ADAM FRANK: Death is the question beyond all questions.

Everybody wants to know what's on the other side.

TIERAONA LOW DOG: I believe the soul is infinite.

TED WINTERBURN: When you die, you die.

There's no grand plan involved.

JEFFREY PIEHLER: What about the afterlife?

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: How do you live your life knowing that its bounded by death?

I started out working at a crematorium, to really zero-in on my fears.

MAAJID NAWAZ: The fear of death led me into the darkest of places, and the shadow of violent death is still there over me.

PHYLLIS TICKLE: Suddenly, I'm in the tunnel, it's real.

Near death experience changed every single thing.

PASTOR VERNAL HARRIS: Your faith is going to be tested...

The death of my sons interfered with the way I felt about God.

JEFFREY PIEHLER: Facing death has rewritten my capacity to love and my ability to see love in the world.

NARRATOR: Those who have come close to death are forever changed, "Into the Night" tells their stories.

ANNOUNCER: Funding provided by The Thiel Foundation.

(Ominous Gregorian chanting) (Ominous Gregorian chanting) (Ominous Gregorian chanting) (Sound of seagulls) NARRATOR: A dying patient recounted her last dream to her therapist.

It's dusk, darkness falls slowly, soon it is pitch-black night.

I'm alone in my boat floating through the harbor.

I see the lights of many other boats.

I know I can't reach them; can't join with them.

But how comforting it is to see all those other lights bobbing in the harbor, knowing that people are still up late at night with me: here and everywhere.

(Quiet lapping of waves) There is nothing that we will ever do that feels so alone as dying.

(Melancholy piano music) There is no way we can know what it means.

Death is our first and last question, why?

We can learn from others, especially those who've awakened to their mortality, for whom death is no longer an abstraction.

There are those who go gently or sadly, those who go with denial or defiance, and some with radiant acceptance.

We can find ourselves in their hopes and fears and in their richly varied narratives.

What is our story?

How do we live with death in our eye?

It is a choice, a choice at the heart of our shared humanity.

(Melancholy piano and violin music) (Melancholy piano and violin music continues) GABRIEL BYRNE: Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, because their words had forked no lightning they do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright their frail deeds... SAM KEEN: Dylan Thomas's poem has kind of haunted me for most of my adult life.

Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And I says, you're damn right, I'm going to, you know?

What is this death stuff?

Where, where did I sign?

I didn't sign up for that.

It wasn't in the...

I signed up to live, okay?

And that I'm going to demand, I'm going to go before God and say, show me the small print, see?

(chuckles) ADAM FRANK: Raging against the dying of the light is just, why would you want to do that?

I mean, none of us want to die, but when the moment comes, when the moment comes, and there's nothing that you can do about it, what a crazy way of spending your last few minutes raging against the, you know, something that is absolutely going to occur?

Instead, you should be embracing the dying of the light.

You should be, you should be curious about the dying of the light, right?

That's really the best way of coming, it's like, oh, what happens now?

SONIA ARRISON: In, in my mind, to accept going... to, to accept the dying light is to just give up.

And I'm not somebody who gives up.

I, I will not give up until the very, very end.

(chuckles) LESLIE BLACKHALL: You know there's this language about fighting, right?

"I'm not ready to give up", you know, "he's a fighter".

"He would want to keep fighting this".

The problem with that story that people tell, which is a story of courage and willpower, is that when that person eventually dies, or is at the end of his life; if they were a fighter, are they now a loser?

Are they a quitter?

Are they a failure?

How can that be so?

MAX MORE: What really gets my heart pumping is rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It's saying, hell no.

Don't accept this nonsense.

Do something about it.

We don't know what we can do with life extension research, what we can do with cryonics.

There are always possibilities.

Just don't go gently.

You've got to fight.

ELDER JESSE: How can you not want to go gentle?

Everything you believe, everything you trust, everything that you've lived on, everything that I stood on, the resurrection, believing and understanding that, yes, I am going to see my savior, I must be gentle, I must embrace it.

I can't fight against it.

CHARLENE KNICKERBOCKER: I know quite a few people who get excited about having that spiritual body and being with God.

I like my body.

And I'm not ready to, um, I'm not ready to be a spirit yet.

TIERAONA LOW DOG: That whole rage, fight, don't go into that, gentle into that good night.

I mean, that was the warrior spirit I was, you know?

And I still am to some degree.

But a lot of years have passed and a lot of things have happened, and, um... you know, death is right here with me now.

I have Stage IV cancer.

I want to go gently into that good night.

GABRIEL BYRNE: We can sing.

We can dance through it.

We can accept it or we can be rageful about it.

But it's the one demon that we cannot uh, appease or subdue.

(Sound of waves crashing) NARRATOR: Dylan Thomas' great poem taps into our deepest unconscious.

Death is the roar underneath everything.

It is the most existentially threatening event any of us will ever experience.

Some have come close to this great unknown and were forever changed.

They have stories to tell.

CAITLIN DOUGHTY: I like to say that the Grim Reaper has his hand up all of our butts because we really are puppets of death and mortality and puppets of the fear of death.

And everything that we do, from building cathedrals to having children to having jobs and careers, is all the thrust of it, is our fear of death.

(Soft rock, guitar music with vocals) WOMAN: Hi, hello!

CAITLIN: Hi!

Good to see you.

NARRATOR: Caitlin Doughty is one of the leaders in a new movement: to make death visible, to break the silence, a silence that reverberates.

Young people are meeting in death salons and in death cafes.

Older people are following them.

These gatherings started in Switzerland, moved to England, and are now spreading throughout the Western world.

Caitlin is determined to understand death and to end our estrangement from the dead body.

CAITLIN: Welcome to Death Salon: San Francisco.

(applause) Thank you.

Yes, yes.

Joyful noise.

Joyful noise.

The moment that I first remember... not knowing death was real, but like, knowing death was real, very deeply was the defining moment of my life.

(Melancholy music) I was young, in about third or fourth grade.

I was at a mall in my town.

I was standing on the second floor and it's one of those big open atriums.

And this little girl climbs up at the edge of the escalator and just fell, fell off, and just... just smack, just this, this thud that, I remember now, I can hear it as clearly as when it happened.

And her mother went screaming down the escalator just, just screaming, just, "my baby, my baby, my baby".

And that changed my life.

I remember everything about the night that it happened.

I remember just lying in bed.

I couldn't sleep at all.

I went into the living room and I pulled the blanket over me; and I just sat there with every light blazing and just waited for morning.

My parents came out and they knew, but I don't know that they wanted to talk about it so much.

I think they were of the opinion that if we didn't talk about it, it would, it would go away, don't, don't bring it up.

Don't, don't rehash it.

Many, many nights following that I stayed up into the night just fearing death, and not specific death, but just the weight of the black cloud of the fact of death existing.

I was very loved by my parents and very loved by the people around me, but what was wrong was this pervasive, intense fear of death and dying.

I went and majored in medieval history, medieval death rituals, depictions of the corpse in the medieval period.

Something I was always drawn to was the art of the Macabre and specifically the Danse Macabre.

Doesn't matter who you are, you are going to get caught up in this Dance of Death.

You will dance with me, eventually.

I started out working at a crematorium to try and confront death to really zero in on my fears and face them head-on, and walk into a place that had real dead bodies and death in its rawest, purest form.

And if I could face, if I could go into the belly of the beast and face it as it really was, maybe that would heal me in some way.

(Melancholy violin music) The body on fire, in flames is intense.

