Into the Night: Darkness and Light

ANNOUNCER: Funding for "Into the Night: Darkness and Light" was provided in part by... Claudia Miller.

(Dramatic violin music with choral like vocals).

(Dramatic violin music with choral like vocals).

(Dramatic violin music with choral like vocals).

NARRATOR: The dream of life without end is universal; it is common to all cultures across time and place.

To be delivered from death is the undersong of all our stories and of all of our questions.

(Dramatic violin music with choral like vocals).

(Music continues over opening titles).

2,000 years ago, China's First Emperor was consumed by the desire to conquer death and live forever.

Crowds today are mesmerized by one of the most astonishing immortality projects of all time.

The Emperor built a 600 mile wall to ward off destruction, and commissioned alchemists to find the elixir of youth.

He ordered 700,000 workers to recreate his whole court in bronze.

Musicians and scribes, chariots, a menagerie, a zoo, all guarded by a terra cotta army, each figure, life size, 8,000 strong.

The burial mound is vast; 21 square miles, and it is still being unearthed.

It was a tomb meant to house him for eternity.

STEPHEN CAVE: I've come across a few figures in my work whose pursuit of immortality have been on such a grand scale that they really embody all of our fears and our hopes and our strategies for overcoming mortality.

And one of my favorites is the First Emperor of China, the man who built the greatest wall in human history in order to keep death at bay.

He reshaped our history.

He created China.

He built some of the greatest monuments... And all of this, these monumental achievements, all because of something so profoundly human, something that we can all understand, the fear of death.

He didn't want to go alone into that night.

This Emperor was determined to take his entire world with him into the afterlife, and that is what he achieved in this tomb.

NARRATOR: The search continues for this elusive elixir of life.

As aggressively pursued today as it was in the days of the First Emperor.

(Beeping of heart monitor).

(Modern New Age ambient music).

NARRATOR: The Internet hums with the promise of digital immortality.

(Clicking of mouse).

Perpetual youth drives a $1 billion industry.

VOICEOVER: The newest anti-aging breakthrough is coming.

Get your exclusive sample now.

NARRATOR: We deny believing in immortality.

Yet we still buy these products.

We build buildings that we hope will last forever and fashion religious narratives that promise eternal life.

(Church bells).

While many place their hope in an omnipotent God, others put their faith in omnipotent science.

STEPHEN: We have in the last century or two experienced a genuine revolution in longevity, perhaps the most important revolution in human history, and, yet, this last insult to our power remains the fact that we still get old and die.

And so for scientists, for everything that science embodies, for our story of progress, we have to be able to tackle death.

(Modern New Age ambient music).

NARRATOR: The Buck Institute overlooks the hills of Marin County.

It is focused on a new and deeper understanding of aging.

They have gathered scientists from around the world who see their mission as urgent.

JUDITH CAMPISI: We are experiencing a revolution in the way we think about aging and disease.

I would say up until a few decades ago, death was considered inevitable.

There were even people who argued that death was programmed.

We are programmed to die from the day we're born.

That has changed completely.

It is now I think by most of the scientific community within our grasp, to not only understand aging but to change its course.

GORDON LITHGOW: I got into aging research at a point where I felt that there was a revolution taking place.

And that was the very first discoveries of mutations in genes that radically extended the life span of simple laboratory animals.

That was an absolute mind blast.

The idea that you could alter aging by such simple interventions was really a very dramatic point and it turned aging research from being an outside the mainstream activity to being absolutely in the mainstream biological sciences very, very exciting.

JUDITH: I'm not saying that we can defeat death.

So we have to separate death from aging.

But the aging process, this process of the slow decline in tissue function that has undergone a revolution and we not only know that we can change it in simple organisms.

There's great optimism that we'll be able to do the same thing with complex organisms like us.

GORDON: We are testing a compound here and we have a hunch that this compound might extend life span of these worms and slow aging and, therefore, um, that would be exciting for us.

I'm often asked you what can we learn from worms and flies and, and even mice?

And actually we are related to all these organisms.

And so we studied diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's in tiny worms with only 1,000 cells.

And the science we discovered there is very relevant to, to human biology.

JUDITH: One other really revolutionary idea is that we're pretty sure there are not 100 different causes of aging.

So think about an old worm or fly or a mouse or human.

And you look at this old creature and you see so many things have gone wrong.

Eyes don't work, hearing is bad, gut doesn't work, the heart is poor, the lungs are poor.

And, you think, oh, my goodness there must be 100 different causes of aging.

We scientists are now pretty convinced that that's probably incorrect.

There are probably a few basic drivers of aging.

And it's those drivers of aging that then give rise to these myriad diseases.

(Melancholy music).

GORDON: People quite often say that aging is natural.

And thinking about interventions in aging is unnatural and, therefore, wrong.

I would like to take people that think that way through a geriatric-psychiatric ward, and see the pain and suffering.

Is that natural?

And if it's natural, do you really not want to do something about it anyway?

NARRATOR: Longevity science also attracts outliers, visionaries, and risk takers.

Michael West is all three and more.

He is pushing back against our acceptance of natural limits with a fervency and relentlessness, of a believer who has lost one faith, but found another.

MICHAEL WEST: I think it was the cemetery that first made me aware of human mortality.

For years after I ceased to believe in Christianity, a devastating time for me.

I would take walks in the evening and say, "God, show me what I'm missing."

And then there was a day I stood here and it hit me such that I was awake in a very profound way.

And I could see almost like a vision, it wasn't a vision, but I could see in the cemetery a day when the sun would rise and the names of all the people I cared for, many of them religious people who were believing religion to be their salvation, and their names would be written on these stones and they would be dead and gone and buried in the earth here.

And I found that unacceptable, because I no longer had the conviction that there was a life here after.

And I said, it will not happen.

It will not happen.

I'm good at science.

I'll make it not happen.

When I entered the field of aging research, you might not find it surprising that my scientific peers would look at this young scoundrel coming in saying, we're going to understand aging and turn it around.

It was not exactly acceptable.

In fact, the whole field of aging research was opposed to the idea.

The dogma was, the belief was, you can study aging.

That's great.

But you'll never understand it and we'll never be able to intervene in it.

(Somber piano music).

What do you expect the human body and all of its complexities?

It's going to wear out with time.

I didn't believe the dogma.

What I believed, based on some of the things that I saw around me, was that aging might be more like a time bomb blowing things up, well we could understand that and we could intervene in it.

And what would make me think that there was such a mechanism behind aging?

I saw on TV that there were children that grew old when they were 12.

They had progeria, an accelerated aging syndrome.

They get grey hair and they die of heart attacks, tragically, when they're 12.

Something had gone wrong in their DNA and simple things and sped up the clock of aging.

There's time bombs with clocks that make us age.

We understand DNA the blueprint of life.

We found the part that describes how people should grow old and die.

And we say we're going to change the instructions.

Today, in the laboratory we can take a cell, one little living cell from the body, it could be a skin cell, it could be a hair plucked from the head.

Take a cell and we have so much knowledge now about how aging works, the clockwork.

