“Would you want the right to choose when it’s time?”  So goes the tagline for the winner of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for Documentaries.

In 1994 Oregon became the first state in the United States to pass a Death With Dignity law that gave terminally ill patients the option to end their life at a time of their choosing with the concurrence of two physicians.  As of 2011 500 people have exercised that option and about 250 have actually taken the life-ending drugs.  The rest have died naturally but had the drugs on hand had they chosen to use them.

This is really two stories in one.  The first shows us how the Oregon law has worked and is working, and the second is the campaign to have a similar law put in place in the State of Washington.

The Oregon part of the documentary follows several people as they exercise their death with dignity option, but focuses on one particularly heart-wrenching case, that being a 54 year-old woman by the name of Cody Curtis.  She was diagnosed with a liver cancer, the only treatment for which was surgery.  While she got immediate relief, the cancer eventually returned more aggressively with no more effective treatment possible.  When she was told she had 6 months or less to live, she exercised her death with dignity option and put everything in place.  Her story takes us on her emotional roller-coaster of plateauing during palliative care – to quote her, she was feeling “quite perky” – to the very quick drop off in feelings of wellness, to the point where she and her loved ones knew it was time.

In Washington Nancy Niedzielski talks about the love of her life, her husband Randy, and his agonizing treatment for, and death from brain cancer.  Palliative care service could not provide him the means to end his life, so he was forced to suffer and his wife to witness his slow and painful death.  Before he died, Randy extracted a promise from Nancy that she would do all she could to get a death with dignity law in place in Washington.  Her efforts took the form of her being a leading advocate for Ballot Initiative I-1000, which called for a Death With Dignity law similar to Oregon’s.  You’ll have to watch the film to see the result.

I’m generally in favor of having the death with dignity option in place so it all sounded reasonable to me.  However, I have a quarrel with the film’s producers in that they presented almost no pause for concern about such a law, save the case of Oregon resident Randy Stroup.  The State of Oregon health authorities denied him coverage for prostate cancer treatment because his 5-year survival prognosis was poor.  However, they said they would cover the cost of the death with dignity option, which would be much less expensive.  This raises an important question.  Will governments and private insurance companies continue to pay for treatments that have a poor prognosis when a much less costly option is in place?  To put it bluntly: treatment is expensive; death is cheap.

I recommend that you also watch at least one deleted scene: that of Dr. Charles Bentz, an Oregon physician who has exercised his choice to not participate in the death with dignity option.  Instead, he is a strong advocate for improved end-of-life care.  While his interview has overtones of persecution, his is a voice that ought to have been heard in the main documentary.

Celebrate Black History Month by leaning about two little known activists in the fight for civil rights in Canada and the United States.

Most people know of Rosa Parks but do they know about Viola Desmond? Viola was born in Halifax and in 1946 she refused to sit in the balcony designed for blacks in a theatre and after she sat in the whites only area she was removed and arrested. Viola was found guilty of not paying the one cent difference in tax between the two sections but decided to fight the charge. During the trial no one mentioned the segregated seating policy but focused only on tax evasion. Efforts to have the conviction overturned at higher levels of court failed. After the trial Viola moved to Montreal and died in 1965. She was granted a posthumous pardon in 2010.  Viola’s protest happened nine years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in a segregated bus in the United States.

You might know of Paul Robeson as an actor in films such as Show Boat but did you know that he was also an early campaigner for civil rights in the United States? Yes, before there was Martin Luther King Junior there was Paul Robeson. The struggles against fascism in the 1930s in both Germany and Spain helped turn Paul into a political activist. In the early 1940s he called upon Americans to demand that Congress pass civil rights legislation. He also asked President Truman to enact legislation to end lynching. Unfortunately neither appeals were successful. Because of his public speaking on these and other topics plus visits to the USSR his concerts in America were cancelled and he had to go to Europe to perform. During the McCarthy era he was called before the HUAC where he refused to deny that he was a Communist. He spent the next few years toruing in Europe and Russia. Paul died in 1976 and is unfortunately little remembered today.  But his activism helped pave the way for people like Martin Luther King Junior to continue the work to get civil rights legislation passed in the United States.