This is a big room with skylights, and it feels almost like an industrial temple.

The first day, I remember my boss put me in a little room back there where we prepare the bodies, and I, I shaved a corpse.

And it was on one hand this incredibly reverent experience of being with a dead body in the quiet, doing this almost ritualistic act; and on the other hand, it was shocking and it was savage.

I felt like I was in a different world.

(Sound of shovel with ashes) It involved getting bone dust on your clothes and sweating and bizarre fluids and decomposing bodies and smells.

But it was also liberating.

Death happens and it can be messy, and it can be gross, but it can also be beautiful.

(Melancholy violin music) (Sound of water dripping) (Melancholy violin music continues) (sounds of machinery in crematorium) (♪ Movement VI, Mirabai Songs, Don't Go, Don't Go).

♪ Don't go, don't go ♪ ♪ I touch your souls ♪ ♪ I'm sold to you ♪ ♪ Show me where to find the back...♪ CAITLIN: There's not a lot of room to break down or to reflect.

As I kept doing it, though, I found things that snuck through.

There were bodies that did affect me that I couldn't ignore.

There was a baby that I cremated, that I, I clipped her hair because her, her family wanted little locks of her hair.

So I clipped and shaved her head and then I placed her into the crematory machine.

I placed her into the flames.

And it felt like I was some bearer of, of ancient, you know, an ancient funeral worker or someone with this real profound purpose.

And I, I cried as I did it.

And then I took her bones out at the end and, and processed those by hand.

And it was this strange honor that, that I won't soon forget.

♪ Don't go, don't go ♪ ♪ I touch your souls ♪ CAITLIN: Each of these stories develop a whole narrative in your mind.

You can't ignore the effect that they're having on your life.

It was a high and a low that I do believe death caused.

What I began to realize after I worked here for a while is that, very rarely did anybody come in with the body, to be here for the final moments.

It felt weird to me that it was just me.

There's no connection to the actual physical corpse at all, and I think there's a huge problem with that.

(Melancholy violin music) The corpse is so important.

We need to get it back into our death rituals.

It allows us to really see the person transition out of this life.

It allows you to confront your own mortality.

There's no better memento mori or reminder that you're going to die than a dead body and being in the same room with it in a calm rational way.

If you look at other cultures, some of what they do seems very foreign and very, very creepy and horrendous to us the fact of keeping the body in the home for days or a week, or, or having the body being eaten, consumed by vultures or something; but they all have these complex belief mechanisms behind that.

And they have very, very good reasons for what they do and meaningful reasons for what they do with the dead body.

(Solemn Classical music) We need ritual around death.

Going to visit a cemetery especially a cemetery that you think you might eventually be buried in is a really incredible opportunity to sit with the idea of your death.

Thinking about your body being there, under the ground... and if it were underground right now, would you be okay with that?

What I think about my own death, when I'm dead, I'm dead.

It's like the old film reel, flapping.

And it just goes white and the screen just flickers and I just sail off into nothingness.

And that brings me a lot of comfort.

That doesn't bring everyone comfort, but it brings me comfort; and it is a narrative, and it is real.

(Flapping of bird wings) (Sounds of waves at the beach) (Sound of gulls) JIM CRACE: I'm a storyteller and a liar and an elaborator, a colorist.

How can I be hostile against religion that uses storytelling as the Trojan horse in which to smuggle into your heart some sense of solace in the face of death.

My novel "Being Dead," a book about death, starts with this dead couple who have been brutally murdered when they were making love on the beach.

(Whimsical medium tempo music) The bodies were discovered straightaway, a beetle first, cladatis maxima, a male.

Then the raiding parties arrive, drawn by the summons of fresh wounds and the smell of urine.

Swag flies and crabs, which normally would have had to make do with rat dung and the carcasses of fish for their carrion.

Then a gull, no one except newspapers could say that there was only death amongst the dunes that summer's afternoon.

(Whimsical medium tempo music continues) What I wanted to do in this story is to go to the really darkest corners of our lives to visit death in all of its biological truth.

For me, that is the whole story narrative that I've come up with.

Nature has the last say and takes us back and greens us up again, uh...even though, our lives are over.

My father died in 1979, and I've written about him in a hidden way through, through my books.

And here I am now in 2014 still talking with love about my father.

Came away from my his funeral, pretty bruised really.

Um...

There was something about my reaction, in which I thought, I wish I was religious.

That was the first time in my, in my life I thought I wish I was religious because then I'd have the answers and I'd known what to have done.

And we would have sorted this problem out.

Um....And I wouldn't have expected religion to provided all the answers and to have made everything okay because, because the armor that, that religion provides you with is, has chinks in it; but, nevertheless, it is armor and it does not, stop, stop some of those arrows penetrating into your flesh.

My Dad came from quite a working class background.

His father made him work selling fish off a barrow.

He didn't go to school from the age of 12 onwards and didn't learn to read properly.

When he was reading us our first books, he was learning to read as we were learning to read.

One of the things we were aware of is that when our father who was deeply interested in literature and art and music, was introducing us to those things, he was also introducing himself to those things.

(Sound of someone whistling a tune) Somehow other than that made me feel very stitched into my Dad and really appreciative of him.

He was a great companion to go on a walk with.

My Dad would say, "What's that tree, or what's that flower?"

The times when we were most happy was when we were encountering natural history with each other.

My Dad was political.

He was a socialist, trade union activist.

So he saw everything in class terms and everything that was controlled by the ruling class, he was hostile to, the church was controlled by the ruling class.

God was controlled by the ruling class.

He was a working class atheist.

This man whose atheism I had admired so much, I now recognize that that atheism was kind of a striking of an attitude rather than something that had any real depth to it.

It wasn't granite hard.

It was flimsy and class based.

And he didn't have any way in which he was going to deal with death.

He never thought about death in spiritual terms.

When he knew that he was dying of cancer, he made it very clear that when he died, there were going to be no members of the ruling class there, in other words, there was not going to be any hymns, there was not going to be any vicar that's for sure.

He didn't even want any guests because he didn't want any fuss being made.

He didn't want any flowers.

And the instruction he gave was that, when he died, he should be cremated at the Co-op crematorium.

You know, it had to be a socialist crematorium.

And we should not even collect his ashes.

Oh, you know, it, that, that is bad.

(Classical piano music) It was the bleakest thing that we could have possibly have done to mark the end of this curmudgeonly, unique, warm-spirited man.

And I remember that day as being kind of the worst day ever.

We just foolishly just let him roll down the ramp and turn into smoke and dust.

And I don't think there's been a day since that day that I've not regretted it and knew that that was a mistake.

That point was the time when I started questioning my own atheism and wanting to come up with a version of atheism which could offer the comforts that the great narrative religions have offered so efficiently over the millennia.

The key thing about it for me was that these stories don't have to be true.

The narratives are comfort in the Jewish religion, the Christian religion, Muslim religion, the Indian religions.

The important thing is not that the story is true, but the comfort is real.

Just because you're scientific person, you don't have to come up with a non-fiction story.

You can come up with something fictional, but the comfort has to be real.

That was the challenge.

I wasn't looking for the truth, I was looking for real comfort.

Soon after he died and we were cleaning his stuff up and throwing things out and I felt my Dad's trousers, I felt a weight in the pocket.

I plunged my hand in and I pulled it out, and it was an acorn, you know, the seed of a British oak tree.

Now my Dad whenever you went for walk with him would have a pocket full of acorns.

