Video Valedictions: TV Aids in Last Goodbys : New Technology Helps the Dying--and the Living

Paulette Kizzar’s face stares out from the television screen, eyes rimmed red with tears and fatigue. A tube, hooked over her ears and into her nose, brings oxygen to her failing lungs. As she speaks, a tear rolls down her flushed cheek.

She is 18, she is dying, and she is saying goodby.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna die or not, but my biggest fear is not being remembered,” she says from her hospital bed as her mother strokes her back. “I just want everybody to remember me--not like I look right now, but how I was always smiling and having a good time.

Not a Quitter

“And I don’t want anybody to ever think that I’m a quitter, because I’m gonna fight it as long and as hard as I can.” A pause. More tears. “And if I die, I want everybody to be happy for me because I won’t have to have treatments. I won’t have to go to the doctors any more.”

The cystic fibrosis patient from Santa Ana died last January, one day after taping this 10-minute video. Paulette Kizzar never saw the finished product. She was buried in her prom dress on Jan. 29.

Through the ages people have left behind farewell messages to ensure that, if they can’t defy their mortality, at least they can live on in the memories of their loved ones and of coming generations.

Earlier Practices

Ancient Egyptians left elaborate crypts, furnished for use in the afterlife and decorated with wall paintings depicting their life stories. Later generations composed farewell letters and poems. And today’s technological revolution has spawned a new way of saying goodby--with videotapes.

“For their last statement, people have used whatever means of communication they were most content with, the technology of the day,” said John S. Stephenson, president of the Assn. for Death Education and Counseling, a national organization of teachers and therapists. “It seems to be very fitting for people today to make use of videotape, just as in the past someone might write letters.”

In what became his last statement, Glenn Anderson, brother of Beirut hostage Terry Anderson, videotaped an emotional plea June 3 for his brother’s return. Terry, the 38-year-old chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, was kidnaped on March 16, 1985. The tape, which Glenn recorded from his New York hospital bed, was subsequently played on Lebanese television. The family hoped it would lead to Terry’s return.

“My father died of cancer waiting to see Terry,” Glenn, 46, said on the tape. “He did not see him. Now I have cancer, and I made a vow I would not die until I saw Terry. That vow is very close to an end. Please release him. I wish to see him one more time. Please release him. Thank you.”

Glenn Anderson died June 7 of lung cancer. He never saw his brother again.

‘Anticipatory Grief’

Most people who compose farewells know beforehand their approximate time of death, experts contend, far enough ahead to allow them to start a process called “anticipatory grief,” in which they acknowledge their potential loss of life, prepare themselves for it and project beyond their death to think about life without them in it.

“They’re on their way to accepting death,” said Stephanie La Farge, a psychologist who founded a “video analysis” program at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. “It doesn’t mean they’re not still angry and don’t have doubts. (Composing a goodby statement) shows both the need to communicate and this acceptance of death.”

Just Like Artists

The dying who write or tape goodbys are doing the same thing as artists when they paint pictures, novelists when they write fiction and parents when they have children, contends Edwin Shneidman, a UCLA professor of thanatology, the study of death and dying.

“It’s a lien on the future,” Shneidman said. “It extends life at least a minute beyond death.”

Although each family reacts differently to farewells, experts debate the merits of these videotaped messages.

Psychologist Stephenson contends that goodby letters and tapes help friends and family cope with the death of loved ones. The only time such a tape might be harmful, he said, is if someone became “pathologically linked” to it and stayed mired in grief.

“Some of us might on first hearing of it be repulsed by the notion of a (farewell) videotape, but this is the communication mode of today and tomorrow,” he said. “If it (the tape) is used as a token of what that person meant and was, fine. If it becomes a vehicle for trying to avoid the reality of the death, then we’d have to ask what the purpose of that is.”

‘Great Blessing’

Dennis Hlynsky, a videographer and documentary maker who works on the Rhode Island Hospital project, said “The tapes are good and they’re bad according to who’s watching them.”

“They are a great blessing for those people who have not had actual experience with the person who has died,” Hlynsky said. “They give us an inside track into an event we’re all heading for. But for those people who have had actual intimate experience with the person who has been recorded, the image of the tape doesn’t stop at the viewing. A single gesture is one that was made 10,000 times before. And that reminder can be difficult.”

