Breathing life into the topic of death.
It's something we know is inevitable yet we struggle to talk about it.
Filmmakers Cathy Henkel and Sam Lara delve into death through their own life-changing experience.
With her dying breath, 90-year-old Laura Henkel instructed her daughter and granddaughter to go out and start a tsunami.
“You are going to make a big impact and a good, good film,” Laura said as she peacefully died.
At the end of 2019 Laura flew to Switzerland to be euthanised and requested her daughter Cathy Henkel and granddaughter Sam Lara, both filmmakers to document it.
Cathy and Sam saw the premiere of their two-part documentary Laura’s Choice air on ABC earlier in March.
Laura's desired tsunami arrived.
Cathy describes the audience response as “unprecedented” and that it has caught her off guard. She says Laura loved the ABC "more than anything else".
“Thousands of people have taken the time to find us and write to us with their experience of the film and many want to talk about their own journey and experiences,” she says.
Cathy says the imperative to make a successful film was important as it was Laura’s death wish, “her final words”.
From a young age Laura Henkel found herself immersed in the world of film, marrying a filmmaker at the age of 20. She knew that sharing a story through film could have a great impact. It is one of the main reasons she wanted her radical journey towards death to be filmed.
“Filmmaking was very much present to her,” Cathy recollects.
“She enjoyed watching and critiquing films and felt she had a good grasp on what made a good film.
“She certainly had opinions about mine!”
When asked what her mother was like Cathy described her as a “very independent thinker”.
“She was quite a formidable intellect and formed views that she then stridently held.”
Her granddaughter Sam said she was “first and foremost an intellectual”.
“When I was young she would engage with me as she would with an adult,” Sam remembers.
Conversations about death came easy to Laura and she wasn’t afraid of broaching the topic.
She described living in her old age as a “terminal illness” and was adamant she would be in control of her end of life.
"She said she wanted to be the Greta Thunberg of the elderly and have them take to the streets with their walkers and campaign for this,” granddaughter Sam says.
“She really didn’t want to lose her faculties and not be able to recognise my mum and I.
“She felt like she was ready to go and she wanted to be in control of the process but it’s obviously not legal for the elderly to do that in Australia so her only option was Switzerland,” Sam explains.
Sam says her grandma freely discussed death in hope that other elderly people would begin to “chime in”.
Laura wanted to open up the discussion about whether or not voluntary assisted dying should be available for people in Australia.
“It was incredibly difficult, logistically and emotionally for a 90-year-old to organise,” Sam says.
“A 30-hour international journey for an old person is really tough.”
Australian politicians are still debating this controversial way of death.
The voluntary assisted dying bill was passed in Victoria in 2017 and in July Western Australia will become the second Australian state to see it legalised.
Tasmania has recently become the latest state to pass the bill and South Australia may be next in line.
Throughout Australia to apply a person must be diagnosed with an illness or medical condition that is likely to progress and cause death within a period of six months.
Laura didn’t have a serious illness she was just finished with her rich life and wanted to die on her own terms.
With dignity.
She was left with no other option but to travel a long distance to fulfil her wishes.
“It’s one of those things that politicians are quite scared of because they think it’s really controversial and divisive but I don’t think it is,” Sam says.
“The whole community is behind this and there are so many people I know who would have loved to have had the farewell I got to have with my grandma but they didn’t.”
Cathy and Sam have kept on encouraging the discussion around death through an interactive exhibition and website.
Their exhibition ‘Conversations around the kitchen table’ drew on inspiration from the film.
They decided to use their own dining table as a part of their exhibition where together they have both experienced many personal conversations to do with death.
On it lay a conversation starter.
Sam decided to create a selection of prompt and priority cards that asked you to think about what was important to you as you reach the end of life, she wanted others to be able to start the conversation.
At one point she witnessed a young man and his mother sit down and read through every prompt card together.
“They came to some really profound realisations together about deaths they had experienced and ways that they had been handled,” Sam says.
“It was amazing.
“I was just sitting here thinking oh my gosh it’s working Grandma you’ve done it.”
The platform they have created online for people to join has become another space where people are able to meet and connect.
“There was a post from an 86-year-old woman who said, “I’m really moved by this story it is so important, I want this for myself but I don’t know who to talk to”,” Cathy says.
“And another woman in her eighties came on and said, “Hello I think you might be my soulmate, I’m the same as you” and now they are talking to each other.”
Penny Miller facilitates monthly meetings at The Death Café in Fremantle. She says she doesn’t have many friends her age who are willing to openly discuss death.
“It’s still quite a taboo topic,” she says.
“It’s complex we a living in a very secular society and there isn’t a lot of focus on rituals especially for us white westerners.
“A lot of other cultural roots do death much better than we do,” she says.
The Death Café is part of a worldwide movement originally founded in 2011 in the UK by Jon Underwood.
Over coffee and cake strangers are encouraged to openly discuss matters to do with death. There are now more than 400 cafeś in Australia alone.
Penny explains that “no one Death Café is ever the same as the next” and that it’s always a chat with a “diverse range of people”.
“We get people bringing in their personal stories of loss, people who are survivors of serious illness and don’t know how long they’ve got, younger people trying to get their heads around death and what it might mean and we get quite a few psychologists and other counsellors,” Penny says.
“Dying, funeral arrangements, the scattering of ashes, palliative care.
“The topics are really wide,” she explains.
“We lose parents, we lose friends, we begin to have a number of friends who have a terminal illness in our 40’s and 50’s a lot of the time.
"It’s something we can’t shy away from forever and I think we also need to normalise it to help people who are unwell.”
Penny thinks it’s “absolutely crucial” that Australia has assisted dying laws in place. Despite her deceased father’s last twenty-four hours being peaceful she says the lead up to it was “hell”.
“I spent a couple of nights on the hospital floor because I just didn’t know when and if he would wake up.
“It was just really awful as is the case for so many dying people.
Penny’s father was given a large dose of morphine which took him out of pain. But she explains it’s still an “unstructured, unlegislated, unregulated way of euthanising people”.
“It seems only logical that we make that a valid process (voluntary assisted dying) and just own that it’s actually happening a lot and make it legal.”
“It’s about bloody time.”
“Even though we’ve been through a traumatic death, we know that our loved one is out of pain.
“It’s awful to think that their last experiences on earth are terribly agitated,” Penny says.
Cathy explains our society has not “served us well” in making discussions around death easy or accessible.
“It’s curious that it is hidden.”
“It’s not a conversation that is encouraged in our society, not in school or university and because it is hidden and brushed away as if talking about it might somehow be a bad omen or somehow trigger it to happen, which of course is nonsense,” Cathy says.
“I mean the one thing we know is everyone is going to die. It’s actually one thing we do know but we tend to wish it away and somehow think if we don’t talk about it, it won’t happen.”
Many people have since written to Cathy and Sam to thank them for normalising the death process.
Cathy says accepting her mother’s journey towards death was a process of learning to listen and take her wish seriously.
“She has the right to want this and she knew what she was doing.
"She wasn’t being erratic or silly.
“She was very serious.
“In those last few days it was just so beautiful.
“The love between us was just clean and gorgeous,” she says.
Cathy is grateful for the peace that came after her mother’s death.
“For some reason after she left it’s as if the sound track of my mind just switched right down and it just went…,”
Cathy pauses to whisper, “…quiet.”
“It’s probably the most peaceful I’ve ever felt.”
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