From the Honolulu Weekly, June 4, 2003 (click image
above to visit Weekly)
Everybody’s journey
Living Your Dying honors the work of Mitsuo Aoki — and does it
justice.
Bob Green
Living Your Dying, the new 57-minute video by Lotus Films and PBS Hawai‘i,
is a beautiful, beautifully done document about the life and work of the Rev.
Mitsuo Aoki, whose work with the dying has occupied at least 50 of his 87 years.
The project, a result of over five years’ work by a collection
of O‘ahu
film/video talents, is simply one of the best filmic achievements in Hawai‘i
in many years.B
It manages — as best an hour’s experience can — to do justice
to Aoki’s ground-breaking work with the dying, one-on-one sessions to aid
the dying to come to an understanding of death as a vital, inseparable part of
life.
In this video, we see “Mits” at work with three such individuals,
all since having passed away: Fay Nalani Myers, Martha Ululani Mendiola and Joseph
Michael Thomson — all of whom allowed themselves to be filmed in various
stages of their illness. (We also see Mits helping his late wife prepare for
her death.)
A “Big Island boy,” as Aoki describes himself, the reverend studied
at Chicago Theological Seminary; later, he studied at Union Theological Seminary
and Columbia University, writing his Ph.D. dissertation on the “meaning
of death.” Aoki was then invited to teach at the University of Hawai‘i,
establishing the Department of Religion, where he taught his “Death and
Dying” course for over 40 years, was central in the Hospice movement here,
and later established the Foundation for Holistic Healing, as well as Make Today
Count, an organization for terminally ill patients.
The film finds the essence of Aoki’s teachings (and teaching methods),
creates sensitive visual correlatives for them, and, above all, lets Aoki’s
words, and gentle personality, tell the tale, which always ends the same way.
It’s a wonderfully handled film that could have gone wrong a hundred ways.
And, always interposed in this documentary, is Aoki — in medium close-up,
leaning forward into the camera — explaining his world view, of how to
accept one’s dying without resignation but as a final experience to be
lived as fully as one can. He talks directly to us when he talks about these
matters — as well he should.