We can take, easily take that cell back in time like a cell time machine to the cells we were born from.

These cells were once on the skin of a progeria patient, taken back in time completely erasing the evidences of aging.

And these can be turned now into all the cells of the human body, young cells.

It's come to be called regenerative medicine.

And because the cells are our own cells, they won't be rejected.

And we can now make young cells of any kind and use them to repair the human body.

And I know this sounds amazing, we could do that forever.

JUDITH: Now that's still pretty speculative.

But there are some examples that give us hope that that might not be science fiction.

Now, there's dangers in this process.

Every time a cell divides it becomes at risk for developing into a cancer cell.

We haven't solved that problem yet.

But it's still incredibly powerful idea that has made people think maybe even in an aging body we can get old cells to go back to a youthful state.

And people are working on that and we, we shall see.

MICHAEL: So it was decades ago when I sat looking at the cemetery and saying, you know, it isn't going to happen.

Decades ago already.

I remember thinking I've got my whole life ahead of me to solve this problem.

Boy, that life can go awfully fast, can't it?

(Reflective piano music).

I'm hoping it will be the next generation, our children's generation that will benefit from all we've done.

Ultimately, it comes down to the lives of your family.

What we're really doing I am doing in my life is trying to use my skills in science to build a better world for family members you know, for my children.

Life is a wonderful thing but it's only valuable if they're here.

(Piano music fades out).

STEPHEN CAVE: The, the most fascinating new immortality movement, the one that I think really defines our day, the one that's really raging against death, is a movement called transhumanism.

(Electronic ambient music).

Using technology in order to conquer death to banish it once and for all, we can use, not just stem cells, but nanotechnology in order to repair our bodies continually or we can upload our minds, or we can build some God-like robot that's just going to solve the problem of death for us.

This is a real movement.

There are scientists who believe in this, there are people putting money into this, there are philosophers who are getting behind this.

And it really captures our zeitgeist, our belief in progress.

And it has like all great movements its prophets.

Characters like Aubrey de Grey is very charismatic, figure with a long preacher-like beard, who is working on repairing our bodies.

AUBREY DE GREY: A lot of people have asked me whether my quest to defeat aging is in any way personal, whether I'm doing it in order to benefit myself, or my wife, for my mother for that matter.

I've never really thought about it that way at all.

I've always thought about it purely in humanitarian terms.

STEPHEN CAVE: de Grey is tackling aging as an engineering problem.

If our bodies are just machines, it must be possible to keep them working indefinitely.

AUBREY: This is all about the ultimate medicine that can keep people looking and feeling and functioning just like young adults, however long ago they were born, however old they are.

STEPHEN SACKUR: Is it your proposition that there is no actual limit to human longevity?

AUBREY: That is exactly my proposition, yes.

I feel that... STEPHEN SACKUR: So we could live forever?

AUBREY: Subject to being hit by trucks or the world being hit by an asteroid or whatever, indeed.

Many people when we talk about this question they say, oh, dear, well, we have too many people, what we have a dramatic decline in the death rate, people carrying on being born, far too many people, massive environmental problems, don't want to go there.

Maybe, maybe we will, but maybe we won't.

We know nothing about what the birth rate is going to be 100 years from now.

We know nothing at all about other technologies that may reduce our carbon footprint and thereby increase the carrying capacity of the planet thereby eliminating the problem in another way.

STEPHEN CAVE: There are prophets like Ray Kurzweil, the great inventor, great mind, who is now dedicating his energy to conquering death.

(Applause).

RAY KURZWEIL: We're actually the only species that goes beyond our limitations.

We didn't stay in the ground.

We didn't stay in the planet.

And we haven't stayed with the limitations of our biology.

It's 200 years... STEPHEN CAVE: Kurzweil is working towards what he calls the singularity, the point where technology becomes so advanced that it has far exceeded the human mind.

RAY: According to my models, 15 years from now we'll be adding more than a year every year to, not just to infant life expectancy, but to your remaining life expectancy.

We now live in an era where there is really a serious way to overcome death.

People think of evolution as biological Darwinian evolution, but we're now actually engaged in technological evolution.

Health and medicine is now an information technology.

And these technologies are doubling in power every year.

Our ability to understand and reprogram this outdated software underlying life, our genes, is now 1,000 times more powerful than it was ten years ago and it's going to utterly transform health and medicine.

We have the tools now to reprogram the software of life using what's called biotechnology.

That is a bridge to nanotechnology being able to go beyond biology.

(New Age ambient music).

Medical nanorobots that go inside the bloodstream and augment the immune system can actually recognize a foe or there's a bacterium that's an enemy, I'm going to go kill it.

Can also fix metabolic diseases; there's too little insulin, okay, we'll put more insulin in.

Kidneys aren't working very well we can augment the kidneys by taking out toxins.

Ultimately, we'll be a hybrid of our biological reality and our technological reality.

We would become increasingly non-biological.

We'll be able to overcome the problems we now have that shorten our lives.

We're not far away from being able to indefinitely forestall that tragedy, which is death.

STEPHEN CAVE: The ultimate backup plan is to move beyond the body.

Bodies are unreliable.

The ultimate dream is to upload our minds on to a computer so that no matter what happens to me if I'm hit for a bus or if I'm destroyed in a nuclear attack, nonetheless, the real me, my essence, my mind, my personality is stored safely on a computer and when the worst happens it just needs to be downloaded again, maybe on to a new body that's been grown in a lab or maybe on to a robot, or something superhuman.

We're still a long way away at the moment because we don't, yet, know how to get this information out of the brain or at least right now if we were to do it, it would involve taking the brain out, cutting it into very thin slices, pickling them, and then scanning them and that's bad for you.

(Ethereal music).

But when you listen to a contemporary scientist who believes in the power of science to stop disease, to stop aging, it sounds incredibly convincing.

And you really can think tomorrow, or next year, or within ten years we'll have cracked it.

Just a little bit more money, a little bit more effort.

There are no limits to what we can imagine we could achieve ...if we can transcend our bodies.

We tell us ourselves this story today more than ever.

MAX MORE: When we're living for hundreds of years, thousands of years, maybe longer, just imagine what it will be like our lives will be so radically different.

We'll have a time to develop real wisdom.

So we might sit around, you know, 60, 65 years old, oh, yes, I'm a wise old fellow now I have learned a lot of life lessons, well, you youngsters don't know anything.

Well, a 60-year-older today compared to the 100-year old or 6,000-year-old will be like a child or an infant.

ADAM FRANK: Imagine you had 200 or 300 years.

Think about the change in human life.

Will we get married, you know?

What we will expect out of partners?

What we expect out of children?

Will we have multiple generations of children or the number of children you are going to have to have is going to be reduced because if people live a lot longer, the planet will become overcrowded.

So I think that's coming.

JIM CRACE: That sounds awful, another 80, when you say 80 years that really made me think, no way, I don't want another 80 years.

That's wrong.

That's misshapen.

That's, that's disrespectful.

Enough already, you know?

