‘Death — Out of the Shadows’: Washougal couple’s documentary looks at modern American way of death and how it’s changing

“He was a very spiritual man, but he was also a mechanical engineer,” she said.

That means he had a hard head for facts, but was also open to bigger, more mystical and mysterious realities, which may have been a comfort to him during his final hours, she speculated.

But Stemper, 53, and her husband, filmmaker Russell Stemper, 56, found themselves deeply rattled by the unrelentingly heroic, eager-to-intervene attitude of medical professionals as well as the role that corporate insurance plays in shaping (and limiting) end-of-life care. In the aftermath of Genia’s father’s quiet death at home, the couple turned their professional expertise in filmmaking and writing in an unexpected new direction: a documentary film about the modern American way of death, and about a growing cohort of helping professionals — doctors, grief counselors, “death doulas” — who seek to make the experience kinder, gentler, more empowered and ultimately more meaningful to the person who’s doing the dying.

The Stempers’ hourlong film, “Death — Out of the Shadows,” debuts at 3 p.m. Feb. 16 at Portland’s Clinton Street Theater. A discussion featuring some local experts who appear in the film will follow the screening. The Stempers are hoping the film might eventually find a home on public television or even Netflix or another streaming service.

A death doula can play any role you like, whether it’s aid and comfort during final days, or helping you grapple with tough questions and make decisions and plans, even years ahead of time.

Experts in the film say if you truly don’t want to be a burden on your loved ones when the time comes, the best thing you can do is make plans — and make sure others know about them.

Making “Death — Out of the Shadows” proved surprisingly cathartic, the Stempers said. They found that people who face death daily, and help others to face it, develop a good sense of how to spend their own limited time more meaningfully.

“It takes a certain kind of person” to choose to work with dying people and their families, Russell Stemper said. “They do it because they have a passion to do it. They’re not in it for the money. It’s a labor of love.”

Hard interviews

Russell Stemper has experience getting deeply difficult human stories ready for broadcast. After working as a newscast and special projects producer at TV markets around the country, he scored a job with Oprah Winfrey’s production company, mostly working as a segment director for the “Dr. Phil” daytime talk show.

Dr. Phil’s specialty was delving into sordid and sensational personal and family troubles — dysfunctional relationships, furious partners, traumatized children — and broadcasting them to the nation. Russell Stemper’s role was conducting introductory video interviews with pending guests. These turned out to be the most difficult, desperate, emotionally taxing sessions imaginable, he said.

“We did help a lot of people — but it was entertainment,” Russell Stemper said. “Doing that for so long really changed me.”

“It was hard work and long hours, and then he’d come home and cry,” Genia Stemper recalled.

After Russell spent 11 years conducting high-emotion interviews for Dr. Phil, he and Genia found themselves empty nesters and decided to leave Southern California. Genia’s aging parents moved with them, and the whole quartet landed in a shared home in rural Washougal.

While Russell Stemper continued to freelance occasionally for Dr. Phil (whose daytime show ended in 2023), he also built up Blue Turtle Pro Media, his own video-production company. With Blue Turtle, he said, he’s stayed busy making publicity videos for hire — for corporations and government agencies — as well as “legacy videos” that aim to encapsulate stories, memories and images of particular loved ones for family, friends and future generations.

“Death — Out of the Shadows” is Stemper’s first in-depth documentary and, like the work of the specialists in the film, it has been a labor of love.

“Who comes to see a film like this? That’s the question, isn’t it,” he said. “I don’t know who sees it, but everyone should.”

In the house

The professionals in the Stempers’ film believe that modern, technological America needs to renew its familiarity with a natural, inevitable — and hopefully meaningful — chapter of life. Some look to a simpler, more communal past for examples of what seem like healthier relationships with death.

“As we’ve taken death out of the hands of families, out of the hands of community, a really high percent of people die in a hospital nowadays,” Valenzuela says in the film. “Surrounded by machines, surrounded by strangers, because we’ve become so fearful of it.”

Death used to be an event that happened at home and was attended by family, friends and other community members, death doula Deanna Hagy notes in the film. The community handled the body and its disposition, usually in highly ritualized and traditional fashion that brought meaning and comfort to the bereaved.

“The community stepped in,” Hagy says. “People used to live a lot closer to death. Not that it wasn’t sad, not that it wasn’t tragic, but they understood it was a part of life.”

The first funeral parlors were family rooms, not businesses hired to buffer families from the unpleasant stuff, says Oregon “green” funeral director Elizabeth Fournier.

“Everybody got used to death as very normal. It’s in the house,” Fournier says in the film.

That picture started to change with the arrival of modern medicine and technologies. Soldiers killed in the American Civil War were often transported home across long distances, Hagy says, and wound up handled by a new crop of professionals: undertakers and funeral homes.

“Death was becoming medicalized, and birth was becoming medicalized,” she says. “These were all things that used to happen in the home.”

It’s legendary that, after his assassination in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was transported home to Illinois by train, slowly and with many stops along the way so admiring and bereaved Americans could view the body. What’s less well known, Hagy says with a chuckle, is that embalming was a new and imperfect technology then.

“Abe Lincoln himself took embalming on tour,” she says. “Apparently he was looking pretty rough at some of those stops, but it did expose a lot of people to the idea of embalming.”

Many Indigenous and traditional cultures emphasize ongoing relationships with ancestors. Mexico’s traditional Day of the Dead is a festive and light-hearted celebration and remembrance, complete with costumes, parades and even family picnics in cemeteries so the dead can be visited and included, says Valenzuela, who shows her own “ancestor altar,” a permanent part of her home, in the film.

“Continuing bonds are a huge piece of what the Mexican culture does,” she says.

What you want

Modern Americans are far more familiar with death dramatized on screen in hospital and cop dramas than with its reality, experts in the film agree.

In media, death usually means something has gone terribly wrong. For the very devout it may even represent divine punishment and the result of sin. It’s usually a thing to fight at all costs.

But those costs can be painfully high. Unrealistic TV portrayals of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, make it seem like a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it’s actually a violent and risky intervention. One emergency responder in the film calls CPR “brutal.”

“We push on their chest and break their sternum and break their ribs and we put a tube in their throat and damage their lungs,” Dr. Dina Brothers, an emergency medicine physician at PeaceHealth Southwest Washington Medical Center, says in the film. “It’s painful, it’s aggressive and most people don’t survive.”

Brothers urges everyone to think through, fill in and post at home (perhaps on a refrigerator) what’s called a POLST form. POLST stands for Portable Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment, and it tells paramedics and doctors whether, and how aggressively, you want them to intervene during a medical emergency if you can’t tell them yourself.

Without a POLST form, or some other way of making your wishes about aggressive intervention known, a doctor must do everything possible to save a life, Brothers says.

“One of the most appalling things in our medical system is, we just don’t talk about death,” she says. “We just make this assumption that everybody wants to live, so we do everything we can without asking the patient what they want.”

When her own mother was obviously dying in hospital, Brothers says, the medical team never acknowledged nor discussed that inevitability. Since then, she’s been far more proactive about broaching the topic with her own chronically and severely ill patients, Brothers says.

“I initiate a conversation about where they’re going and how they want the last days of their life to look,” she says.

Death doulas and their professional peers are not pushing any agenda nor aiming to change anyone’s beliefs or values about life, Hagy says, and they’re certainly not advocating an earlier death than anyone wants. But there may come a time when prolonged suffering is worse than letting go, they say.

“I have seen many beautiful deaths,” Hagy says. “People don’t know that’s even an option.”