And without any sense of introspection, he would throw them into the hedgerow and grind them into the ground with his heel, planting the landscape with oaks, the tree that survives longest in the United Kingdom.

They can be 400, 500 years old.

And there was my father with no sense of before and after, a simple man, nevertheless, planting oaks for the future.

And there's a stalwart square of oaks that my Dad had planted throughout his life.

If you wanted evidence of a life well lived, that's what he's left.

That's his gift.

It goes to the heart of him as a man.

And I think it also goes to the heart of our experience of the world... that if you start to see the world, which is what I had to do, if I started to see the world, not as an outside job, in other words, a universe created by God, but everything in it was an inside job, in other words, the, the world itself created and recreated itself through natural processes.

Then the idea of a seed and a tree says it all.

(Ambient music) I now know what it is that gives me comfort in the face of death.

Finding that acorn in my Dad's pocket was an absolute clue for me.

It's not meaningless, there is that continuity there, there is a future.

I learned with my father that if you are really to love and understand the natural world, you have to embrace it all or none of it.

You can't just only embrace kingfishers and rainbows and daffodils because that's too easy.

If you are prepared to look at the soil and study the lice that run around your body, treat them all with interest.

What you're doing is you're training yourself to embrace the whole of the natural world.

And then you end up not feeling disgust at all because you have a rounded view.

For me, that helps a hell of a lot.

You're not going to be able to deal with death entirely, all you can do is kind of defend yourself in a few places.

So I thought I would write a book about the death of my parents and try and find an afterlife for my parents.

(Prelude in C Major by J.S.

Bach) I carry in my wallet and I've carried all my years in my wallet, a little photograph of me and my Dad, little tousle head, three-year-old me in my father's arm.

And he's standing in the sea.

There I am, absolutely safely encased in my father's arms as if that can never end.

And for me that is the, the moment that I think that I will rediscover when I walk along the beach, that I will find me in my father's arms in the sea.

That picture is not just my personal picture, the photograph of the family by the seaside and the children being held by the father, or the mother while they stand in the sea is almost universal.

When my wife saw that photograph in my wallet and she went to her wallet and she brought out an identical photograph and she is standing in the sea next to her mum holding her mum's hand.

My wife's mum died within three months of that photograph being taken.

So what I thought that I would do was that I would find that beach in a story, in my novel, and I would find my father and I would find my father's arms.

And I would also find my wife's mother.

This novel would be a gift to my wife.

I would give my wife something she never had, which was her mum.

This is the arrogance of writers.

I would find the place where all of our parents, and all of our dead dogs, and all of our dead friends, and all of those people that we've loved and lost can be relocate, relocated.

This is just a story.

This is just a novel.

But I'm sure that it's reverberating in your mind with, with kind of the Christian stories and religious stories about being reunited with people that we've loved and lost.

So that was what I did.

And I wrote 40,000 words and the hubristic end to the story is that the novel was a total failure and had to be abandoned.

(Sound of waves crashing) I want to think that there's some kind of eternity, a kind of immortality but I'm sensible enough to know immortality and eternity are wrong.

Sometime you are going to die.

What happens when I go to the doctors and the doctor comes through the room with my chest x-ray and he puts it up on the light and there's the cancer in my chest.

So how good are these narratives of comfort then?

So I fear that everything I've told you is going to fail.

And I made sense of that inevitability by reminding myself again and again that I've won a kind of a lottery.

So what's to be sorry for?

The solace is to remind myself that of all the eggs that there were in the universe, of all the sperm there is in the universe, of all the places that there could be, of all the times there could be, of all the creatures that there could have been, it is me, and it is here and it is now.

And the chances of that happening in the great big unthinking teeming world of possibilities and sperm and eggs and time are infinitesimal.

So we should never lose sight of the fact that we are that lucky.

I don't live my life like this, though I don't go around having conversations like this with friends.

I don't go into the pub and talk at this level.

I wouldn't talk like this to my wife.

She'd say get a grip.

We don't live our lives having these conversations.

These are rare conversations.

Um, and isn't it odd that we don't have these conversations in these big issues.

We don't grapple with them.

I'm embarrassed, I've embarrassed myself today talking so self-regardingly about these things.

So I feel a bit embarrassed, but I also feel a bit shriven.

(Ambient music with vocals) NARRATOR: For Adam Frank, death opened him up to the stars and shaped a narrative of adventure and possibility.

ADAM FRANK: I'm absolutely agnostic about death, about what happens after death.

I would consider myself an atheist, but when it comes to death, the idea of taking a strident knowing position, just seems a little antithetical to the whole scientific enterprise in some sense.

Death is really it's what wraps around all of our questions.

It's the central mystery.

My brother's death put me on a path.

It opened me up to this enigma that inhabits all life.

We have all of this care and concern and fear and anxiety and love and joy, and then it just goes away.

(Crash of thunder) (sound of rainstorm) In our house in New Jersey, we had a porch and everybody sort of hung out there a lot in the summer.

And there was a torrential rainstorm.

And I remember my father saw my terror and he said, "no, no, no, wait, you know what, let me tell you what thunder is" and he gave this beautiful cogent explanation the electron streaming through the air, superheating it, you know, forcing the air to explode, it was just a great image.

I was like, "oh, yeah, whatever, you know?

Like it's not, so it's a loud noise, that's all it is, is a loud noise."

(Sound of rain fall) That idea, that there are explanations.

And the explanations take away the uncertainty.

That became very important to me.

That, in some sense, by knowing what's actually happening, it can alleviate some of the sense of, of fear, despair, anxiety.

I was often being picked on or I was often, you know, I was getting beat up a lot in the neighborhood.

My brother David was seven years older than I was.

And he was my protector because he was a big guy.

And I remember him like one time when somebody was coming after me for whatever, and I ran home.

And I remember David stepping out of the house and the dude who was chasing me just stopped, you know, and went.

And David didn't even say anything.

The guy just turned around and walked away.

So he was really, you know, he was the guy who was protecting me, he was paying attention in some sense.

And he took me to the baseball games.

He turned me on to the Beatles, his presence in my life was really important.

And then when I was nine, he was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver.

The loss of my brother in so many ways marked a turning point for me.

That moment, that changed everything, right, that was, that I can definitely say there is you know, before David's death and after David's death.

And it's hard even to express what the loss meant because it did, it just did completely redirected my life.

I was alone in many ways.

There was nobody in the house, kind of who was going to be paying attention anymore.

And it was just, that was, it was, at nine years old you just don't know what the hell's going on, right?

You don't really understand it, you know something has happened and the idea that he's gone, he's just irrevocably gone, it just takes so much time to process and, you know, if I ever processed it.

(Melancholy music) There is this ache, this unresolvable absence.

There's a, I still have it, it's a little thing I wrote which said, something like, "Love can be good but it can also be bad.

I lost my brother David today.

It hurts."

My experience of my brother's death certainly opened me up to the weirdness of life.

I didn't feel some sort of existential dread over that, it was just sort of an overwhelming sense of irrefutability.

(Dramatic ambient music) My love of the stars started very early.

The beauty of the stars, the sense of calling to them.

I think because of the difficulty of my childhood, I thought of the stars as my friends in some sense, they were someone to talk to in this weird way.

But really with my brother's death and the, the fact of his death, the timelessness, the apparent timelessness of celestial objects of the stars became a source of enormous comfort to me.

The sense of vastness, the sense of scale, I was already learning about how big a light year was and how immense the distances between the stars were and the timescale's involved, I found a great sense of whatever is happening in my life, whatever loss I felt, it just doesn't matter, you know?

