Most Excellent Dying - Nancy Jewell Poer

The Most Excellent Dying of Theodore Jack Heckelman is a new (2010), award-winning film by Nancy Jewel Poer. It was a gift from big brother Jack to his sister, Nancy, who after many other important efforts over decades now works to help individuals and families “live into dying.” Finding himself faced with an aggressive cancer early in his eighties, Jack decides to give his dying to his community: family, friends, fellow social activists. He becomes in the process a real elder in the traditional sense: someone whose conscious, purposeful approach to birth into the next life becomes a sacred exercise of the capacity to love, for himself and all his people.

The contents of this film are almost too perfect; as fiction it might have been over-reaching. In fact it is all the most genuine home video, real folks speaking and singing not perfectly but from the heart, while Jack’s high ideals, spoken beautifully from a lifetime of social activism, are edged by the emotional strain of letting go and approaching the unknown.

And along with sister Nancy there is Jack’s younger second wife Linda Bergh, who had already experienced and learned to work with the devastating death in a car accident of her daughter and a close friend. Through these and many other threads a web of destiny is revealed, which Nancy as filmmaker explores with great artistry. — Available at www.nancyjewelpoer.com, along with the book Living Into Dying