Um, but if you were to say to me 14 years?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: I suppose there's something to be said if you could really extend life with quality, that would be interesting and not, not a bad thing to pursue; but not with the end game that death is the enemy and I would, I would worry about losing the joy and beauty and life that death provides us.

PASTOR VERNAL HARRIS: It's almost as though you're not accepting the will of God for your, for your life, you know.

If you know it's time for you to go, and especially when you know that you're going to a better place.

You know, no, if this is my time, finally, then I surrender.

JUDITH: If, if I were to die tomorrow and my brain could be stored, but my body would be gone I would miss my body.

Definitely, I would miss my body.

On the other hand, I would love to be able to plug in to the world every few decades or so, and see where are we.

Where are we with global warming and population growth and I just want to know how the story ends.

(Ambient music).

NARRATOR: In every moment we are changing what it means to be human.

The story is still evolving.

The futurists' dreams may still be realized.

But meanwhile we still age and die, and the questions persist.

How do we live with death in our eye?

And what are the narratives of solace that can sustain us today?

(Somber piano music).

SAM KEEN: At two in the morning, when the, the devil comes with his eraser, I would wake up with profound anxiety, the void has gotten me.

And I would get up and walk.

And the first thing I feel is that it's all been for naught.

I've worked at this, I tried to love Jesus, I tried to do to live in some kind of my own sense of a heroic mode for me.

I've tried to love even a lot of people I don't like, but, you know, I failed at so much of it, but maybe I, maybe I'm facing the void because I hung on way too much to my own ego and my own little self.

NARRATOR: Sam Keen spent much of his life searching for the story that could rescue him from death.

Science could never hold him, neither could the certainties of fundamentalism, nor the wilder shores of the New Age.

SAM: The idea of death is an insult.

Why did you dangle all of these possible goodies in front of me only to say in the end, it didn't cut it?

You didn't earn your immortality.

(Voices singing in church).

SAM: My mother was a fundamentalist Christian.

She believed that and practiced it with all of her heart.

One day when I was nine years old, when these Gideon Bible people came by, and he left me this little copy of the New Testament.

And you can see, you can see it's well used and in the back of that believing that the Lord Jesus Christ died for me, I now accept him as my Savior.

If you will make the above decision, sign your name.

And here I signed my name.

And I went up in my little tree house and I would pray that I would have a personal relationship with my Lord and Savior.

The place where death seeped in was when I considered really what was the central message of the New Testament, that whoever should believe in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.

(Choral voices singing).

(Choral voices singing).

SAM: Death had this sort of all-or-nothing threat promise.

If I could believe I would be eternal, if I couldn't, I'd be damned.

And from about 11 or 12 years old, my belief system was slipping.

The need to believe did violence to my own native questioning philosophical mind.

I had worked my way free from a lot of that fundamentalism and then when Dad died, that residue of fundamentalism came back and the, and the, the great existential awareness, if the father dies, the son will die.

This very flawed but magnificent man protected me from death.

As long as he was alive, I was protected and it wasn't by Jesus, theoretically Jesus was still there.

But the fact was it was his love for me.

My Dad had only one prohibition, no sex outside of marriage.

I knew I wasn't supposed to commit adultery before I understood what, what it was.

[Laughs] And I wanted to get that rigid Calvinism out of my soul.

(1960's inspired music).

And I headed west for California.

We're dealing in the 60s where the period when, you know, everything was up for grabs.

I wanted to know what this new human-potential movement was about.

Man, I was going for liberation.

I sampled everything.

I sampled body therapies, rolfing.

And those things that really were aimed at getting you back in your body.

There were drugs and psychedelics.

NEW AGE GURU: Truth is just heart.

Just all heart.

NEW AGE GURU 2: The essence is in the heart.

NEW AGE GURU 3: Go on, make noises.

(Woman audibly breathes out).

SAM: I sampled all those therapies, some of them very solid and others of them really flaky kinds of things.

It did reawakening the senses very well.

But the New Age movement was looking for the short path, for easy salvation and quick methods.

I was still searching for the big treasure.

I was still looking for questions about death and evil.

(Waves crashing).

(Ethereal music).

And one day, I had what I would call agnostic epiphany.

I'd never forgotten it nor will I. I was walking way, way up the beach and there was a cave that went in there.

And that cave was very mysterious and I mean, what it was doing there, I mean, it was sort of, it was both the ultimate darkness and, and, and a vagina, dark, mysterious.

And somebody had cut into the, into the rock, "nobody knows."

And I swear it was almost like a voice, "you don't have to know."

It was just like inside me and I heard again, "you don't have to know".

And I was trying to say, "I don't have to know?

I don't have to know?"

And it was like this 10,000-pound weight was just taken off my shoulders.

I didn't have to know.

(Waves crash).

I am not put on this earth to know.

And now I have two very opposite feelings about death.

One of them is the blackboard is erased.

That's it.

Period.

End of report.

Nothing remains.

Spirit like smoke goes off into the stratosphere.

We are the grass of the field, the wind blows across it and we are gone and our place knows us no more.

And the other one is no, no, no, no.

There is something in me that transcends time.

It was here before me and after me.

And I am a part of that.

I am, I am at some level ineradicable.

I can't shake either one of those feelings and I quit trying to.

The feeling that I'm not ended by death, first place, you know, I've got, I've got a palpable immortality guarantee.

I now have 21 books that are in, that are in the Library of Congress.

I think about that, I think about, okay, and I don't want to go digital these things, I do not want, they're going to go with, with, in hard cover.

I got that many books.

Um, I will be remembered.

I'm ongoing.

I'm ongoing in my children.

I'm ongoing in my books.

And that, ameliorated a lot of my anxiety about dying.

But what scares me most is the numbers.

I said it can't be.

I am not 83 years old.

Somebody has been fiddling with the numbers.

Denial is my favorite defense mechanism.

At 62, I decided to learn flying trapeze.

(Female singing Wiegenlied Op 41 No.

1.

By Richard Strauss).

(Female singing Wiegenlied Op 41 No.

1.

By Richard Strauss).

SAM: We all have dreams of flying.

And those are dreams of transcendence.

It all began for me when my Dad took me to the circus.

I saw the flyer go to the catcher.

That image stayed with me my whole life, I wanted to become the flying man.

I can transcend age, I don't have to be defined by my age.

I can do a new thing.

And I did, and I do.

(Metal clanging from ladder).

I started the trapeze when I was 62 years old.

So, I guess the first thing you would have to recognize, is this was some kind of immortality project, wasn't it?

[Laughs] 62 is not an ideal time to start practicing trapeze, but I got hooked.

There's a little, uh, element of fear.

But this is not about overcoming fear, I'm not going to overcome fear, anymore than I overcome the fear of death.

It's going to be there.

What it is... it's about becoming a connoisseur of fear.

Of knowing when you should be afraid and when you shouldn't.

(Sam climbs ladder).

Letting go.

Trapeze teaches you, you must let go at the right time.

(Sound of Sam landing in net).

I would like to be able to become still.

And, uh... and not strive to stay when it's my turn to let go.