It just, I mean it's there, it's real, but it has to be set against this context.

That lifted me out of the feeling like I was stuck, stuck in my pain, stuck in my loss.

And some of the most beautiful images from astronomy are of these interstellar gas wombs.

There are stellar wombs in some sense, where you'll get hundreds, thousands of stars all being formed at once.

(♪ Casta Diva by Vincenzo Bellini) ADAM: Science is a gateway to a sense of awe.

♪ Casta ♪ ♪ Diva ♪ ♪ Casta Diva ♪ ♪ Che inargenti ♪♪ ADAM: There's just so much more universe than what we experience.

So how can death be scary?

How can, it's just something that happens.

How can that not be comforting?

♪ Queste sacre ♪ ♪ Queste sacre ♪♪ ADAM: I know many people look at the stars and feel the sort of sense of existential terror of being absolutely alone in a meaningless universe.

And I don't understand that at all.

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

In fact, it makes me feel part of this vast drama like I absolutely belong to the universe.

But it's, it's not like this perspective on the stars makes fear go away, I certainly have all that fear and anxiety.

I am full of fear and anxiety every day of my life, just like everybody else, you know?

I get at spot on my leg I'm like "I'm going to die, that's it.

I got to go to the doctor.

I know it's going to happen, see, I told you."

So, um, you know, I am absolutely, my, my perspective on the stars does not inoculate me.

There's just a little bit less sting, there's less scorpion sting.

And we're going to call it BE and we're going to use flex freezing condition which is that the field at the maximum radius...

So the other thing that happened with my brother's death that launched me on a trajectory is that I was seeking certainty.

I was seeking in astronomy and in these laws of physics I was seeking solace in them.

And as I started to get deeper into mathematics, you know, I fell in love with it.

And the fact that there were these mathematical expressions, detailed mathematical expressions that described the world, described how the radiation from the sun what its patterns of energy would look like, I was struck by enormously and I became a Platonist.

I came to believe that as Plato had argued that there was a world of ideals uh, beyond this world, and these ideals where mathematical that, you know, every triangle that we see is just kind of a crappy version of the ideal mathematically expressed triangle.

When you're doing Maxwell's equations, you know, which are the equations for electromagnetism and light, what you're really doing is you're reading the mind of God.

You're thinking God's thoughts, because these, you know, we know, obviously, most scientists wouldn't put, some would, but wouldn't say God, but just that, these are the eternal timeless laws built into the universe.

The way I'd like to think of it these are the, the mathematical expressions are the skeleton upon which the flesh of the world is hung.

It's a beautiful idea and very seductive for all of us as physicists.

But as time went on, I kind of became a lapsed, a lapsed Platonist.

(Sound of chalk on chalkboard) Wouldn't it be awesome if this equation was timeless, right?

You know, I can write down these equations, and these things were immutable and that, you know, they lived beyond time.

Oh, my God.

And I could contemplate them, you know, by, by reading them and learning about them and learning how to manipulate them, I am actually working with the, the alphabet of creation itself, right, you can see why that is so powerful.

(Dramatic ambient music) What the problem with that, with that view is is that it becomes kind of another kind of certainty, another kind of absolute certainty that, you know, because we're always seeking the timeless, right?

Because of death, we yearn for the timeless, right, the idea that something out there doesn't decay and doesn't change and will be there long after on there.

And I just now have come to believe that actually that's too simple a view.

(Dramatic ambient music) The lust for certainty and it is the most damaging thing that humanity has.

It's what drives people to take these rigid stances and it's in that rigidity that so much violence occurs.

(Dramatic music builds) MAAJID NAWAZ: This lust for the absolute, this thirst for knowing what happens what when we die, is universal.

That's the nature of being human.

It's something that Christianity, the Old Testament and Judaism have gone through in the past and throughout time.

But there is a particular challenge in today's times with a version of Islam which seems to be specifically vulnerable at the moment to this thirst.

(Dramatic ambient music) The fear of death, this desire for certainty, led me into the darkest of places.

I grew up in a relatively middle class to upper middle class, integrated British-Pakistani family.

From about the age of 15, I became aware of how close, how fragile my own life was.

It was 1990-1995, a genocide began to unfold in Bosnia against Bosnian Muslims.

That genocide really made me start thinking about death in a different way, what if I as a Muslim in the U.K. started being targeted in that way?

And it happened at the same time when Neo-Nazi skinheads in Essex where I was born, would engage in what I, they called Paki-bashing.

(Sound of men shouting) That was a sport to them.

They would go around in the back of white vans.

And look for people of color.

Then they would jump out fully armed with machetes and hammers and screwdrivers.

The first time they attacked my group and me, we saw running towards us this group of men, you know, with Nazi salutes, shouting racist slogans.

(Sound of men shouting escalates) MAAJID: I was walking around in those early days on the streets of Essex with a bull's eye on my face because I can't shed the color of my skin and so I felt that I was literally being hunted.

I became very mixed up about identify, was I British, was I Pakistani, was I Muslim.

And into that mix came friends of mine who began giving me some of the answers to these questions in a more certain way.

They said, Muslims are under siege everywhere, and solution to the siege is to have a state that only looks after and protects Muslims.

And we'll fight on behalf of Muslims, the so-called caliphate.

Now that made sense to me politically to my young naive angry vulnerable teenage mind, you know, it was a black and white answer to what I saw as a black and white problem.

But then, equally or, more importantly, came the religious answer to this.

You are of the chosen religion, you have chosen the truth, Islam, and you're going to paradise.

That embracing the afterlife in that way allowed me to really feel secure and safe in whatever happened next.

So I joined the Islamist group.

We would hold private study circles, some of them would be on one topic alone and that would be the topic of death.

I remember in some of these study circles receiving vivid description of the afterlife.

On the day of judgment I remember being told that we would be petrified, there would be a burning sun right above us, we'd be drowning in our own sweat, hoards of us, thousands, millions of us, that have been resurrected at the same time, would be panicking, running around, you know, begging people to forgive us for the sins we've committed against them.

(Drone like ominous music) We'd have to cross what's called the Siraat, which is the, the bridge from the plane of the day of judgment to the reckoning with God.

And the bridge is the width of a hair, and only the true believers could cross it without falling into hell.

And then we get to the reckoning with God himself, every single one of our deeds is recounted.

And it's all written in the ledger.

But don't forget, it recorded it all before you were even born.

So those sins were already there.

So then God says to me, "do you deserve paradise because of your good deeds or because of my mercy?"

And, obviously, I'm going to say my mercy, because I'm (...) scared right now.

I'm not sure if I'm going to paradise.

There was one solution that will definitely circumvent the uncertainty that comes with judgment, and that was martyrdom.

Martyrdom was a one-way ticket nonstop directly to paradise.

While everyone else is waiting for the day of reckoning, the martyrs will be small green birds flying around the throne of their Lord until the day of judgment.

And then they will be resurrected as fully formed beings, straight in paradise.

This wasn't made up.

The religious side was true to traditional Muslim interpretations of the faith and the afterlife.

(Chanting in Arabic) MAAJID: The innovation was to take that religion and link it to a political ideology.

And I saw then the power of not fearing death, the power that I could yield against my enemies in being so certain that the truth was on my side, that I was prepared to die for it.

And it was the first life lesson.

We had factions within Islamism.

My faction didn't subscribe to terrorism, which is why, thankfully, I never killed anyone, and I have no blood on my hands.

