Death has always been a taboo topic for Chinese.
But in 2020, for the first time, many people have such an intuitive approach to these two words:
A few days ago, the star-chasing girl who called for her favorite idol on Weibo moved into the ICU;
The boy who has just won the lottery and is ready to buy basketball shoes is tormented by illness to the point of being bone-like;
The daily routine is an ordinary social animal that sleeps with cats, and there is no chance to return to work.....
Together, these fragmented but precise individuals make up the 2020 public commentary on death. We may also realize that death is so close and life is so fragile.
Fear, anxiety, pain...
The documentary "Life", with sixteen stories, shows the true state of life under the disease.
Man spends his whole life waiting for death, and when the distance of waiting gradually shortens, in the last few millimeters of the life process, there is collapse, there is determination, and there is more vitality.
Perhaps, after reading these stories about "death", you will have a new understanding of "life"——
"Why me?"
In the wards of the cancer hospital, they all asked this question.
There are so many people who are sick, why am I? The chance of cancer is so small, why am I?
Confused, dazed, powerless, fearful.
So many emotions swept through the intertwining, and eventually they could only turn into this rhetorical question: "Why - is it me?" ”
The boy named Autumn Garden asked this question countless times.
At the age of 16, he had bone cancer and faced amputation because he missed the best treatment period.
"The injection is so bad that I want to cry, don't hit... I want to cry too. ”
"We young people, you can't go out without legs and hands."
He regretted that he had used his mobile phone to check for illness, and he thought that if he did not know, he might not be so afraid when he faced the disease.
In the hospital, loneliness was his norm.
At the age of laughter and laughter, he lay in his hospital bed and couldn't do anything.
"Boring."
"The spirit goes straight to the brink of collapse."
Friends, classmates, and family members were encouraging and comforting him, but no one felt empathy for his uneasiness and fear.
During the interview, he kept pounding his chest.
He is well aware that "we" are different from "you," so he is both lost and unwilling.
Autumn Garden seemed to be separated from the world by a huge and heavy glass window, and the glass window was sunny, but it could not shine into his hospital bed.
Also afflicted are parents.
When she learned that Qiuyuan was likely to have her leg amputated, Qiuyuan's mother kept rubbing her hands in front of the doctor, and her tight fingers could not fully relax until she faced her son.
It was a mother's pain from weakness to trepidation.
And Mengfan, a girl who also suffers from cancer, is not as old as Qiuyuan.
It took four or five hours to defecate at a time, and I lay in bed for four full years.
Illness tormented her, as did her parents.
Due to the place where the tumor is located, the blood vessels and nerves are meandering and fine, the third embolism of Mengfan is not only long and difficult, but also more painful than ever.
"This pain of hers is indeed... Unbearable. It's not that you can endure it if you have a strong willpower, but it hurts more than the torture to force a confession——"
When Mengfan was tormented by the pain to the most difficult, her mother, who was guarding the door, cried out at the same time as her.
"I can't replace your pain, but I can accompany you to your pain."
Why me —
None of them asked the question anymore.
Not to figure it out, but to accept it. In other words, "forget it" -
Searching for an answer to the root cause is meaningless in the presence of death. Today, with the rapid development of science and technology, human beings still feel powerless in the face of terminal illness.
"Gentle Death"
For many people, the fear of death is not the fear of death itself, but the fear of the "unknown."
To this day, we don't know exactly about cancer.
How it is produced, how it is prevented and treated, and whether it recurs is unknown everywhere.
From a rational point of view, there is no point in asking "why", but starting from the emotions of human nature, the "gentle moment" of cancer is more worthy of being recorded.
The horror of most cancers lies not only in the haze of death, but also in its "chronicity."
It is not as sudden as an acute illness or an accident, but like a knife, hanging low above life, slowly grinding your body, spirit...
Unlike most people who have a strong desire to survive, Grandma Chen voluntarily gave up treatment.
She offered to be admitted to a hospice ward, where she would be treated painlessly only for the pain caused by the cancer itself.
She felt that cancer had given me enough time to accept death and say goodbye to death.