(Female singing Wiegenlied Op 41 No.

1.

By Richard Strauss continues and fades out).

TIERAONA LOW DOG: How hard this is already to know you're going to die?

Oh, and the way we say it.

The callous way we say it, "oh, we're all dying."

How many times have I said that in my life?

"Well, we're all going to die."

Oh, yes, we do.

It doesn't mean the same thing when you know you're dying.

(Native American inspired flute music).

NARRATOR: The idea that the soul is irreducible and survives our death is ancient, intuitive and believed by many people.

It sustains Tieraona Low Dog now.

(Native American inspired flute music continues).

TIERAONA: I don't know how we will ever begin to have a conversation around dying if we can't, in some way, create ritual that prepares us for these things.

When I was much younger, you thought maybe a good idea would be for me to do a vision quest, find a space, go out alone for three days and two nights.

I went out into this desert area.

I made my circle around me and it was so hot.

The day went along and I was so thirsty.

And then the night came, it was hard.

Not a wink of sleep.

I had never been so happy to see the morning.

And I'm looking for signs.

I'm like a failure.

I'm a failure at the vision quest.

And that second night comes along and I just felt so naked and just so tired and so vulnerable.

And then the dawn came.

And I looked over, there was this doe.

She kind of looked up at me and then just kept grazing.

And I felt this amazing sense of peace come over me and I realized that I had died in that circle.

And that uncertain girl was just gone.

And I walked out of there reborn in so many ways.

It was almost a foreshadowing of what I was going to need to get me through today.

(Slow guitar and violin music).

(Rush of water).

When the oncologist says to you, "a year maybe less", that's when you really realize there's so many things in our lives that prepare us and we never know really why or how.

My grandmother, Jo, was Comanche, part Comanche.

(Native American drumming, chanting, and singing).

TIERAONA: She loved to go to Medicine Lodge.

And I remember the pow-wow was going on and the drums and the men were singing.

We were in the sweat lodge, we're sitting on the dirt.

There's rocks in the center, it's hissing with steam.

It felt like it was burning my lungs.

And I remember just thinking this is so hard.

Why do we do this?

And Jo just told me, "you know, baby, life is hard.

There's a lot of times that life's just hard.

And, and it's going to feel like your skin's on fire.

And it's going to feel like it's hard to breathe.

And it's going to feel hard and you can do it.

You can do it.

You can get through it."

(Sound of bell chimes).

It was another ritual about surrender and about touching something bigger than us and surviving it.

That sense of sacred, that sense of strength sustained me my entire life, and certainly now.

(Dog whines).

My good boy.

But nothing prepares you for the moment when you're sitting with the oncologist and you have stage IV cancer and everybody's told you and you've already done the Internet search and it's like there is no cure.

You will not be cured of this.

That's, everything you say, there's no cure.

(Melancholy Native American flute music).

Seven weeks of radiation, three chemotherapy drugs.

All at the same time.

It was brutal.

I would go to the bathroom and it was just glass.

It just felt like shards of glass.

It was so painful.

It was mind-numbing.

And I found myself talking to myself like a child, like, I just was saying, "it's okay, baby.

It's okay, baby.

You're going to be okay, baby."

And I would go and I would lay on the bed.

And I would just weep, I don't mean cry, I mean, I would just weep and tell myself it will pass.

This too shall pass.

(Melancholy Native American flute music continues).

(Pouring of tea).

I'll pour a little bit and let it steep a little longer.

KIARA LOW DOG: Her diagnosis brought up a lot of things for me regarding my beliefs around death.

The idea of everything that made her her disappearing into the black, into darkness, into nothingness was terrifying.

I had considered myself an atheist and I just believed that when we passed, we just went with the earth and that's just all that happened.

But my Mom somehow just being gone was really unsettling.

There is this Lakota belief, which is that within us exists a spirit and a soul.

My Mom could live on to continue her destiny, she could reincarnate into whatever she was.

But also be accessible to me, still be here, still watching over me, still here to provide me comfort, as selfish as all of that is.

It brought me a lot of comfort.

(Sound of crow cawing).

Yep.

TIERAONA: One night, when I was done with the radiation, I felt very restless and for some reason, I felt like I wanted to go for a walk.

It was in the middle of the night.

(Eerie Native American inspired flute music).

And I wasn't sure where I was going or what I was doing.

We lived very far out in a forest and I kept hearing all these noises.

What sounded like good-sized animal up there and I felt so afraid.

And then I just realized I'm afraid of the dark.

I'm afraid of the dark and I'm afraid of dying.

And I started walking back and there's this very narrow bridge.

I couldn't see it very well.

If I fell I was afraid I'd be really hurt.

I felt like that bridge was my crossing over.

I realized that I had just done my death walk.

I was rehearsing.

As much as my family wants to be there to help me, as much as my children and husband will be there to comfort me.

I will have to walk into the darkness or the light alone.

(Eerie Native American inspired flute music continues).

And then there was the part of me that remembered I'm not really alone.

My grandmother's with me.

My great-grandmothers are with me.

All of my ancestors are with me.

They're all around me.

I don't know how lonely it must feel for people to not feel that.

(Bird song).

(Pensive guitar music).

(Sounds of footsteps and horses).

Back, back, back, back.

Living with the seasons and living with animals and having chickens die and burying dogs and planting gardens and some are just annuals and they're beautiful and they're so bright and their colors are so powerful.

And they don't come back.

The trick I think for me has been how to figure out how to live like I am dying without living like I'm dying.

Lord knows the moment when it comes how I will be.

I don't think I'm so much afraid as maybe I won't be here to take care of Jim when he's old and to watch us grow old together.

I won't see my grandchildren.

I'll never hold them.

We welcome you.

(Hissing of water and steam).

KIARA: I think as many times as you can prepare for you own death, it's still really hard to prepare for somebody else's.

My Mom's my everything.

And I can almost see the life coming out of her.

I can almost see the death creeping in.

I'm not really sure if you can ever really prepare for that.

[chanting in Native American language] TIERAONA: When I walk out here on this land, I feel like there's this ancientness.

It speaks to me.

I feel that in me the ancientness of just the earth itself.

Today, you know, now, with where I'm at, living, uh and also, you know, dying, I love, I love the whole notion that these things were here so long before me and they will be here so long after me and that there's a forever-ness to the universe.

That's why I live here and this is where I will die.

I do not believe that this soul started when I was born.

And I do not believe this thing I call a soul will die when this body dies.

I believe the soul is infinite.

That it's timeless.

That it's as ancient as this land.

I will die.

And I will be reborn.

If I am wrong, if there is no rebirth and there is no heaven, I wouldn't trade a breath of my faith, if I'm wrong, but if I'm right.

(Bird song).

(Mysterious orchestral music).

JAMES KUGEL: We think we're going to live forever, even though in some sort of intellectual fashion, we know that's not true.

The way we carry on is a total daily act of denial.

William Saroyan, he said to have said on his deathbed, "I know everyone has to die, but somehow I always believed an exception would be made in my case."

I think that really is true of all of us.