In “Voices of Death: Personal Documents from People Facing Death,” Shneidman likens farewell messages to the guidebooks left behind by 16th and 17th Century adventurers. The books are called “rutters” and describe a safe route through unknown regions in an effort to help the travelers who came later.

“Death remains mysterious; we scan our horizons for any possible clues that might belp us avoid the rough waters in the passage of our lives toward death,” Shneidman wrote. “Who of us would now want a personal rutter for dying written by a friendly death pilot who had our best interests at heart.”

While most family members acknowledge the difficulty of watching a videotape of a loved one who has died, they also argue that the pain is usually eclipsed by the comfort the tapes proffer.

‘An Incredible Man’

Sarah Hoard’s husband, James, a Long Beach engineer, videotaped a farewell three days before his death. The first time she watched the tape after his death “was hard, but it was comforting,” she said. “But each time I watch it, I realize that he was an incredible man in that in his death he tried to rise above what was happening to him in his concern for us.”

The advent of inexpensive and easy-to-use electronic equipment is changing the way people say farewell, and many experts say it could become the prime medium for such communication as the impact and common use of the written word wanes. Since the mid-1950s, it has been relatively simple for consumers to make audio tapes, and sales of recorders and blank tapes are still rising.

When Roger Johnson, an 11-year-old cystic fibrosis patient, went into Childrens Hospital of Orange County for the last time, he told nurse Jackie Walker that he was worried about how his mother would manage after he died.

Walker suggested that he write a letter to his mother, Cindy Messerli, but after much discussion, Walker and Johnson huddled in his room with a tape recorder on March 14, 1983, and recorded a 15-minute audio tape.

Parts are spoken in past tense, for Roger knew that, while he was speaking about “now,” his words would not be heard until after his death.

Roger’s voice is high and reedy, and he sounds as if he is reading aloud in class when he says: “This is Roger Johnson, and I decided to sit down and make a tape for my family and friends, ‘cause there are a lot of people that I love and that I enjoy being with, and I’ve enjoyed spending my life with.”

An oxygen tank hisses in the background, the boy gasps and wheezes, and the recorder is stopped and restarted frequently because of Roger’s difficulty breathing. “I’d like to start off with my mom,” he says, “because no matter what I do or say, and even when I’m being a twit, I know she’ll always love me, and that’s a real nice feeling.”

Help His Family

Roger’s is not the only voice on the tape. Walker had to finish the recording alone: “Rog ran out of breath before finishing this tape, so I promised that I would end it for him. Rog said he wanted to make this tape to help his family and friends feel better after he was gone.”

Roger died in his mother’s arms on March 21, 1983. As she had promised, Walker gave the tape to his mother after his death. It was played in part at his funeral, which he planned himself.

Psychologist La Farge started the “video analysis” program at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence in 1979, when she began taping young cancer patients during a research project. By 1983, adolescent patients diagnosed with cancer were using the hospital’s equipment to tape themselves at will.

Dying patients now review all the tapes they have made and edit them to form a final statement. The program has amassed 500 hours of raw video tapes and about 20 such formal statements. At least 10 of those are all or partial farewell messages.

Perhaps the most celebrated death tape was recorded in 1979 by New York artist Jo Roman, who was dying of breast cancer. A proponent of “rational suicide,” Roman, 62, earlier had decided that she would take her life in 1992. The cancer diagnosis caused her to advance that date.

Roman used the tape to explain her decision to her family and friends in a series of tapings later edited down to a one-hour documentary. Fearful of the loss of her faculties and adamant about choosing her own end, she told them: “I would like to hang in for at least another decade, but I’m not interested in hanging in and devoting my life to cancer.”

Final Segment

Roman taped the final segment one month before she took her life on June 10, 1979, by washing 35 sleeping pills down with champagne. The tape was one of three goodbys; Roman also made a final sculpture and mailed letters that her friends received the day of her death. “Choosing Suicide” aired on public television stations on June 16, 1980.

James Hoard was a 41-year-old engineer living in Long Beach when he found out that he had inoperable lung cancer. Hoard taped a conversation with his physician, Dr. John S. Link, just three days before his death in 1982, in which he spoke of his regrets as a father and his hopes for his family--especially for his wife, Sarah.