The only way I could get martyrdom was by holding to account some of the dictators that I was attempting to destabilize.

If they killed me, then I'd be a martyr.

And so then that became the dream to die in the, in the cause of resurrecting the utopian caliphate.

(Sound of people rioting) (police blowing whistles) MAAJID: When I went to Egypt and that was the martyrdom I was seeking, I needed, I craved.

One night, the state security agents had burst through my apartment door.

They blindfolded me and they tied my hands behind my back.

(Ominous drone-like music) They drove me to the dungeons of their state security headquarters in Cairo where I was placed with hundreds of others, all blindfolded.

We were all numbered.

My number was 42.

They proceeded to roll call through these numbers and each one they would take to the interrogation room.

And we would all hear their screams.

By the time my number was called, I had heard 41 people tortured.

And I was 42.

So 41 times I relived the experience of death.

(Men chanting and cheering in Arabic) MAAJID: On the day we were sentenced to five years in the Egyptian courtroom, all of us erupted in jubilation and cheers... (Men chanting and cheering in Arabic) MAAJID: Celebrating the fact that we had sacrificed for our cause.

We would go down in history as those who had fallen in the struggle.

Our blood would form the ink that would write the history books.

(Middle Eastern guitar music) When I was in solitary confinement for four months, it was the beginning of my introspection and the beginning of a long journey of questioning.

After my release, when I returned to the U.K., I was full of doubts about my political narrative.

But I still had my religious dogmatic convictions.

And then I began questioning how realistic is it that the plateau of the afterlife and the, and the, and the thin bridge the width of a hair and this book that records everything all of your deeds and misdeeds from even before creation, you know?

How realistic is all of this?

Eventually, I became uncertain about some of the more rigid religious dogma.

And, eventually I am very happy to say I became incredibly comfortable with my uncertainty to a point now where I think that if there is a holy grail, it has to be uncertainty.

And that's the beauty of it.

There are many moments that I regret in my past.

There are regrets in the people I recruited, some of them went on to leave my group and joined more violent groups and some of them went on to get convicted for acts of terrorism.

Everyone in this society, Muslims, non-Muslims, whether they are Islamic societies, whether they are government, everyone needs to do more to challenge extremism... Now, what I want to do is send the message to those who are seeking to recruit the young angry 16-year-old version of me, that democratic societies can re-embrace people who had been its avowed enemy.

One of the beauties of democracy is its openness.

You haven't suffered one day in prison.

You haven't suffered one bit for your views, you're allowed to sit here right now because of freedom and democracy.

In your so called caliphate, you'd have me killed, wouldn't you?

Wouldn't you have me, am I an apostate that deserves death?

ANJEM CHOUDARY: Well, I mean, obviously... MAAJID: Answer my question.

There are people who still subscribe to all of the dogma, political and religious, who are incredibly upset, angry that I make it my business to challenge that dogma.

BBC HOST: You're not going to answer the question, right?

ANJEM: Well, it's a ridiculous question.

He knows the answer to it already.

MAAJID: The bull's eye that was on my skin, because of my skin color is now because of my thoughts.

And it's still a target on me.

So if I'm in a cafe, I'm aware of people staring at me.

I'm aware of sudden movements.

I'm aware of sudden noises.

I'm aware of exit points and entry points.

The shadow of violent death is still there, over me, looming, it hasn't gone away.

So I live with that every day, and, yet, I am happy to say I'm a Muslim who has embraced skepticism and uncertainty about what will happen when I die.

I take an almost serene view about anything that might happen.

(Up tempo foreboding violin music) NARRATOR: For some, equanimity in the face of death is giving up.

True wisdom lies in resistance, in going beyond our natural limits.

MAX MORE: Cryonics is a safety belt.

You could call it true life insurance.

It's the last and final step.

I want to make it very clear; nobody wants to be cryopreserved.

I don't want to be in one of these tanks.

But it may be necessary, it's the second worst thing that could happen to you, right?

The idea of sitting in a tank of liquid nitrogen unable to control my destiny, it's not appealing to me at all.

But then I think, well, what's the alternative?

Well, I guess I could just die and be gone forever and have no more life, uh, no more relationships, no more love, no more experiences, no more learning.

That doesn't sound like a very good alternative.

(Pensive ambient music) From a very early age, the limitations of human beings just seem to be frustrating to me and I was looking for ways beyond that.

I remember very obvious one is aging and death.

And that's the ultimate limitation.

It doesn't matter how smart you are whether you can fly or whatever else you can do, turn invisible, levitate, none of that matters if you're going to die at some point, it's all going to come to an end.

I realized if we were going to do something about it, it would have to be through science and technology, that's the only way to overcome aging and death.

Cryonics is, essentially, an extension of emergency medicine.

Think back 50 years or so... (Sounds of siren and heart monitor flat-lining) Somebody just collapsed and you check for the pulse, they had no pulse, no breathing.

They're dead.

And that was it.

Today, that's not true.

We'll pounce on them and do defibrillation and CPR and all kinds of things.

And, in many cases, they come back to life.

So you have to ask yourself, were they actually dead 50 years ago?

Well, not really, we call them dead because we couldn't do anything about it.

So what we're saying is when today's medicine has reached its limits, let us take over freezing you in a state, not literally freezing, but we're stopping all molecular motion and then taking you to a time in the future when there's more advanced medical capabilities that may be capable of repairing and reviving the person into a fresh, healthy rejuvenated body.

(Violin music continues) We are sitting in the Alcor Patient Care Bay.

We have 141 patients here.

They're in these large vessels, which are custom-made.

You can touch these.

They're just room temperature cool, but inside, they're incredibly cold.

To be cryopreserved, people will make arrangements generally well in advance, hopefully, years or decades in advance.

In most cases, we will actually be right there at the point of clinical death.

We have a watch list of people who are in bad condition and we stay in touch.

You're in your hospital bed, we're in the room next door with all our equipment, as soon as the doctor declares you legally clinically dead, we immediately within seconds, start lifting the patient out of the hospital bed, placing them in the ice bath to accelerate the external cooling, we'll also take over respiration.

We have a mechanical CPR device.

(Sound of breathing machine) It's very much like the early stages of organ donation.

You want to keep the tissues fresh and viable.

Then we'll transport you here to our location where we can do the surgical procedures.

So we're able to access the vascular system and remove the blood and other fluids, replace it with a kind of medical-grade antifreeze.

(Bubbling of fluid and other surgical sounds) We commonly say we freeze people, but we really don't, we try not to, because freezing implies the formation of ice crystals, which are very destructive.

They don't completely demolish the cells as some people incorrectly make out.

But they definitely do a lot of damage.

And then we wait, we wait for a time when we have sufficiently advanced technology to repair, first of all, whatever it was that killed you, we want to fix the aging process, there's no point bringing you back as an old person.

And then we need to repair the additional damage that is definitely caused by the cryopreservation procedure itself.

We know from studies that we are preserving tissue in good conditions.

Meaning that, you know, memories are almost surely intact.

(Slow reflective piano music) We are preserving the essential physical structure that is you, your memory.

(♪ Don't Go, Don't Go, Mirabai Songs, Movement VI) MAX: We have friends who are already cryopreserved and relatives.

We have family signing up, we have three generations of some families.

You're really saying goodbye for a very long time, you're not going to speak to that person, you're not going to hug them anymore.

So it is still going to be a terrible loss.

MAX: But I think it does blunt it somewhat to know that it's not necessarily forever that they are gone.

