How to Die in Oregon

This is on at the Melbourne International Film Festival

"A beautifully intimate look at terminally ill patients who choose to end their lives painlessly and legally." - Variety

How to Die in Oregon is a remarkable and deeply moving documentary that examines the fraught issue of physician-assisted suicide.

Starting with the realities of euthanasia in Oregon, one of the few US states that has decriminalised the procedure, Richardson embarks on a poignant but unflinching survey of assisted suicide in America, from the fight for legalisation in Washington to the devastating and courageous reasons people have for actively choosing to die.

Always honest and ultimately life affirming, How to Die in Oregon is a clear-eyed, sensitive and powerfully human exploration of one of society's most desperately fraught issues.

Winner of the US Documentary Prize at Sundance.

D/P Peter D. Richardson WS Clearcut Productions TD digibeta/2010

More information: http://www.howtodieinoregon.com

Living with Lou

Dudley Clendinen is an American writer. He has ALS, aka Lou Gehrig's disease, and has a short time to live.

He writes:

There is no meaningful treatment. No cure. There is one medication, Rilutek, which might make a few months’ difference. It retails for about $14,000 a year. That doesn’t seem worthwhile to me. If I let this run the whole course, with all the human, medical, technological and loving support I will start to need just months from now, it will leave me, in 5 or 8 or 12 or more years, a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self. Maintained by feeding and waste tubes, breathing and suctioning machines.

No, thank you. I hate being a drag. I don’t think I’ll stick around for the back half of Lou.

I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.

And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.

Click here to read the New York Times article

which is also archived here

Here is a link to conversations with Dudley Clendinen