A recent article in the New York Times reminds us that while hospice care has profoundly changed the slow process of dying for many terminally ill patients, it has yet to be perfected. Those nurses and therapists who help provide end-of-life nursing are sometimes absent during the main event, or only present in a perfunctory way. The article’s author calls for both more predictable care at the end, and more exhaustive care options for not only the patient but for his/her family. Massages, meditation aids, soothing art, and calming music are forwarded as able salves for the painfully slow grieving process. The proposed program of care would not only ease the physical and emotional suffering of the dying, but that of the survivors.

In the modern-day sci-fi film The Final Cut (2004), computer programmers have created a much more problematic way to ease the pain of those left behind. This new solution involves placing an electronic “Zoe device” inside a foetus’ brain during gestation so that every moment of a person’s life—from birth through to death—can be recorded. Upon the individual’s passing, a “cutter” takes the resulting audio and video footage and, with the help of family members’ requests, constructs a 1-2 hour music video to be shown for the benefit of those who attend the funeral.

The information recorded on the embedded chip is not extracted during life for purposes of entertainment or research, nor is it reviewed by the living host to encourage self-knowledge. The device’s sole purpose is to provide solace for those who survive the deceased. Select family members are given the opportunity to, in essence, recreate their loved one, to shape how s/he will be remembered by extended family and friends. With the help of the cutter’s technical expertise, a spouse, parent, or sibling can fashion a definitive portrait of the deceased, a colorful and dynamic memory that is then stamped on the minds of those attending the “rememory” service. Affairs and abuse, lies and crimes are all quietly removed from what is supposed to be an accurate and representative sampling of the deceased’s existence, but is instead a sanitized and sentimentalized—more socially acceptable—snapshot of a life.

Allan, a cutter and the film’s central character, remains unconcerned by the ethical problems others locate in his profession. He claims that rememory services “fulfill a human need.” What outside critics call an elaborate “lie” Allan calls a “concise” and “symmetrical” reorganization, a therapeutic kind of patterning that imposes order in the midst of chaos and seeming randomness. His response to an old friend neatly summarizes his professional philosophy: “The dead mean nothing to me . . . I took this job because I respect the living.” Those who watch one of Allan’s videos presumably exit the funeral soothed and pacified, their questions about the deceased’s life and afterlife overwhelmed by a shared emotional experience filled to overflowing with warm and innocent memories.

Hospice care, funerals, and these fictional rememory videos all serve a useful function, helping bring at least a temporary sense of closure to those in mourning. This is all to the good.

What Allan and his fellow cutters fails to realize, however, is that another’s death should also involve a process of deep and soul-searching, necessarily painful reflection. Instead of smoothing over the rough bumps in another’s life, their death should force us to consider closely both the uneven impact of their life on the world, and the impact of our own life on those around us. What are we doing, and why? Is our present course of action drawing us closer to the Divine or pushing us away from Him? As John Donne reminds us (above), the death of another person should shake us profoundly: it should remind us that while our present experience is limited, our final destiny is not.