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Everybody dies differently, a hospice doctor once told me. Those words have echoed in my mind as I’ve been watching Showtime’s remarkable six-part documentary, Time of Death. The doctor went on to say that there’s no predicting how people will face the end. Who will find peace? Who will feel overwhelmed by terror or regret? Who will manage to keep living, even growing, even as they are dying? The Showtime series illuminates this in haunting, uplifting ways, and it’s one reason why the program, which is hard to watch, is even harder to turn off.
Time of Death follows eight terminally ill people through their final weeks, days and moments, in high-definition video, with no narration. The latest episode—the third, broadcast last Friday, focused on Cheyenne Bertiloni, a 47-year-old Santa Monica man so incapacitated by ALS when we meet him that he uses a computer-generated voice, activated by his eye movements, to speak.
And speak he does.
When he dies, he’s going straight to hell, he announces when we meet him. The story of his past emerges slowly. He’d dabbled in real estate, been a Mixed Martial Arts fighter and served time in prison. There were drugs and lots of women. Two bore him sons he never knew, and who did not know about each other. He’d been estranged from his own mother from the time his father died, when Cheyenne was 15. They reconciled after his diagnosis in 2009.
The camera picks up hints of the once-strapping, hard-living guy. Cheyenne has a devilish, sometimes flirtatious, smile, and he hates when people finish his sentences. Yet, he radiates sweetness, gratitude and love for the people around him. His body may be emaciated and limp as a ragdoll, but his will remains strong. He uses it to find redemption, and his mother helps.
She reaches out to his sons, ages 18 and 25. Although we do not see their initial reunion with their father or the first time they meet one another, we see later scenes of exquisite tenderness. And an ad that Cheyenne placed in a newspaper soon after he was diagnosed—seeking “one more love before I die”—has turned up Ruth Quevedo, an amazing woman who remains by his side for the rest of his life.
All this is shown without sentimentality. The sons, especially, struggle to come to terms with finding and losing a dad in one blow. But from the chair and the bed that have become his world, Cheyenne finds grace and the capacity to forgive his younger self. “No more regrets from here on out,” he tells his mother shortly before he dies.
The hospice nurse warns Ruth that ALS patients sometimes struggle for breath so ferociously at the end it’s like watching them drown. Yet Cheyenne dies quietly. Ruth spends his final night next to him, stroking him and praying. Time of death is 6:35 a.m., Feb. 22, 2013.
“He died pain-free and with his lover,” says the nurse, Laurel Lewis. “And that’s a beautiful way to go.”
The series is produced by Magic Elves, a company better known for reality shows like Project Runway and Top Chef. It continues Friday night with a portrait of Dr. Toni Yancey, a public health advocate who has devoted her career to cancer prevention and gets a diagnosis of lung cancer. The through-line of the series—a story unfolding over all six episodes—follows Maria Lencioni, a 48-year-old single mother of three with stage 4 breast cancer. You can catch up on the first three episodes on Showtime on Demand or Showtime Anytime.
Posted by Fran Smith