Doctors tell you, "you know, it just doesn't look that good."

And you'll have to start thinking about, you know, dying in the next few years.

I felt suddenly that the music had stopped.

There's always this music going on in the back of our minds, the music of daily life, I'm going to do this, and then suddenly, it just stopped.

And it was replaced by nothing at all, just silence.

(Lilting piano music).

One day I started to think about this poem by Rilke.

It's a beautiful poem.

It's all about our perception of time throughout our lives.

NARRATOR: [narrating Rilke poem] "Turning for a brief time in the shadow of its roof is this revolving stand of painted animals, all from the land that lingers long before it fades away."

JAMES: He's in Paris.

I can so imagine him, you know, kind of shy uh, and just watching the little kids on this merry-go-round.

(Merry Go Round inspired music).

He describes this very vivid world, a blue boy holding on to the reins of this lion, a girl, all in red, strapped into her seat.

It goes faster and faster.

You don't want it to stop.

A red, a blue, a green, passes by.

They're looking out at him.

It's a world in which that happy smile is squandered on a kind of fruitless game, which is this life of ours.

What spoke to me so much about this poem was the music stopping.

There was this music for these children, but I was outside of that world.

By then, I was through the chemotherapy.

And as far as I knew that the music was never going to start again, I would always have this kind of being temporary and uh, you know, just taking it day by day.

I was 54 at the time, which is not terribly young but I really wasn't expecting it all to end so soon.

I remember in the days that followed having this thought that this was, you know, something really real.

Um, normally, you know, especially academics they live in a world of ideas and in my case of, you know, old texts and, and then this must have been entirely different order of thought, it was, this was really happening right now.

Suddenly I was in a different reality.

It was a different feeling about fitting into the world.

I felt that I was just down to being myself, just the person that I really am and not all these hopes and dreams and plans.

This may sound odd, but I think most of the time, most people are, you know, especially in our society, are just so big.

(Sound of plane flying overhead).

(Fast paced dramatic orchestral music).

We live in a world, in which we are all powerful to judge by the cultural artifacts of the modern world.

There's really, very little place for God.

We're so important.

Our importance fills the sky until there's really no one, no room for anyone but us.

(Music dramatically stops).

And, of course, you know, that's not true and there's nothing like dying to convince, you that that's not true.

But we live in that artificial world until something comes along, maybe it's a bad diagnosis or bad prognosis, uh, or maybe it's just a kind of privileged moment of seeing.

(Male voice singing in Hebrew).

JAMES: I think that it's this inner kind of vision, the vision of the soul that allows us to come before God in the fullest sense.

Way back when in prehistoric times, people were just erred to this sense of smallness.

I like to think of this in terms of the story of the Garden of Eden at the beginning of the book of Genesis.

There is Adam and Eve, they're running around, these two naked people.

And they hear the sound of God walking about in the garden.

He's right there.

That, uh, smallness, is really the natural human condition.

(Ominous dramatic music).

I know some people like to identify the fear of death or the awareness of death as the seed from which all religion grew but I just don't think that's so.

The real beginning of religion, it begins in that garden where you're just a very little person.

(Sound of thunder).

And the whole outside world is constantly acting on you.

I can't imagine a human being under such circumstances not feeling this overwhelming external divine presence it's undifferentiated.

But it's overwhelmingly out there and it's making things happen to me.

I was existing in that state of smallness, that blessed state of smallness.

(Reflective orchestral music).

I felt throughout this a new sense of closeness to God.

It was this extraordinary transformation.

Now I was starting my supernatural life and I didn't know how much longer it was going to last, but, but it was definitely going to be borrowed time.

And I think that's where I am still now.

(Sound of leaves rustling in the wind).

(Merry Go Round inspired, lilting piano music).

We have this belief in Judaism called [speaks in Hebrew], every hour, every minute of life is precious and if you can preserve it a little bit longer, that's what you ought to do.

It's not like you get a second chance, you're on that merry-go- round for one ride.

And really, it's a ride that we never fully understand.

NARRATOR: [narrating Rilke's poem] "So on it goes hurrying to the finish, turning and circling for no goal or reason.

A red, a green, a gray go rushing by, the shape of some child's outline half-begun.

And time and again a smile is turned this way, a happy one that dazzles, unrestrained, and squandered on this blind and breathless game."

(Tapping sound).

For those of us dying outside the fold of religious consolation, the solace of art and love can become the story.

JOEL MEYEROWITZ: Less than three years ago my two best friends died within four days of each other, two relatively healthy men, not showing signs of dying really and then bingo.

[snaps fingers] They were gone in the breath of four days, they, these two vital men, intellectual companions, long-term playmates, my, the buddies I swam with and traveled with and they were gone.

(Pensive piano music).

(Soft sounds of waves of beach).

They had talked about, you know, things they were going to do next year.

We all say, "next year, we'll do this.

Well, there is no next year and their deaths pointed out to Maggie and me that there is no time like the present.

MAGGIE BARRETT: They were two people who had kept saying that they wanted to do this thing.

They wanted to go live in Europe.

And they never did it.

And then one of those partners was left behind, not only with the sorrow of loss, but also with the regret of not having done the thing that they had said they were going to do together.

Their deaths taught us hard lessons that we hadn't been prepared to take.

Dear Morey probably informed us more about death than about living, because his death was a drawn-out painful death.

Surrounded by denial, understandably.

We could see that he was dying.

He knew that he was dying and he wanted out.

Easy for us to want to help him, not so easy for his family to ease him out of the life.

JOEL: Morey and I when we would leave Cape Cod at the end of every summer, we'd meet and we would say it's time to go.

And we would pack up with cars, summer was over, pull the shades down, and go.

Morey was in the hospital.

I brought him a photograph, a simple building with a doorway, looking out to the sea.

I put it on the wall at the foot of Morey's bed.

And we both knew that he was dying.

And I whispered in his ear, "it's time to go, Morey."

[Cries] I said, "there's the door.

[voice breaks] " He thanked me for that.

It was his escape route.

Out.

Into that sunlight.

Yeah.

Time to go.

(Sound of beach waves).

MAGGIE: Joel and I had a lot of conversations after that about how we would stand by each other.

If one of us is diagnosed with a serious illness that we know will take us out, neither of us want to suffer that way and not the next hospital procedure, and the next tube, and the next thing and the intubation and the, no.

No, thank you.

So that death, that death was profound.

JOEL: Their deaths propelled us to reconsider the way we were living.

For example, letting go of ambition.

MAGGIE: I met Joel on Cape Cod.

He was this joyful spirited play.

And then when I moved to New York with him, I saw, I don't want to say a completely different person, but I saw certainly a different facet of this man.

I saw the New Yorker.

I saw the person who was driven to achieve.

And I tapped into that energy.

I wanted to be a successful published writer.

I wanted to stake my claim.

I wanted to be seen.

And life became all about tomorrow, tomorrow, next year, next year.

And it, and it was also about the material, um, a bigger apartment, another pair of shoes.

