Half a year before she died, Joan Schneider, a Northampton chiropractor, said something that suggested she was drafting her obituary. Her fight against breast cancer had run into years. She tried a few phrases, as filmmaker Jim Lemkin looked on.
"Joan died," she said, paring away explanations and meanings dear friends might offer. "I walked a good way."
In the last two years of her life, Schneider said a lot to Lemkin, a naturopathic physician who practices in Haydenville and has been making films since he was an undergraduate at the University of Rochester in the mid-1960s.
At the start of "Walking at the Edge," Lemkin's hour-long documentary about Schneider's illness, we hear that this story was first meant to be a video remembrance of a friend, for other friends. As the tape ran, Lemkin saw Schneider was offering more than tokens.
She is unflinching, for instance, as the camera observes her struggle to rise from a lawn chair, the summer before she died at the age of 40, in January 1995. With a cane in hand and her once-muscular legs painfully thin, she sits gathering what strength she can - and waits 15 seconds for it to come.
With excruciating slowness, she rises. "Voila," she says with a deadpanned flourish. "She's up."
Because she was willing to speak so candidly, and granted Lemkin such access, he was able to construct a kind but pointed account of Schneider's tenacity, humor and remarkable self-possession in the face of this most feared experience. She succeeds, for the most part, at dying on her own terms.
Lemkin casts his friend as a teacher just learning the lessons she is imparting. Together, they let contradictions wrestle with confidence.
We see her sifting emotions and weighing decisions - in footage that is fresh, genuine and undeniably real. Despite its tenderness, it is a hard-nosed documentary that will stay with you. It will be shown Sunday at 12:30 p.m. in Stoddard Hall at Smith College as part of the Northampton Film Festival.
"I was trying to make a film that doesn't function on the cerebral level, any more than necessary," Lemkin said. "I believe communication is much better at that level. I'm not going for emotions particularly, but they come up for people."
Lemkin manages to keep sentiment at bay, but doesn't shy from it. It is an aspect of Schneider's dying, for she'll miss her friends. And those friends - a remarkable, durable group - are preparing to suffer her loss.
As a narrative tool, Lemkin interposes questions to viewers, usually to footage of a natural scene like a wave washing a beach. The questions are spare and philosophical. They guide our thinking about the life Schneider is fighting to keep, as cancer spreads through her chest and lungs, and eventually into her brain.
She underwent two lumpectomies, but initially declined the far more invasive surgery of having her breasts removed. That decision, and some indecision about other treatments, we are led to believe, proved tragic.
"When we finally accept that we will die, what do we lose and what do we gain?" the filmmaker asks. Elsewhere he intones, "Can we heal as we die?"
Through the documentary, the answers come in fits and starts from Schneider herself, though it is up to viewers to assemble them. We follow her to treatments and healing circles and watch her scrub her face and visit with a beloved niece.
She bangs a drum with her eyes closed, seeming to draw a pulse from its rhythm. In quiet and peace, she adjusts a telescope from her chair near the Summit House, where she's scanning the skies for birds.
Lemkin, at one point, asks her how many pills she takes each meal. They are there before us, piles of them. Thirty, she says. "It's a big orchestration," she says, "to be very sick and conscious."
We witness moments where she seems to be losing, then winning, then losing. Through it all, she is trying to die consciously. She faces up to the fight and generously opens her life to others.
Episodic as it is, the film could have failed to be more than the selected wit and wisdom of a courageous cancer patient. Lemkin's delicate voice-over questions ("I just wanted to float them," he says) spur us to look deeper.
Because he was a friend, the story could have been too protective, for that's a noble instinct in such times. Lemkin's editing, which took five years to complete, lives up to the compact that must have emerged between him and Schneider: She would say it all and he would spare little.
That meant he included moments when Schneider seems to fall away from lessons she's learned about dying. In July 1994, at a healing circle with friends, she asks for prayers to help her move along. "I'm really ready to go," she says.
Later, that resolve has eroded. She is sitting for an alternative health treatment. "There's no reason why I can't be a miracle," she says. "It's cured other people. Why not me?"
As that winter comes on, it's clear to us there is to be no miracle. We also learn this remarkable doer will not be able to heal a rift with her parents.
One of the strongest moments in the film comes when Schneider falls silent, as she struggles to finish a thought. The camera stays on her face. In a commercial television documentary, we might feel we've invaded her privacy. But Lemkin has directed everyone in the documentary to speak directly into the camera.
We already know Schneider's twinkling eyes and can accept a few minutes of her looking away. Finally, she finishes her thought. After the delay, she's boiled it to its essence. She knows she must surrender.
As he approached the film's premier this weekend, Lemkin gathered two dozen current or former cancer patients and showed them the work. He felt they could help him find weaknesses or missteps. The preview went well.
"They felt validated - that their struggle isn't pretty. It's full of contradictions," he said.
After this weekend, the film goes on to WGBY-TV in Springfield, the PBS affiliate, where it will be shown six times early next year. Lemkin is seeking other outlets as well.
Like his subject, he feels he has a story people must hear. It was Schneider who'd told him that a key disappointment, after years of pain and struggle, was that she'd become wise, but had no time left to put that wisdom to use. It was a marvel to her - and bittersweet - that even as it closes us down, death pushes us to open-heartedness.
As she put it, "I'd like to relish the lessons that I've learned." Lemkin's work helps guarantee those lessons won't be lost.