♪ I touch your souls ♪ ♪ I'm sold to you ♪♪ MAX: There are so many little things and big things in life that I would hate to lose, experiences I've had like scuba diving have been amazing, sitting on the bottom of the ocean at night, with all the lights off.

It's like being in another world or in space.

This idea that having a short limited life makes it more valuable, more meaningful, I think is a horrible rationalization.

What is beautiful is the idea that we can not just keep surviving, it's about growth.

It's about improving ourselves.

It's about never giving up and always trying to get better.

(Up tempo violin music) To me, one of the most amazing experiences was sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

You can see a mile down and a mile across.

Oh, my goodness.

It's just so vast and open.

I take it as a challenge, challenge to my existence, and rather than thinking, well, my life span is so short compared to this natural marvel, I get a little bit competitive, I think, you know what?

I'm going to outlive you.

I'm going to be here when this planet's gone.

One day you'll be a tiny memory, a tiny flake in my existence, and I'll be in here for billions or trillions of years maybe and I'll just have a memory of the Grand Canyon.

So I get a little bit competitive.

(Laughs) NARRATOR: The longing for more life is primordial.

It is mankind's oldest story, but there are also those who yearn for the light.

This, too, is an enduring story.

(Ambient reflective music) (Ambient reflective music) SURVIVOR: I remember dying in 1994.

SURVIVOR 2: Every vital organ in my body started shutting down.

SURVIVOR 3: I was in a coma, but I was aware.

SURVIVOR 4: I remember floating up to the ceiling and I let go.

SURVIVOR 5: And then it was black.

Pure black.

Why am I not scared?

SURVIVOR 6: And the next thing I know I was in a dark tunnel, moving into a bright white light.

SURVIVOR 1: I had no belief in an afterlife.

And greeting me at the entrance to the light was my grandmother and mother.

SURVIVOR 5: I only saw complete darkness.

No attachments.

There's nothing, and, yet, within that nothing, there is so much peace.

SURVIVOR 7: I started to go down into a very deep black bottomless pit.

There were people everywhere with such torment on their faces; I knew I was in the presence of Satan.

SURVIVOR 8: What you see is you see heaven.

SURVIVOR 9: The joy of a homecoming.

SURVIVOR 10: Nothing but pure bliss.

SURVIVOR 11: The emotional sense was you'd never want to leave.

SURVIVOR 12: And all of a sudden, God said, you're not ready.

SURVIVOR 13: Now that you know this truth you need to go back and live fearlessly.

SURVIVOR 6: I turned around, stepped back into the dark tunnel and I was back.

SURVIVOR 5: When it is my time to die, I know that this is where I'm going.

And I will do so without fear.

(Dramatic ambient music) STEPHEN CAVE: The near-death experience has really shaped many people's views of death and what might be beyond.

Now this is an experience that people have when dying or even when their heart is stopped, when they are in a sense dead, but they're revived and they come back and they remember having experienced something.

We find these throughout history yet they're becoming much more common now, because now people are dying in hospital and being revived, we have the technology to bring people back from the brink.

And for those who have them these are deeply meaningful experiences, often life changing.

But the question is how do we interpret them?

ADAM: I understand why people have put so much faith in those experiences.

For them that is proof of life after death.

And then for another camp, you know, the more skeptical camp, that's going to sort of look at the science and say, well, you know, you weren't really dead there, we don't have a high resolution enough understanding of the relationship between the brain and consciousness to say, you actually were dead, so what was really was happening is your brain was shutting down, being deprived of oxygen, maybe these white lights that you're seeing and everything are part of that deprivation of oxygen.

And then your brain's rebooting.

But there's a third way you can interpret the near-death experiences as dreams, dreams of a dying mind.

And it's the dying process that we should be focusing on, not the what happens after the dying process.

PHYLLIS TICKLE: I can say that death is a blessing.

And I kind of yearn for the opportunity to say it.

Intelligent discussion about and from near-death people, uh, has something to say to the rest of humanity because it matters.

Five weeks ago, they called me in, and they said "what you've got is Stage IV lung cancer with metastasis already to the spine.

The prognosis usually is four to six months.

You're not going to beat this one."

I said to the oncologist, "look, I've reared my children.

I've buried my husband.

I have done the work, I think I came to do.

Now I can go."

The near-death experience clearly has affected my own reaction to this whole thing, you know, and it has from, what, good night, 50 years ago, 60 years ago almost.

(Ringing of church bells) The year is 1955, I'm all of 21, a new bride, desperately want children.

I get pregnant, but something is wrong.

The doctor is saying to me "there really is a danger and we must prevent this miscarriage if possible."

And he gave me a drug.

I wake up in the middle of the night, the door to our apartment bedroom is wide open, Sam is on top of me beating and screaming, "Ms. Jim, Ms. Jim, who is our landlady.

Quick, quick, somebody help."

(Eerie ambient music) We made it to the hospital, I don't remember that.

And then suddenly Sam is screaming, and beating on my chest and I am aware that I'm up in the corner where the walls come together with the ceiling, like a gargoyle, and I'm sitting up there and I am aware that that's my body and it's quit breathing.

And then abruptly with no segue, and I'm in the tunnel.

My tunnel is quite lovely.

It's grass all the way around.

There's no ceiling on it, but it's, it's all totally uh, lovely green grass.

And at the end of it there is light as I have never known light before or since.

Um and I am moving toward the light with great joy and great peace.

And the voice says, "are you ready?"

And I remember more than anything I've ever said as distinctly saying, "no, I think I'd like to go back and have his children."

And then the voice said, "all right."

That was it.

I was back in bed, but it changed every part of what I was.

This experience... is the nearest I've ever come to touching the sacred and it's not just touching it, it was being absorbed in it.

Knowing that there was a rightness, and a wholeness, a goodness, a peace, belief in God ceased to be something you were taught in the Sunday school, ceases to be something in your head that's thought about.

It's real.

It's just there.

God is real.

I felt like I had been birthed out into a whole new world.

(Birds chirping) I needed desperately to tell Sam what had happened.

And he absolutely couldn't handle it.

He would not let me have those conversations.

It defied everything he had been taught in two years of med school.

It had to be physiological, it had to be the result of a some kind of neurological disturbance, it had to be the result of the fact that I went brain dead, that I clearly was not breathing, um, and was in every way clinically dead.

And that, and I kept saying, if that be true, if that be true, if I were clinically dead, then what I've got to tell you is on the other side of being clinically dead, it's really nice.

And I understood that I had a choice.

I think part of what bothered him was I yearned toward it.

It got to be such an emotional overlay that it became the first thing we could never talk about.

I just learned to shut up.

I was, essentially, 25, 30 years removed from the near-death experience itself.

When it began to dawn on me, Sam was right about the fact that there's science involved here.

And there is no question there's a neurological consequence and there's no question that there is all of the things that physiology and physiologists and neuroscientists are telling us absolutely happened.

That doesn't, it doesn't change the fact that the, that doesn't make the experience any less vital or, or, or alive or accurate, simply because it describes the mechanism by which it happens.

(reading from book) I praise thee oh Lord before the peoples and I will sing praise to thee before the nations.

For thy mercy is great even to the heavens.... What goes is fear.

And there's a whole body of American Protestantism, especially, that is fear based, and when you take away the fear of death you have knocked the corner stone out of a great deal of western civilization.

(Murmuring of church and minister) PHYLLIS: What I care about is the fact that fear is not the same as awe and awe is the holy thing.

(Organ music) PRIEST: In the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father.