JOEL: Yet another book, another show in the museum or another, you know, body of work, and instead of um, climbing that, that internal ladder, to kind of jump off it into free fall.

(Reflective piano music).

Maggie said, "Let's sell the house on the Cape.

Let's pay off all our debts."

And we just packed it all in and moved to Tuscany.

MAGGIE: To be in a country that has all the echo of time in every moment carries a kind of immortality with it.

The weight of history feels present in every day.

Our new life there is a comfort that has entered the mystery of us approaching our death.

It's just eased some element of terror that we were here and then we weren't and what, what did it all mean?

(Joel and Maggie converse in background).

JOEL: Somehow these deaths and the change of life we were about to make and the ideas that were percolating in the background had a moment of revelation for me.

I felt this urge to connect to a body of work that I knew from the history of art, but I had never really dealt with myself and that was the still life.

(Bright Classical piano music).

I collect things now that have once had a life and were cast off.

And they're in the, basically in the junk pile.

And by rescuing this one and that one and bringing them back and putting them on this little teatrino, little theatrical setting that I've made.

These characters come on to the stage and one more time they have a chance to express themselves.

MAGGIE: Perhaps, he's choosing old objects as a way of honoring his age.

I, I, I see a conversation between him and these objects.

He understands them.

And these objects have been ignored for a long time, most of them, and he's finding them and he's bringing them back to life for a small moment placing them in his little theater, you know, taking this one and putting it next to it and saying, "okay, have a conversation."

He's playing with death and making it live and how much of this is just pure play and adventure for him and how much of it is him facing his own death and finding a way to his immortality that maybe he won't be left on the shelf somewhere, that maybe his work will always be rediscovered and in that way, he'll live on.

I think that's a big piece for Joel.

JOEL: I'm really here in this phase of my life for the last look.

It's like saying goodbye to everything, one thing at a time.

Hold it up, lick it with consciousness, turn it around, thrilled to its ordinary beauty, move it off stage, bring on the next.

(Bright Classical piano music crescendos and then fades out).

Am I afraid of death at this point in my life?

No.

It's, it's coming at me and I, I've been lucky in experiencing a vision of what death was about, probably 30 years ago.

I uh, took a LSD trip with Morey on Cape Cod.

And during the course of that trip, we found ourselves lying on the grass of the house that I had rented, baking in the sun, and I noticed in the grass, all kinds of creatures moving around.

And I remember turning to Morey, on my belly and saying, "put your hands in the earth and open it up, let's see what's in there."

And we sort of dug our fingers in and pulled the earth back... (Trippy psychedelic music).

Opening up this womb in a way.

It was teeming with life.

It was fecund and I remember peering into it and thinking, oh, that's what comes after.

It doesn't stop.

It is just an incredible enrichment that we become part of that whole thing that there is no end.

There is no end to the end.

(Soft sound of wind).

I thought there's nothing to be afraid of.

And that experience like, like an arrow, right through my entire life has been buoyant in a way for me.

I, I never can think of death with any kind of tragic motif, dark, you know, abyss of nothingness.

MAGGIE: I had much more fear of death until quite recently when that feeling would come up in me, of 'no, I don't want to die."

It was because I felt that I, I hadn't fully inhabited my own life.

It's hot still.... JOEL: Yeah.

The light's beautiful.

[Conversation with Joel continues] MAGGIE: Now I feel the warmth of having no regret.

(Reflective piano music).

That Joel and I have finally done the thing that we were saying we always wanted to do.

JOEL: And we are really looking at who we are as individuals and with each other.

It's as if the last look, not only applies to the cast off objects, it applies to each other.

And I want to know what it's like to be completely intimate with somebody before I die.

Maggie turned to me at one point and said, "If I die now, I will at least have had this year with you."

(Bell chimes).

(Pensive piano music).

NARRATOR: Despair over the unlived life, fulfillment over the lived one.

These are potent stories in the face of death.

(Ringing of phone).

DON COLCORD: [talking on phone] Good afternoon.

Apothecary.

I'm a druggist in a small town.

I am the only pharmacist in 4,000 square miles.

You're welcome, honey.

Have a good day.

Bye, bye.

Nucla is 100 miles from any city, any direction that you want to go.

I've got patients that have never left Nucla, some of them have regret that they didn't get a chance to do it.

I probably talked to almost all of the people after they're diagnosed with a deadly illness.

And I, I think the one thing I always gather from them is the, and it's something that haunts me, too, with my wife being sick is that failure to do while they could.

You know, it's the one common theme that I see that runs through every patient that I've ever dealt with is failure to do.

There were things they wanted to do but either illness or money or family sickness didn't allow it.

[talking on phone] It's going to raise your blood pressure, so it may be that your blood sugar is what's causing your blood pressure... For me, I'd like to go spend about three months in Greece and go do a sail trip through the Grecian islands and then, I don't know, then just take the train and go to every country in Europe just as I was there.

You work all your life to save enough money and plans change.

CHARLENE KNICKERBOCKER: Probably Don Colcord now is the most famous man in Nucla.

DON: Hi Charlene.

How you doing?

CHARLENE: Don, pay attention to me.

DON: Hi, honey.

CHARLENE: A lot of us go to him before we go to a doctor.

DONNIE BJERK: Don's always there if you need help.

Everybody around here loves him, probably except for the ones that owe him a lot of money.

DON: It's one of the best drugs because.... CHRIS DANIELS: He knows he can't leave, he's aware of that.

He's been told.

I'd love to be able to say, Don, we have a pharmacist, that's going to come in and take of things now and, and you can go off in your, you know, you and [inaudible] can go off and enjoy your later years.

But I don't know of any pharmacists that are willing to come into a small town and do the things that he's done.

So I guess when he's finished, a lot of people around here are finished, too.

He does worry about that.

DON: I just feel so much empathy with this rural guy in town.

You know, they struggle, I struggle.

The uranium industry crashed and so things went downhill quite rapidly and we have a lot of people that just simply live on Social Security, unemployment.

We have no hospice now.

We just have very few people that can provide the kind of end-of-life care that people need.

CHRIS: People just want to be home.

They want to die in their home.

And in a lot of instances they can't.

They have to go elsewhere and they have to be taken care of by people that they don't know.

(Reflective guitar music).

KEN JENKS: Independence is one of our traits.

We have a large number of people who are living by themselves.

There is this fear of dying alone.

But most of the time, somebody will show up, his church, his neighbors, his friends, we all got to walk this valley and do it by ourselves, but it's nice to have somebody holding your hand.

(Voices conversing in background).

KEN: Our last sense to go is hearing.

To hear that voice, you know, the people talking in the next room, (muffled voices) to wake up at three in the morning, there's a reading light on, there's a neighbor sleeping with a book in their lap, the cat's curled up, the fire's going, and that's it, you know, they don't make it to morning.

I think that's how it's supposed to work.

And uh, that's what death looks like in this community.

[voice breaks] DON: I'm not afraid of dying at all.

That doesn't bother me.

I'm afraid of dying without doing.

I need the feel good part of my life to be accomplished so that I can go to death without sorrow.

