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“It’s a Right Over Our Own Bodies”: A Remarkable Documentary on Physician-Assisted Dying | Documentary films

October 6, 2022

IAt the end of January 2021, Eli Timoner was hospitalized with breathing difficulties. It had been a long, slow physical decline. The 92-year-old entrepreneur and father of three had been paralyzed for 40 years after a stroke aged 53; during the Covid lockdown, his mobility worsened, putting a strain on his 55-year-old wife, Elissa. Now, due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure, he was permanently bedridden. Reached on the phone at the hospital by his daughter, documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner, Eli reports that he feels finished, that he is “just waiting to die”.

“Waiting to die?! I thought you were expecting to see me today,” a shocked Ondi replies. But Eli is adamant: “If they could give me the goodbye powder, I’d take it.”

Last Flight Home, Ondi’s remarkable documentary about her father’s last days and medically assisted death, starts from this point of certainty. Being bedridden meant a transfer to a full-time care facility, which was a non-starter for Eli. He was in constant pain, tired, exhausted. Cut to less than five minutes into the film: a Zoom call between Eli, Elissa, Ondi and his hospitalized siblings Rachel and David discussing the possibility of physician-assisted suicide. The conversation is the film in miniature: both profound and practical, ironic and devastating. A rare example of how to approach death collectively. How to do it legally, according to California End-of-Life Options Law. (There are 10 states that allow medical assistance in dying, in addition to Washington DC.) How to do it spiritually, as a family losing their patriarch, their best friend, their husband, their father, their grandfather. How to respond to your loved one when, faced with a terminal illness, he says to you: “I want this to stop. Right away.”

The Timoners supported Eli’s decision to help die medically, though they don’t know how to adopt it, let alone live it through the state-mandated 15-day waiting period between the evaluation by a doctor and the administration of the lethal prescription. “I had no idea. It was like walking on the moon in my parents’ living room,” Ondi told The Guardian.

Last Flight Home captures a phase of transition – tasks to be done, words to be said, love to be honored and consecrated. There’s Zoom’s final, sentimental and largely optimistic goodbye, peppered with anecdotes from Eli’s time as founder and CEO of Air Florida in the 1970s and his life as a friend. A follow-up appointment via Facetime with another physician to confirm, per California law, the first physician’s approval of the prescription. An encounter with a death doula, to whom Eli told of his fear of being placed in a coffin during his lifetime. Practice drinking a smoothie through a straw, to ensure that Eli can, still in compliance with state law, take the medicine with his own hand. Conversations about life, about feelings of shame and gratitude, about funeral plans, old photos, monthly utility bills.

“There’s an unreality to it all,” Elissa says, mostly camped out on the living room couch, in the film. “We just put one foot in front of the other.”

Surreality, a mixture of family candor and delicacy, was “a position that a lot of people find themselves in, and families find themselves in, because our culture doesn’t really settle us – we don’t talk about death”. said Ondi. “We’re really, really scared of it.”

Before her father’s decision, Ondi hadn’t really faced it either. “I was freaking out” at first, she said, initially ignoring California’s end-of-life options law. She began recording her father’s phone calls from the hospital. “I knew it was going to be imminent. I was just horrified that he would die as degraded as he felt. And he just felt like there was nothing left for him here, and that no one cared but the four of us, and that his life had truly ended in failure”, largely because of the material losses resulting from his disability. (Eli Timoner was forced to leave his business following his stroke prior to the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990.)

“Being able to take him home and put his bed right in the middle of the living room and then surround him with love was the greatest gift,” Ondi said. “I don’t know where I would be today if I hadn’t had this chance. He was my best friend, my buddy, and I was devastated, absolutely devastated.

Cameras began rolling soon after, initially as an archive rather than a film. “I do a lot of recordings and my family is used to it, so nobody knew I was making a movie, including me,” Ondi said. “I was desperate to bottle it up somehow.”

Filming such sensitive and raw moments was a family deal. Eli, always supportive of Ondi’s work, was on board for any future projects to be made from the cameras set up in his living room. (Ondi also edited the film.) So did Elissa and David. Rachel, who supported many people and their loved ones at end of life as chief rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, was more wary.

Clockwise from top left: Elissa, Eli, Rachel, Ondi and David Timoner in a file image taken at Boeing headquarters in Seattle on October 30, 1979. Photography: Courtesy of MTV Documentary Films

“It was so private,” she said. “Even though I don’t shy away from talking about death and having these conversations, I felt like it was really just for us and not for anyone else’s eyes.

“Part of what’s important about the dying process is that it’s unmediated,” she added. “That it might just be private.” She slowly got closer first to the shooting, then to her public broadcast. His father supported him, at first, as did his mother, who found solace in the images after Eli’s death, watching them every night for months. “If my mom is comforted by that, then that’s by far the most important thing,” Rachel said. And then there was the effect on the audience. Viewers of the film left the theater “amazed by life, by love, by the fact that if we are brave enough to turn to death, we turn to life,” she said. “That seems like a really sacred goal to me. And I gave up any worries I had.

Plus, she said, it could help influence other states to pass compassionate choice laws. The film is adamantly for the Compassionate Choice, which is still working through the New York Legislature – “If you’re terminally ill, you should have the right to end your life if you don’t want to suffer any more.” It is a right over our own body,” Ondi said.

But the film isn’t shy about feeling uncomfortable with the process as it currently exists. The administration of the drug is an ordeal of choreography and solemnity, trying to balance the last goodbye with specific and critical instructions; the final mixture should be completely consumed in less than two minutes. This countdown, in which Eli, held by children and grandchildren, struggles to swallow the bitter poison against time and says “I can’t” is edited but still seems to last 10 minutes, a stressful race against the time.

“It felt like an obstacle course,” Ondi said. “There’s got to be a more humane way to do this… We were surrounding him and it was going to be this really peaceful journey, and seeing him say ‘I can’t stand it'” – referring to the taste of the final medicine – “that to be his last experience on earth was really sad for me.”

But in the end, peace. Eli died shortly after completing the drug, on March 3, 2021. Until then, he comes across as compassionate, generous, funny. “This movie is exactly what it was,” Rachel said. “He just paid attention to everyone and rooted for everyone,” Ondi said. “And I just yearn to have a tenth of that generosity and grace.”

A final act of generosity: the willingness to speak openly about death, to offer a model of how one might embrace the end. “I hope people will be inspired to face the fact that they and everyone they love is going to die,” Rachel said of the film. “And if they have the courage to talk about it, and to project themselves into it a little, that they have a real chance of having a beautiful and good death. And that it is a way for them to seize their It’s a way for them to embrace their life.