She calmly completed her "bucket list": sitting in the hospital with her old sisters to talk about life, visiting the park with her daughter and granddaughter, and reminiscing about the past with her old comrades-in-arms.
She was almost overwhelmed with flowers when she held a birthday party, and her daughter coaxed her to be a flower goddess. On the big group photo, she is idyllic and calm.
She does not want to lie in the rescue room with tubes in the end of her life, and she wants to leave time for the children, and she also leaves them with "good looks".
Lao Luo, another cancer patient in the hospice ward, had his greatest wish in life to witness his son's wedding.
Old Luo had advanced colon cancer, his condition deteriorated rapidly, he was in pain every day, and he could not take care of himself.
After careful consultation with his son Luo Shuo and his father and fiancée, he set a date.
On that day, the son and daughter-in-law wore red wedding dresses, held ceremonies, drank a glass of wine, and paid homage to their parents...
Lao Luo leaned back on the hospital bed, and with everyone's assistance, put on the largest white shirt, and after wearing this dress, he was already out of breath and sweating.
The son looked at his father in pain, and Lao Luo laughed while shedding tears:
"Son, I don't care...
Be happy, go down..."
In fact, the director of "Sheng Sheng" had made some "self-righteous imaginations" about cancer patients and wards before filming.
"But when we actually pushed open the doors of the wards, what we saw was a different story."
During the days in the ward, some of them re-picked up the hobby of singing and judging, and some of them began to think about life, "Sort out the first half of my life and the second half of my life"...
Chi Haochen, the documentary's cameraman, once wrote a note about the hospice ward in his handwriting:
"In the hospice ward, what I feel the most is a kind of calm and gentleness. Just like the autumn when Grandma Chen left, although the air is a little cold, the sun still gently surrounds you, the sky is high and cloudy, and the autumn night is golden. ”
Perhaps, the mystery of death is still difficult for us to touch, but the patient's situation and emotions, and the humanistic care given by those around them can be truly perceived.
How to live to die, how to touch a brighter and deeper depth within the range of gray tones, is a more gentle force that belongs to human beings.
Gaze and look back
In recent years, there have been many documentaries about medical treatment.
"The World on Earth" drops the carrier on the patient and the doctor; "Shengmen" records the shock and alternation of pregnant women's childbirth; "Emergency Room Story" is almost everywhere flesh and blood, and life is hanging in the balance.
Compared with these, it seems that the heaviest theme of "Shengsheng", but it seems to be somewhat "flat".
The footage of the documentary is restrained.
The director seems to deliberately conceal the events and character clues, most of the characters do not have a complete story line, and the camera only focuses on the moment when they are in the general ward.
On the other hand, whether it is Si Nuo's pain, or Grandma Chen's departure, or Qiu Yuan's collapse in the face of amputation, such a painful and struggling plot, the director also deliberately blurs the treatment.
The documentary as a whole presents a kind of brightness and depth under the gray tone, like the dark tide surging under the calm life, no matter how the earth-shaking waves under the surface, life still has to be lived, and this meal must be eaten.
In the movie "The Wonders of Benjamin Button", the male protagonist is a person with the wrong life form.
Benjamin was born with the appearance of eighty years old, but gradually became younger as the years passed, and finally he returned to infant form and grew old, dying in the arms of his dying lover.
It sounds surreal, but if you think about it, it seems that it can also be self-consistent with our lives.
Born old, the process of waiting to die is so long that most people are already fighting death before they realize death.
But after the haze of death, in the long unknown, there is always some love more important than waiting.
Fate is gentle, the documentary gazes at death, and behind the lens we look back at life.
The slogan of the documentary "Shengsheng" is a distinct blood red, flashing in the lower right corner.
At the beginning, a beam of light flows and transforms along the flesh body, and the blood vessels are in the shape of the tree of life, winding and overlapping, and the points of light become leaves, falling and regenerating.
The cycle of life is like a river flooding, the old being swept away, preparing the soil for the new, and not fearing these eternal destructions.
The fallen leaves are long and endless.