‘Life After’ Documentary Review: Making Life More Accessible Than Death

I love it when a film challenges a belief that I feel settled on. The issue of the right to die is one that I have felt pretty secure about for decades. But in his new documentary, Life After, director Reid Davenport has forced me to add some pretty significant asterisks to my feelings about medical assistance in dying.

Davenport’s film starts with the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, who, in 1983, went to court fighting for the right to die. Born with cerebral palsy, she found herself becoming more dependent on others to the degree that she wanted to admit herself to a hospital where she would starve herself to death. She was denied this request and instead had a feeding tube forcibly inserted to keep her alive. However, following her court case and some of the aftermath of that, the story around her fell silent. The Wikipedia page about her does not include a death date, so Davenport begins the film by believing that she is alive and is trying to find out the truth about her life.

Bouvia’s question about the right to die is very much the anchor for the rest of the movie. Canada has the most lax laws surrounding medical assistance in dying (MAID), going beyond terminal diagnoses to include disabled people among those allowed to request to end their lives. As Life After progresses, Davenport tells the story of several disabled people facing this decision.

One of the first people he interviews is Michal Kaliszan, a disabled man living in Ontario. For most of his life, his mother was his primary caregiver, but when she died of cancer, he was forced into a system that cut access to benefits that would allow him some measure of independence, while at the same time making it easier for him to choose to kill himself.

That is the primary thesis of Life After: that it is easier to allow disabled people to die than to invest in infrastructure that helps them to live the kind of life that they want. At one point, Davenport takes the test that others use to determine if they are candidates for MAID, and his results would allow him to do that. The difference between him and many others who have chosen medically assisted suicide is that he has the tools in place to allow him to live a life that is fulfilling.

One of the other big questions asked by Life After is that of who gets to determine what “quality of life” means. Melissa Hickson is another subject in the film. Her husband had an accident and suffered a brain injury that resulted in a disability later in life. During the height of COVID-19, he contracted the disease and was put on a ventilator; however, his doctors removed him from that ventilator without Melissa’s consent, citing his low quality of life. The film questions whether or not non-disabled people should be the arbiters of how fulfilling someone’s life is if they have a disability.

The other interviews of note were with Elizabeth Bouvia’s sisters, Teresa and Rebecca Castner. Davenport finds them and is able to speak with them about their sister and the struggles that she went through, not so much as a disabled woman, but as a woman who had to figure out how to deal with a society that values able-bodied people over those with disabilities. While they have obviously spent a lot of time thinking about their sister, neither one is able to pinpoint exactly what changed that allowed her to change her mind about dying and embrace the life that she had remaining.

The somewhat complicated response of Bouvia’s sisters is very much the overall tone of this film. Life After isn’t afraid to use the word eugenics when it is talking about MAID, something that UN human rights experts and disability advocates have said about the MAID program in Canada. But this documentary is also not a condemnation of medically assisted suicide, either. It doesn’t try to answer whether or not this process should be allowed, but instead highlights some of the problems that can arise when there is a campaign asking disabled people if they’d prefer to kill themselves without providing the help they need to live the life they want.

In 2013, my mom was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease). Her decline was quick, and in the final months, there were moments when I wondered if something like MAID would be better for her. Could it have provided some element of dignity for her? In watching Life After, I don’t know if I’m closer to any answers on that, but it did make me think that we need to focus our efforts on making life more livable rather than making death more accessible.