Sandy's case affected me greatly.

Sandy is a great example in the sense that she is somebody that did before she got sick.

SANDY POOL: I decided to better live my bucket list because my father had died not long after my husband did and life just seemed fragile or something.

So I got with it.

(Country inspired guitar music).

I drove all over the western slope of Colorado and visited all the local things and hiked.

I camped out a lot by myself which seemed to shock people terribly, but it worked for me.

JERRY POOL: After my Dad died, Mom definitely went out to prove to the world what her second childhood was all about.

She meandered around our part of the country, rafting down the canyon.

She got quite a thrill out of being the guide.

And then she started venturing New Orleans, Alaska, Caribbean.

SANDY: And during all this time I belong to a couple of bowling leagues and I joined a couple of camera clubs, I got a whole drawer full of ribbons.

To me it was like all my daydreams came true.

JERRY: At the beginning of this year she had received a couple of messages to get back to the doctor.

We knew it was serious because there was four messages.

The next day, I drove her to Delta.

We sat there for a little bit, holding hands, knowing that they don't call you into to the cancer doctor if you don't have cancer.

And the news was blunt and devastating, stage IV pancreatic.

SANDY: This was pretty hard.

And I came home and blubbered a while and then got to thinking, I have lived a really good life and I used to tell people that I was thankful I had went and done all the things I wanted to do because it would sure seem a waste if you didn't.

I'm bald as a cue ball.

There ain't no hairs on that head!

DON: Sandy talked to me about at great length that she was so happy that she took all her money and did what she wanted to do before this happened.

SANDY: If I hadn't went ahead and done the things I had done, I would be so mean, probably someone would've shot me, oh, a week or so after the diagnosis, but I feel a great satisfaction with my life that I'd done everything I could and most of what I wanted to.

And I still hope to do a few fun things, I know we all got to go some time.

I just don't want to leave what's happening now I'm having such a good time now in between treatments and whatnot.

[laughs] DON: As I get closer to that time that I have to make a decision about what I'm going to do, I don't know how to reconcile that desire to go do my bucket list knowing the town really would struggle without my store and, but it's hard to get somebody to come in here.

So in some ways I feel like I'm on hospice's list right now... that it's just a matter of time.

I guess all of us over a certain age are on hospice's list just don't know it.

SANDY: He feels obliged to be here to take care of his people.

I would be very surprised if he ever leaves.

(Bright guitar music).

DON: Nucla has a Fourth of July parade every year.

[talking into microphone] Fourth of July, holiday weekend in Nucla, Colorado.

I announce the parade as it goes by and people wish me happy birthday since it's my birthday on the Fourth.

[talking into microphone] You know that's a nice thing about watching the float from up here at the first of the street.... You get all the candy.

Good 'ol summertime.

In the good 'ol summertime Strolling down the main street hill [talking into microphone] Give a warm welcome to this year's king and queen, Frank and Mary Lou.

I don't know that I could just walk away and close the door and say I did my part.

I can't do anymore.

Is the place to be in the... [talking into microphone] Do I dare say only the llama lodge.

I can't imagine ever wanting to be in any place but this town where people know me.

[talking into microphone] The queen and junior queen candidates and princesses are all here today.

I want to die in Nucla.

And, hopefully, I have touched enough people that I'll have a big funeral.

That would be a success.

(Reflective piano music).

And figure out how to do my bucket list and take care of Nucla, how to care of my wife and how to take care of me.

(Man cheers and sound of fireworks exploding).

(fireworks exploding).

(Ringing of Buddhist meditation bell).

NARRATOR: Living in the moment, accepting that we are dying and that everyone is dying with us can be liberating.

Death is banished into the future and the heart is enlarged.

ROBERT CHODO CAMPBELL: The great mystery for me is how do they get to becoming a Buddhist monk, 15 or so years after waking up in the gutter from a blackout, a drug-induced, alcohol-induced blackout.

This incredible arc from gutter to altar.

(Disco-inspired 1970s music).

It was a period between my 20s and 30s, that the possibility of death was kind of exciting.

How could I use more drugs?

Where would I find a more dangerous man?

Staring at death.

It was like, come on, do it.

And one day I woke up in the gutter.

There was a voice in my head that very clearly said, "Robert, this is the moment.

The only difference now between you and the bum on the bowery are the clothes you're wearing, the gig is up."

That was the death of my desire to die because that's basically what I was doing throughout all my addictions was wanting to die.

(Meditation bell resonates).

What my meditation practice has given me is the opportunity to sit and simply be with everything that arises from the horrors to the beauty.

That's what keeps me sane, knowing that in this moment what I truly have is this breath.

I don't know that I have the next one.

In Zen, we say, it's life and death in each moment, in breath life, out breath death.

We're being born and we die in each moment.

And that to me is the great liberator.

I don't have to worry about death down the road somewhere.

It's here.

But I wanted my practice to be more than just meditating and I began volunteering in hospice.

There was something about walking into that space where people were dying peacefully where it wasn't about violence, where it wasn't about craziness, where it's just about entering into a space of sacredness of peace.

That something inside me [snaps fingers] clicked, oh, death can look like this.

It was really my partner, Koshin's grandmother, Nimmi, that provided the stepping stone from volunteering in hospice to beginning my journey as a chaplain.

KOSHIN PALEY ELLISON: She had seen her sisters go into nursing homes and she came to a certain point she's like, I am not going to do that.

I want to stay home.

And I want to stay with you.

And so I took care of her.

And when she finally decided that it was time for her dying, we moved in together into the hospice and from watching her family members and friends coming to visit, seeing their fear, seeing how they would stand at the foot of the bed holding, bracing the foot of the bed, afraid to get close and seeing how heartbreaking it was for her that people were so afraid to be with her.

So it was one night when she said, tonight, she looked at her watch and she said, she sat up in her bed very kind of official and she said, "tonight is the night, Chodo", and everybody was there.

Sitting around like on this vigil, thinking that she was going to die, she kept like looking at her watch and then, you know, kinda [chuckles] around like 9:00 that night, she was like, it's not going to happen.

She said, "Let's get some pizzas and some beers."

ROBERT: And she said to us there's something to this Buddhist stuff.

Being able to tell my life's story and someone is listening to me.

KOSHIN: She said, you know, you and Chodo should start this organization and bring meditation, teach people how to meditate and teach people how to care for people.

She's like, you guys are good at that, you know?

And so our life now is really to me one of flowing from her blessing.

(Reflective atmospheric music).

ROBERT: We hear so much about the good death and what the good death is.

And that can actually create a lot of damage if we're not careful.

You know people are often losing control of their body, they're in diapers, they may be entering into periods of dementia.

Their whole world is changing and they can be surrounded by loving people in a beautiful home.

But they're not feeling good about it.

I'm [......] myself.

I hate this.

I don't want someone to feed me.

Why can't I die now with some dignity?

My family doesn't want to hear it.

I can't tell them this sucks.

They want me to have a good death and I feel responsible.

KOSHIN: There is a lot of judgment around kinds of death.

But who are we to say?

