

01:59:57.820 --> 02:00:00.023
before death presses in on us.

02:00:00.970 --> 02:00:03.690
We can live in the full knowledge

02:00:03.690 --> 02:00:06.780
that we are dying consciously.

02:00:06.780 --> 02:00:10.660
We can craft our story
with fierce attention,

02:00:10.660 --> 02:00:13.910
knowing it could shape every waking moment

02:00:13.910 --> 02:00:15.883
until the hour of our death.

02:00:17.410 --> 02:00:21.203
We can see death as a
portal or the final stop,

02:00:22.180 --> 02:00:26.503
the universe as resonant
or empty of meaning.

02:00:27.790 --> 02:00:30.050
Death as provocation to live more

02:00:30.050 --> 02:00:31.863
intensely and lovingly,

02:00:32.810 --> 02:00:36.913
or as a challenge to overcome
and ultimately defeat.

02:00:39.140 --> 02:00:42.730
We can find our truth in the
flames of the crematorium

02:00:44.233 --> 02:00:45.803
or in an Egyptian prison,

02:00:47.430 --> 02:00:49.713
in an English Oak tree,

02:00:50.763 --> 02:00:53.854
in anticipation of the life to come,

02:00:55.860 --> 02:00:59.000
in the piercing regret of an unlived life

02:01:00.240 --> 02:01:03.593
or the serenity of a fully lived one.

02:01:08.330 --> 02:01:10.132
- We've witnessed a story.

02:01:11.401 --> 02:01:14.435
And that's what life is, life is a story.

02:01:15.340 --> 02:01:20.173
It's become our craft, Helen,

02:01:21.010 --> 02:01:22.460
to tell these stories

02:01:22.460 --> 02:01:23.713
and tell them well.

02:01:27.840 --> 02:01:29.543
It's storytelling.

02:01:31.440 --> 02:01:33.873
So I think this story has to be over.

02:01:35.220 --> 02:01:38.180
I think it needs to have its own time to

02:01:43.240 --> 02:01:46.153
take a deep breath and say,
"I think we've got it."

02:01:49.285 --> 02:01:52.476
[serene string and piano music]

02:02:11.666 --> 02:02:15.841
[intensifying string and piano music]

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