The Lives of Others

The setting is East Berlin, just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The best movie of 2007, The Lives of Others, sets up a series of tight, wrenching, dramatic moments that take us deep inside the hearts, minds and souls of a group of artist's, intellectuals and the Stasi – East Germany's pathological cadre of secret police. Courage and dignity are in short supply.

REQUIEM FOR A GOOD MAN

In a secret attic space, just above a fully wired, book lined apartment, a bland and lonely Stasi apparatchik, Captain Wiesler, listens in on the personal life of noted playwright Georg Dreyman and his lovely, highly acclaimed actress girlfriend, Christa Maria Sieland, in order to collect "evidence" of their supposed subversion. His "participation" in their lives changes him. He weeps, courtesy of a haunting piano piece played by Georg in the apartment below that is piped – via state supplied headphones and listening devices – right into his head. Or is it his heart? The composition is titled Requiem for a Good Man.

Faced with untenable choices, characters on both sides of a devil's divide find ways large and small to stand up, cave in, survive. It's a riveting spectacle. A life of impossible choices. Small green shoots of human dignity poke through a gray drabness. As fast as they push through, the boot of the State stomps them.

All of which brings me to a clumsy segue about human dignity and impossible choices. A current real life disappointment. My father – 84 years old - is crashing. Bleeding in the brain. Dementia. Pneumonia. Barely ambulatory. Prostate cancer. Diabetes. All systems on red alert. The near end of life in any meaningful way, or maybe not just yet. And I find myself not wanting to call him, or see him or have anything to do with him. Owing to his struggle with his own dignity. I want and don't want to disown my own father.

He refuses – as does Georg, in The Lives of Others – to correctly assess his own predicament. "But he's sick," you say. "He can hardly take a piss by himself, never mind take stock of his own demise." Yes. But this is all a bit of an old story. He's never been able to take proper stock. And I wish he did.

He's lost all control of events and rails not at the injustice of it, not at life itself, but at the perceived agents of injustice, his doctors, his children. Unlike Georg, who is too passive in the face of monstrosity, but eventually finds his way, George believes that dignity lies in furiously maintaining a level control that he doesn't know he's lost long ago. He's Dylan Thomas hurling invectives, raging at the dying of the light. (If you've never actually heard Dylan Thomas read that poem by the way, do. It's stunning.)

So I am witness to a crummy end. An old firefighter in a corner of Southern New England is going down hard, in a blaze of fury. Maybe in the last act, like Georg in Berlin, he finds a way to make peace with his inner demons, locates an old piece of himself, the part that got him through wartime. The man has a powerful life force, no getting around that.

So here's a question. What right do any of us have to expect that our parents – or we ourselves for that matter - will age and die gracefully? My suspicion is that precious few of us go out with our dignity intact. By the time we hit the exit ramps we've been lost for decades. Too many compromises, missed opportunities, failures of nerve and courage. No coherent narrative. The wrong husband or wife, no husband or wife, too many husbands and wives. Or maybe yours was a perfectly adequate middle class American existence with the pictures, and good kids and a pile of success stories stacked up like Fiesta-ware. Or maybe you're Tony Bennett and it all adds up.

To age and die with dignity is the province of those who keep it simple. Stand up when you can. Be forthright. Be a whole person. Be honorable. Help others. Tell the truth. Buy flowers for your wife. Gracefully release control of your life when you must. Hold onto your dignity. Simple enough words, but when you are crapping your pants, you're brain is bleeding, you are hallucinating dead people in the bed beside you, feel that the people closest to you are your enemies, reason is out of stock. There is nothing left to do but howl and rail. Which unsettles the children. Because howling and railing is fear. And we don't want to be afraid. Even less, we don't want to see our parents scared shitless.

Dignity in the face of real fear is courage. Or is courage in the face of real fear dignity? Either way, how many of us will be able to claim that?

My Dad used to make a pretty strong case for being a determinist. A guy who used to say, "When the Big Book says I go, then I go. If it's not in the book, then I'm OK." Where that exists on the faith/reason continuum I have no idea. But you have a guy who survived World War II as an infantryman, (D+6 at Normandy) who never saw his high-school graduation, who is in actuality a very smart SOB who took himself farther than circumstances might have suggested, and so I sit here trying to understand.

For right now, the Big Book says he lives at the Sippican Nursing and Rehab Medical Center in Marion, Massachusetts. A really beautiful place. Amazingly good food. "I wouldn't keep an animal here," says George about his new home. And I am his Captain Wiesler. The headphones are on. I hear every word. I weep. It changes you.