There's this one person who at the end of his life, he shot up in bed and was so angry and he shot up in bed and went, "ahhh."

And fell back and he was dead.

It was extraordinary.

So I've seen a lot of deaths from peaceful to raging, to sorrowful, to completely comatose, to hooked up to a million machines and do everything, to happy.

Ready.

Let's have the whole world, the whole world is like full of volcanoes and toxic dumps and rainbows and beautiful sea shores.

And why should our deaths be any different from the world?

(Reflective piano and violin music).

ROBERT: The story of my sponsor, my 12-step sponsor of 25 years is the story of a good death that also contained all the indignities.

Over the course of the last four years of his life he experienced, his life getting smaller and smaller and smaller, his world getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

We had to sell the house in Long Island.

He lived in a beautiful apartment in the village, but he could no longer make the stairs.

So we had to move him into assisted living.

It was a good death because all along the way, he was enjoying himself, even in his dementia.

He had fun I think till the very end.

In October, I think it was the, the hospice nurse came and she said, "you know, it's really a matter of a couple of weeks.

I think we should start preparing, he's not doing well."

Well [......] me, if he doesn't rally.

He started eating again and he wasn't quite so demented, so I said to him "Honey, we're running out of money.

You can't rally.

Come, March.

We're done.

And we're going to have to move you into a nursing home.

Is that what you want?"

And he said, "No.

I do not want to end up in a nursing home."

I said, "Well, then you need to start thinking.

How are we going to do this?"

We had a great Christmas, New Year's and it looked like he was not going to go anywhere.

And now we've gone through like $800,000.

And I said to him, [claps hands] "Honey, it's New Year's Eve, you need to make some decisions."

And he said, "I know.

Will you be here?"

And I said, "Absolutely."

And he said, "Okay, I'm ready."

He died January 9th.

There's a silence that ensues the, the last breath.

There is like no other silence.

There is a presence in the room that cannot be explained.

In Zen we're very pragmatic.

We don't know what's going to happen next.

We certainly don't know what's going to happen after we die.

So there's this kind of finality, we die and that's it, you know?

We live in this moment, and then we're gone in the next.

And I am okay with that and, yet, I have seen the moments following a person's death where something occurs that leaves me with the thought that this is not all there is.

I call it the silence of the leaving.

KOSHIN: Sometimes you can feel like there's like some kind of something, still in the room, and then it dissipates.

In the Jewish tradition, they open the window so that that something can go out.

People sometimes call it the spirit or the soul or different things I don't know what it is.

And it does leave.

(Eerie Drone like music continues).

JOEL: Who knows what the spirit emanates into afterwards?

VOICE: Everybody wants to know what's on the other side... STEPHEN CAVE: Could there possibly be a more important question?

SPEAKER 1: What's the door you step through?

ADAM: What comes after?

It is the question beyond all questions.

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS: [overlapping] Nothing disappears....

It doesn't stop... Everything transforms...

There is no end...pure energy There is no end to the end.

CAITLIN: My atoms go back into the universe... they are on loan from the universe and I give them back.

STEPHEN CAVE: We can live on, if you like, through the echo that we leave.

RAY: What is it that persists?

It's the patterns of information.

JIM: Nature has the last say, it takes us back and greens us up again.

SAM: Spirit like smoke goes off into the stratosphere... we are the grass of the fields, the wind blows across it and we are gone and our place knows us no more.

SPEAKER 5: Look up and wonder, if there's a cosmic shrug?

SPEAKER 6: Staring into the great void, that's not particularly consoling.

ADAM: Just because the cosmic drama is large, it doesn't mean that my place in it is any less significant.

MAGGIE: We were here and then we weren't, and what did it all mean?

SPEAKER: When you die you die.

There's no grand plan involved.

SPEAKER 8: Death has dominion over us all.

SAM: No, No, No, I am at some level ineradicable.

TIERAONA: I do not believe that this thing I call a soul will die when this body dies.... KIARA: There is a part of you that lives on in the spirit.

TIERAONA: I believe this soul is infinite.

JEFFREY PIEHLER: There is something divine in the world.

DON: There has to be something that makes the universe hum.

JEFFREY: And the language of that divinity is love.

WOMAN: There is no attachments... MAN: What about the afterlife?

WOMAN: There is no love.

MAN: What about that hope?

WOMAN: There is no joy...

There's nothing.

SPEAKER 6: If death is final and there was no resurrection, there would be no meaning for life.

PHYLLIS TICKLE: I expect the glory and the opulence and the wonder of that transition.

GABRIEL BYRNE: It's a kind of arrogance to demand a second life.

STEPHEN CAVE: What is that doing to how we live this one?

GABRIEL: This one is so beautiful... STEPHEN CAVE: Are we valuing the time we have now if we believe we have an eternity in the future?

ELDER JESSE: I can't imagine dying without faith... SAM: You don't have to know.... ELDER JESSE: I think it would drive me insane.

SAM: You don't have to know... GABRIEL: Although we profess this incredible faith, I think deep down we are all doubting Thomases.

CAITLIN: How do you deal with that... how do you live your life knowing that its bounded by death?

NARRATOR: [narrating Rilke's poem] "So on it goes, hurrying to the finish, turning and circling for no goal or reason, a red, a green, a gray go rushing by, the shape of some child's outline half begun, and time and again, a smile is turned this way... a happy one that dazzles unrestrained and squandered on this blind and breathless game."

However we answer the question why, we live with the ache of impermanence.

Perhaps more so today than ever before.

What we do know is that one day the music will stop, we will lose everyone... every place.... and everything we love and finally ourselves.

We have only one ride and we should not squander it blindly.

We can choose to see it without aim or purpose.

Or see its flashing colors to be fashioned into something rich and strange.

If we have the privilege of health, of means and time then we can prepare now to go beyond resignation, to push back against the fear of death... while loving life.

We always come back to stories, to the solace they offer, in sharing them.

So you too have felt this way?

So I'm not alone?

We can enter the world of joyful play and briefly step out of time into eternity.

We are no longer living towards death.

It's a timelessness we can also experience through art.

By losing ourselves in compassion for others, death recedes.

We can see the natural world where we are born, live and die as not the only one, but pointing to another where love is not annihilated.

But if love is extinguished, and this is all there is... then to experience it as enough.

We can see death as a worthy adversary, and say no to suffering and pain using the power of science in the struggle.

But finally never forgetting that the ache in the human heart is not simply for more life but richer life, the central pleasure of a life fully lived now.

This is the most potent story of all.

TED: I've had this work experience with you, Helen, for over 20 years.

20 years, WOW.

Imagine ending up at 81, still editing, still having a passion for what I love to do... and having such a wonderful marriage... this has been a good life.

And I can easily walk off the stage.

I don't need an afterlife.

(music plays through credits) ANNOUNCER: Funding for Into the Night: Darkness and Light was provided in part by... Claudia Miller.

A DVD set, including this film and its companion film, Into the Night: Portraits of Life and Death is available online at MPT.ORG/SHOP.

Or call the phone number on your screen.