Now and forever.

PHYLLIS: The Eucharist, it's the ultimate near-death experience.

PRIEST: Amen.

CONGREGATION: Amen.

PHYLLIS: It's where you on this side of death experience a moment of union.

You can't enter prayer without entering into the memory of that tunnel.

It is your prayer chapel.

It is your bridge into, and you can't be afraid again.

PRIEST: The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.

(Birds chirping) PHYLLIS: So once the fear of death goes, then you're not so afraid of life.

And you're free to love.

You're just a different person.

There are moments out on the deck looking at the farm, watching the seasons change, watching the animals, that will be, I hope my last place on Earth, the last thing I hope I die on that deck, I hope I die on that deck with a bottle of Jack Daniel sitting in front of me.

Now the trip has begun.

To be given the ticket and not know where you're going, it would be awful.

I can't fathom what it would be like.

(Organ music and congregation singing) NARRATOR: And yet, death can become the ultimate challenge even for those of secure faith.

It can call everything into question.

PASTOR VERNAL HARRIS: Death will come in your life and cause so much anguish, so much pain, so much distraught, praise God.

When death came in my house, I hurt.

So much discouragement, until you don't want to be bothered!

I have asked myself many times, how do you do this, how have you been able to continue this journey after what you've experienced in the dying of Paul and the death of Solomon.

It's not just the dying, it's not just the death, but the suffering.

But then again, I think about that night, in that little church, the change that took place in my life.

(Preaching fades out) My faith was born when I was nine years old.

I'll never forget it, in a little small town called Kingsland, Georgia.

I remember one night, my mother was invited to go to this church service.

And I decided I would follow her.

I walk down that rock road and, all of a sudden, I heard this beating a bass drum, boom, boom, boom, boom, (Gospel music in church) I went to the door and I pushed my way in.

(Gospel music in church) I saw my mother.

It was like she was in a séance.

And she said, "I'm saved.

I'm saved.

I met Jesus.

I met Jesus."

She was crying.

And the people was clapping and there was just such an an atmosphere of jubilation.

And after the minister finished preaching, there was an invitation "those of you who want to get to know Jesus, come to the altar."

I was a kid.

I didn't know, so I went and I got on my knees.

And these old church mothers, they were standing around me, and they were playing the tambourines, and they was telling me to say, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

And they were saying, "call him like you want him, call him fast," and I begin to call in the name of Jesus.

Oh, my God.

Even as I think about it at this moment now, my spirit goes back to that night.

I felt an unbelievable presence like I'd never felt before.

When I think of the goodness of Jesus... And out of that experience was born a relationship with God.

Hallelujah.

Thank God for saving me.

How many thank God for another chance?

Hallelujah.

My wife and I had three children; two of them were sickle cell children.

It's a disease that affects the blood and it causes excruciating pain and our children lived in and out of the hospitals all their lives.

They suffered, oh, my God.

NARSEARY HARRIS: There's a great sense of helplessness when you have to watch your child suffer that way and they're crying out with pain and agonizing pain, just agony that you would see in their faces and sometimes um, they will be in such pain that they stop, they couldn't even cry.

The sounds were like moaning and groaning and they would have, they'd be in that pain and then they'd look at me, as though to say, "Mom, help me."

(Cries) PASTOR HARRIS: When Paul died, I had no clue... (cries) I didn't, I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know.

I thought he was just having another crisis.

I didn't know that he was getting ready to leave me.

I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't wrap my mind.

I could not wrap my mind around the fact that my Paul.

(cries) I could not believe that the God that I preached about so and talked about so and at a time when I needed him, to me, he left me to bear this by myself.

I don't talk about it too much.

But it interrupted my relationship with God, death of my son, interfered with the way I felt about God.

Paul died at 26, Solomon died at 33.

It has really taken an unbelievable toll on us as faith believers.

(Piano music) ♪ Ohh ♪ ♪ When I come to die ♪ ♪ Ohh ♪ ♪ When I come to die ♪♪ PASTOR HARRIS: I was a sad person.

I would get up at night and come down and just be here sometime for hours.

It didn't matter whether it was snowing or hot, a lot of the hurt and the bitterness that I felt I just found relief in being able to come here and remember.

(Singing continues) PASTOR HARRIS: So I walk around this cemetery, and look at these many graves.

Some people live to be 90, and there are children.

And I just prayed to God that, just prayed that they found the peace that my son Paul found.

Both my sons knew that they were going to go to a better place.

NARSEARY: And you never get over this.

It's not something that you would, that you should expect to get over it, but how you deal with each moment gets better.

It changes.

And um, just knowing that my boys are in a better place, I know that.

In spite of how angry I was, how much I doubted God, how much uh, I didn't understand about what was going on; in the back of my mind and in the deepest part of my heart in that little corner back there, I always knew that God was there.

(Dreamy ambient music) PASTOR HARRIS: I just wanted to know that Paul was all right; and I remember one night, I had a dream more like a vision, I was walking through this valley and there were trees overhead.

I heard a voice said, "oh, so you want to see Paul?"

I said, "yes."

And the voice said, "well, come go with me."

And I heard this laughter... (child laughing) That's Paul!

That's Paul.

There was this huge lighted area and there was a merry-go-round and a swing set.

The voice said, "You want to see Paul?"

Point and said, "There.

There he is."

And I looked I said, "Paul."

And he was laughing.

He was on the merry-go-round.

He was just so happy.

I said, "Paul."

And he jumped off, he got in the swing and he was just going up, down and the voice said, "Now, see?"

And I started backing up the leaves were backing me up back to that valley, I said, "he didn't say anything."

And the voice said, "oh, no, that was for you.

It wasn't for him."

And when I saw that, my faith in God was renewed because before then, it had been almost a year even as a preacher, I had not experienced the presence of the Lord.

There was a void.

Death had robbed me and now this new experience showed me that death didn't have the last say so.

For I am convinced, I am persuaded, that neither death, not even death, death don't have the power to come between me and my God.

Did you hear what I said, I said, not even death...

I have that confidence that death is not the end.

I will see my Solomon and Paul again.

And that's the faith that I live on.

♪ Slumber, my darling ♪ ♪ Thy mother is near ♪♪ NARSEARY: Sometimes just sitting quietly by the window and the breeze comes through gives me a sense of presence, that the boys are still up there, knowing that they're still watching, that they're still looking down on me.

I have to believe that.

It gives me comfort.

♪ Slumber, my darling, the night's coming on ♪♪ PAUL HARRIS: Love you all.

If I see you again, it will be a pleasure.

And wish me luck.

(blowing kiss) (Sound of clock ticking) JEFFREY PIEHLER: I'm jealous of someone who can say, going to be eternal joy, much better than anything we have here.

That is a powerful vision.

I have looked and dug and scratched for that, that answer, that solution; that key, that door, it's going to make it all right.

(Sound of waves) (Classical piano music) This has been a voyage through storms, through whirlpools, through moments of beautiful blissful sun and everything in between and moments of sheer terror and moments of indescribable peace.

All of this has been part of this.

When I was practicing medicine, circling the drain was a term that was used acknowledging that things were getting out of control and the inevitable was fast approaching.

I feel, as do my oncologists that that's the spot where I am now.

I have prostate cancer and it has spread to at a minimum to practically every bone in my body.

(Melancholy violin music) The first time that I went to get my chemotherapy, I went in there and I paused at the door.

And I looked around at everyone sitting there, and I mean I thought I'd entered Dante's Inferno.