“I love her (Sarah) and I want her to know that,” he says from his hospital bed. “Now, I don’t know what happens after I die. I hope that somehow I can watch what goes on from now on, and I hope that when it’s her time that I’ll recognize her in some way. . . . If she meets somebody that she wants to marry that’s fine. I don’t know how to put that any better than that. I hope she finds somebody.”

At the end of the tape, Sarah, Matthew, then 6, and Kimberly, then 4, join Hoard in the stark hospital room. The children clamber into their father’s bed, careful not to disturb the intravenous tube that drips morphine into his veins.

“You don’t realize how much you want to be with your kids (until) you suddenly find out that you aren’t gonna be able to be with them very long,” he says, glancing down at the children. “Boy, that one gets you right in the old pit of the tummy. Most importantly, in day-in-day-out living, you got to love the ones you love. That’s preachy, but it’s what I believe. Normally you just don’t do it enough. I didn’t.”

John Gallogly, 17, is one of the adolescent cancer patients who has taped a formal goodby to his family through the Rhode Island Hospital program.

At 14, Gallogly was diagnosed as having a rare form of liver cancer--a disease that killed him slowly over three-years time, although doctors had originally given him only months to live. The youth was aware of the pain his prolonged death caused his family and apologized to them in his farewell statement.

“Life was just getting so difficult on me and on all of you,” he says, four months before his death in December, 1984. “Just watching me die was a terrible thing--it had to be--and I’m glad that it’s over with.”

The pale young man, his face framed by horn-rimmed glasses and an oxygen tube, stares at the camera and continues:

“It’s done, and I’m happy now, ‘cause it’s finally over. I’d like you to express that to people. That’s not a sad thing. It’s a happy thing--my dying--because, like I said, I finally got things over with. I just wanna say I love you and that I’ll be waiting in heaven.”

Paulette Kizzar told her father last January that she knew she was never going to leave Childrens Hospital of Orange County. Her death wasn’t really what frightened her, Paul Kizzar said. What plagued the bright, blue-eyed blonde was that her family would fare badly after she died or that she’d be forgotten.

So nurse Elizabeth Styffe and Dr. Frank Karden gathered Paulette’s friends together in her room, arranged for the hospital’s audio-visual staff to join them, and Paulette did the rest.

“I’m gonna tell you guys, if I die and when I’m up in heaven, I’m gonna be checkin’ up on you,” she said. “I’m gonna be watchin’ you and I’m gonna tell God, ‘You better watch them.’ Especially you, Dad, always on the freeways.

” . . . I’m not gonna be telling Him all the bad things,” Paulette promised. “I’m also gonna be telling Him all the good things and giving you Brownie points.”

Four months after Paulette’s death, Annette Kizzar, Paulette’s mother, had only seen the tape once, she said, and her husband had not been able to watch it at all.

“The first time wasn’t hard,” she said, “but I think it will be harder now. I think part of that is the different stages (of grief) that you go through.”

Still, the Kizzars do not regret having the tape of their daughter’s final message to them. Although it is difficult to see her face and hear her voice now, they say, it probably will be a comfort in the future.

Their response to their daughter’s farewell is characteristic of parents and family members who have seen and heard their loved ones say goodby on tape.

Cindy Messerli said she first heard the audio tape from her son Roger Johnson at the funeral home before his burial.

“It was the nicest gift anyone could ever give me,” Messerli said. “I would say I listen to it once a week, minimum, to hear his voice. . . . With a tape, a letter, a video, it helps with the grieving, getting the garbage out of the way. It helps get you back to the positive things. . . . When I get really, really down I remember that Roger didn’t want to be forgotten, but he didn’t want me to be sad.”

The first time Sarah Hoard saw the tape her husband made, she was sitting at his side in the hospital. The second time was six months after his death.

Heartened by His Strength

“It’s hard to look at the tape and hear his voice and know the mannerisms and realize that he’s gone,” she said. But by watching the tape, Sarah Hoard is heartened by the strength her husband showed in his last days.

“He had an incredible capacity in his dying day to try to reach out and comfort other people,” she said. “And he had come to grips with what had happened.”