I didn’t have any intention to watch Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s documentary A lion in the house that aired on PBS last Wednesday and Thursday. Who in their right mind would want to watch a documentary on very sick kids going through cancer treatment? Especially with no reassurance that, as it usually happens in TV, they will survive and get better.
And yet last Wednesday, flipping through channels, I could not resist going back time and time again to PBS. Even if it was painful to watch, there was something in that documentary that made it impossible for me to avoid.
For once, it was true life and therefore thoroughly engrossing. No fake reality TV, no boring celebrity stories, no stupid and wasteful challenges to win and competitors to eliminate. It was real people dealing with real life-and-death events and decisions. And differently from other TV shows, these events and decisions are relevant to my life and instructive.
It was also a necessary look at what we constantly try to escape but we want to know everything about: sickness, pain, death. In a seldom visited but always awake region of our mind, lies the awareness that at some point we will have to confront these less glamorous aspects of being alive; and yet we live in absolute denial. We have so many questions about death and they scare us, because death is so unknown and yet never talked about. How is it to get sick and die? How does it feel? How does it smell? And the unthinkable: what happens to our life when our child get very sick?
(Sometimes I think that the reason why people are so attracted to car accidents is not just sick curiosity. Perhaps it’s the fundamental need to get a glimpse of injury and death, because they are so close to us but so mysterious. We may meet them one day, and we won’t be prepared.)
As painful as it was to watch Bognar and Reichert’s documentary (at some point I was sobbing so loudly that I worried people in the next house would hear me and call the police), it was also surprisingly reassuring. To witness the stories of those children and their families was a step closer to admit that death is part of my life and that I might be able to get through it as I got through other difficult events. Stopping to think about death was nurturing, because to be reassured about death is such a profound and denied need. We feel so lonely in the face of death, because death is not part of our social experience. And yet, watching A lion in the house it became clear to me that dying in the presence of people who love you makes it sweet and almost bearable. Finally, it gave me permission to think that if kids can handle sickness and death with such dignity and grace, maybe I will be able to.
There were many surprises and lessons in A lion in the house. For example, the only thing those parents seemed to regret was continuing treatment even when it was clear that it was not helping (which suggests that losing dignity and suffering in vain is worst than just getting sick and dying). How the most heartbreaking stories were the ones of the older kids, not of the younger ones, because the awareness of death and sickness was more painful than just death and sickness. (Buddhism teaches us the difference between pain and suffering, but seeing it in real life is all another matter). How parents broke down not while they were dealing with their kids’ sickness and death but after it. Because when they were struggling for their kid they had hope and they were doing something, but afterwards they were just surviving.
Some of the medical staff at the Cincinnati Children Hospital were amazing. By the end of the documentary, I wanted to have Dr. Robert Arceci as my doctor, friend, father, and president of this country.
In the end, the lesson is that death is an inevitable and painful but natural physical event, even when it happens to children. As hard as it is to look at death in the face, it’s much less scary than pushing our fear of death away, and dealing with the dark unconscious panic that comes from constantly having to hide from her.