Tina Kakadelis
There are only a few absolutes in life, and most of them are unpleasant. People have found less-than-legal workarounds for things like taxes, but the one thing that remains unbeatable is death itself. The documentary Other Side has its world premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival and centers on this unbeatable absolute that will come to all of us. The documentary’s tagline states that “this is a story about choice, not death.” It’s an effort to fundamentally redefine the way we talk about death with our loved ones. Other Side is a complex look at death as an absolute, but also as a choice each of us should be able to make on our own terms.
Lynda Bluestein knew she was dying. She’d been living with terminal ovarian and fallopian tube cancer and was adamant that she deserved to die peacefully, surrounded by loved ones. Lynda lived in Connecticut, a state that did not allow medically assisted death. However, nearby Vermont made the procedure legal, but only to those who were residents of the state. Lynda’s fight to die on her own terms began when she sued Vermont for the right to access their treatment, and the fight continued as the cancer worsened. By her side the whole way was her husband, Paul, and their two children, Jake and Aimee.
People don’t like to talk about death. It makes them squirm in discomfort because there’s still so much unknown about the experience. For almost everything else in life, we have some sort of barometer or documented first-hand experience. Those who have died have no means of communicating what happened to those who are still alive, and that’s what unsettles people. Other Side is not an attempt to make people feel better by answering the question of what happens after. The documentary is an encouragement to those still alive to be unafraid to discuss the reality that’s coming for everyone. Why must a person’s final days be spent in agony? Maybe we haven’t found a means of circumventing death in its entirety, but we have found a way to soften the blow.
“I’m so happy I don’t have to do this (suffer) anymore,” were Lynda’s final words to her family. In order for Lynda to be able to go through with the procedure, she had to be eligible for hospice, mentally capable, able to self-administer the medicine, and have the approval of two doctors. When Lynda begins this journey, she’s not healthy, but she is able to be somewhat active. The longer the fight drags on, the weaker she becomes, until she is eventually unable to sit up on her own. As death approaches, it’s not entirely the way she pictured it. Lynda wanted to take the medicine on Groundhog Day, but it became clear that the cancer wouldn’t let her hang on that long.
“Last thing I said to her was, ‘Lynda, it’s been a life,’” Paul says at the beginning of the documentary. “‘Because it has been. It’s been a life.” There may be no life that is long enough for anyone, nor is there any limit to the grief the still-living can feel. Before Lynda died, she asked her son to build a “wind telephone.” It’s an old rotary phone that will never ring and can’t call anyone, but it stands as a symbolic means of communicating with those who are no longer here. It’s a lifeline to someone already gone, for the living rather than the dead. There is bravery in Lynda and her family members for agreeing to document these final moments. It’s a time of immense pain in all of their lives, yet they chose to share it with others to show that alternatives exist. It’s brave to put one’s grief on display like this, in the hope that it will help someone else.
The end of the film brings about a strange sensation. Most movies, documentary or otherwise, lead the audience toward some sort of peak. Usually, it’s a peak of triumph, and what’s confusing about Other Side is that it does end in a triumph. Lynda spent some of the hardest years of her life trying to make it possible for herself and others to die with dignity. And she succeeds, but success in this case means dying. Death is the thing we all dread, that we all fear, yet it’s what Lynda was fighting for and what she achieved. Other Side doesn’t provide an answer for the unanswerable, but it provides a new path for us to contemplate.