This was incredibly sobering.

People that looked sick, and I stood at the doorway and I said, "well, I look as good as the people helping out here.

I think maybe I can just, you know, go in there and get this done and come through just as nice as the people accompanying" which was a monumental delusion.

(chuckles) About halfway into this therapy, I looked in the mirror and, and I said, my God, you look just like everyone in the waiting room.

You're one of them.

I knew as a physician standing in that doorway the first time that most of those people were going to die.

And I knew looking in the mirror at that point that I was too, and that the next person coming to that door looking in for their first dose of chemotherapy was going to look at me and say, "wow, I hope I never look like that guy."

JEAN PIEHLER: 27 years, 12 of which have been fighting cancer.

Bruschetta with artichoke dip.

How could you turn that down?

JEFFREY: I could not.

JEAN: There have been periods of respites and breaks and there have also been times when you just don't know which way it's going to go.

You're going into the hospital, things look frightening.

And in the back of your mind, you just start wondering, is he coming home?

Or is this it?

So, it's hard.

JEFFREY: I think that something happens... that there's a fundamental sort of restructuring of your thinking when you realize that your days are numbered.

JEAN: We've had the gift of time, and time allows you to process.

JEFFREY: All the thoughts are just going to the important places.

And the other stuff, I mean it's just gone.

It's not there, it's not important, it's.... JEAN: Right.

JEFFREY: It's just vapor.

JEAN: But where we are now, a decade and some years later is that, you just see everything so differently.

(Laughs) JEFFREY: I love you.

JEAN: I love you, too.

JEFFREY: I had this idea that what the process is is letting go.

And that each step of letting go would reward you.

As it turns out, I found out that to be the case but it is not a linear journey.

I had to give up operating because my fingers went numb from chemotherapy.

Uh, and that was a very hard thing to do.

But there are a lot of things that I've given up that I am so happy that I have jettisoned.

I've given up any thoughts for material things.

Things like envy, and jealousy and I've given up a lot of regrets, not all of them.

But the problem is that just when I think I've got this thing down, something will happen, just a small thing.

My daughter will come down the stairs in the morning and just a simple, "Hi, daddy.

How'd you sleep last night?"

And then I realize what's going, what ends, what I'll never... know anything more about, and then I'm back... (cries) I'm back to Stage I.

(sound of seagulls) I've tried to leave things as taken care of as they can be for, for my family.

So I envisioned myself in a nice looking mahogany box with fancy brass handles, velour or silk pillow.

I just couldn't envision my dead body in that environment.

And I said "I know what I want to do.

I want to build my own coffin."

JEAN: Are you kidding me?

I couldn't believe it.

And I thought it was warped and morose.

PETER WARREN: And he said, "Peter, you know, what do you think about building a coffin?

I said, "well, okay, yeah, you know, I'm not, I'm not so uncomfortable with that."

JEFFREY: My friend, Peter, is an artist who works in wood.

So I said, "Well, let's head on down to the hardware store and get us some plywood."

(Up tempo piano music) Peter said, "we're going to make it out of this" and he pointed to this pile of wood that he had rescued from the floor of some old factory.

PETER: And we took it all apart, this wood, sawed it all apart, and then organized it and flipped it over and then put it all back together.

JEFFREY: There were certainly a lot of hard moments, probably the hardest initial moment was, "Well, Jeff, we got to figure out how long to make this thing.

Why don't you hop up here on the bench."

He squared up my head on one end, took a pencil, and marked me out.

And that was the moment that, Hm, this isn't just a wood-working project, is it?

You know we had some jokes about it, are my feet like or like this.

I need a little room for a pillow behind my head or you're just going to kind of crunch me up in there?

We had a lot of jokes.

(Piano music builds) PETER: As soon as we glued it up into the panels was like, whoa, this is no joke.

Just like a quiet, we stopped doing everything, we just like, looked at it, like, I was like, there wasn't any sound, nothing.

Kind of almost like you'd really imagine, at the end, is there any sound when I go in here?

Really intense, this was like, you know, maybe we should step outside and have a beer (laughs) lighten up a little bit.

What do you think?

Come on, let's go.

JEFFREY: It started out that Peter and I were making the coffin and in pretty short order the coffin was making us.

JEAN: They really created something beautiful.

Simple, elegant, perfect.

It's perfection.

JEFFREY: You know I don't welcome assuming that position of the corpse.

On the other hand, the knowledge that that's where this is all leading, and that's what accepting mortality is.

All right.

Come here, please.

I don't have any illusions about the process of dying.

It can get pretty ugly, and particularly dying of cancer.

Wouldn't it be easier if I just moved myself into the white light, my family be spared all this?

JEAN: But pain is part of living and death and dying is part of life.

PETER: One of his greatest fears is that you're completely reliant upon, you know, somebody to help you and take care of you and wash you.

He so doesn't want to make anybody uncomfortable and wants it all to be squeaky clean and tied up in a bow and done.

And, and there's just no way to do that.

There's no way to do that.

I've seen this.

And, you know, like, it's ugly.

But it's not the worse situation either.

And, and, and I will be there.

I'll help you.

I'll take care of you.

I'll wash you.

I'll bathe you.

I'll wipe your ass.

If that's what it needs, if you need to be cleaned up, I'll clean you up.

And his family would do it for him, too.

And, you know, I think that that was a really powerful moment for both of us.

JEFFREY: He said "I will come to your bedside.

I will bathe you."

(cries) "I'll carry you to the bathroom.

I'll do whatever has to be done.

I have to do this for you.

And I have to do it for me."

(sniffles) Can you imagine a friend like that?

Having a friend say that to me makes all of this worthwhile.

Acknowledging my mortality is absolutely the path that has taken me to where I am.

If I had to say in a nutshell, what it has done to me, it has... rewritten my capacity to love and my ability to see love in the world.

People ask me, they say, "well, can you do this without having a death sentence?"

And I don't know.

But I've come to believe that I would never go back to the way I was before I had incurable cancer.

I would never go back.

(Uplifting Classical violin music) There is a power of beauty in the world now.

And I see it when I'm on the first step on the way to the newspaper.

And I walk out and I smell, and I see the leaves moving and I look at the weeds and I say, wow, this guy is really growing, isn't that great?

But there's such concentration of desire to live in this stupid little plant.

I mean life is so much better.

It's life in Technicolor as opposed to black and white.

(Uplifting Classical violin music) (Sound of seagull) NARRATOR: Jeffrey had the death he chose, but many cannot.

Those whose deaths are unsupported, sudden, out of season or in dementia, they cannot go gentle or rage against the dying of the light.

(Piano & violin music) But for those of us who are given the gift of time, we can be awakened to our lives now before death presses in on us.

We can live in the full knowledge that we are dying consciously.

We can craft our story with fierce attention, knowing it could shape every waking moment until the hour of our death.

We can see death as a portal or the final stop.

The universe as resonant or empty of meaning.

Death as provocation to live more intensely and lovingly or as a challenge to overcome and ultimately defeat.

We can find our truth in the flames of the crematorium or in an Egyptian prison.

In an English oak tree, in anticipation of the life to come, in the piercing regret of an unlived life or the serenity of a fully lived one.

TED WINTERBURN: We've witnessed a story and that's what life is.

Life is a story.

It's become our crafts, Helen, to tell these stories and tell them well.

Um, it's storytelling.

So I think this story has to be over.

I think it needs to have its own time to, to um... (sighs) Take a deep breath and say I think we've got it.

(music plays through credits)