Cai Emmons, in the advanced stages of a degenerative disease, has just gotten off a Zoom call with a doctor to discuss end-of-life options. She’s on a small couch, bathed in her home’s warm light. Her walker, which she can use to get around the house, is within reach. But she can’t stand up to be able to use it. She tries to push herself off the couch and fails. She gets a hold of one handle of the walker, but it’s not enough. She tries again and again, for a full minute, determined, but can’t do it. Her husband Paul re-enters the room. He hasn’t seen how long Emmons has been trying to get up, but a couple seconds later he understands, and goes to her, putting his arms around her. With his help, Emmons is able to rise. Standing upright, she looks straight into the camera. She doesn’t speak but her intentions seem as clear as day: You saw me, right?
Vanishing: A Love Story — a documentary by Sandra Luckow (receiving a preview screening at Yale's Linsly-Chittenden Hall in New Haven on April 8 at 7 p.m., with a Q&A with the director to follow) – tells the story of novelist Cai Emmons: her energetic life; her vibrant family and loving partner, playwright Paul Caladrino; and, keeping it all in sharp focus, her death. “Remember me with joy,” Emmons says. “This isn’t going to be a grim film, I promise.”
Under Luckow’s steady, unsentimental hand, which matches Emmons’s own candor and humor, it isn’t. But there’s no getting past Emmons’s death, which we witness, too, in Its eerie casualness and its intense intimacy. Do viewers have the right to see someone they don’t know pass from life to death? Is it right that the camera is there? The questions buzz in the air, while the fact is that the camera was on because Emmons herself wanted it there, as she wanted it on in the months preceding it, documenting the end of her life.
But as Emmons herself promised, Vanishing “is not about the moment of death,” Luckow said. It’s about the way Emmons lived her life, right up to the end, driven to experience as much as possible, arms and mind wide open. And, Luckow said, “it’s about her having the agency to do what she wants to do.”
How Vanishing Was Filmed
Luckow and Emmons first connected in New Haven in September 2019, when Luckow was teaching film at Yale. That year marked the 50th anniversary of women being admitted as undergraduates to the university, and Brian Meacham of the Yale Film Archive asked Luckow to do a presentation of women who had gotten involved in the film world. Emmons was among those who spoke at that event, and the women kept in touch on social media. As the pandemic began, Luckow got a private message from Emmons asking for “our own private quarantinis,” Luckow said.
They began getting together weekly on Zoom and found a lot in common. Luckow had grown up in Oregon, where Emmons then lived. Both had gone to Yale and to NYU’s film school. “We would talk for hours,” Luckow said. Emmons drank Manhattans; Luckow drank gin and tonics.
About a half a year into their routine, however, Emmons sent Luckow a text saying “I don’t want to have these Zoom meetings anymore,” according to Luckow. Emmons proposed switching to email and text. “I was really hurt,” Luckow said, and asked why. Emmons explained that “there’s something going on with my voice and I’m very self conscious,” Luckow recalled. Luckow suggested it might simply be the cocktails, but Emmons was “very firm.” A little while later, Emmons shared that she had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, it’s a degenerative illness that affects nerve cells in the brain and causes loss of muscle control. ALS patients gradually lose the ability to walk, speak, write, and, in time, swallow and breathe. There is no cure.
“We kept in touch,” Luckow said. “She was very open with me.”
Luckow was going to be in Eugene, where Emmons lived.
“I’ve got to meet you,” Luckow said. Emmons agreed.
Luckow then asked what proved a fateful question: “How would you feel about me filming you?”
Luckow had in mind capturing footage “for her family to have this visual of her vitality,” to remember her as she was. Emmons was enthusiastic, sending Luckow a list of things she would like to have footage of, from hiking to book events. “She literally gave me a shot list,” Luckow said.
But Emmons granted Luckow permission on “one condition: I want you to shoot my death,” Luckow recalled.
At first, Luckow said, “I was very resistant. Has this been done before? What are the ethics of doing this?” Were they creating a snuff film? She noted that other documentaries — notably the 2018 film Island — have filmed “death, and death with dignity,” She contemplated the same questions Island’s director, Steven Eastwood, did: “can you tell the moment of death on camera?”
“People talk about how the room gets colder, there’s a change in the air, and that does not appear on screen,” Luckow said.
She recalled telling Emmons that “I will shoot it. I’m not sure I will show it.” Emmons had a sharp reply: “That’s not going to cut it. Birth and death are the two things we all have to encounter. There’s no way around it. And I don’t want you to have a way around it.”
Luckow arrived in Oregon in June 2022. “I drove across country with my gear” and “the day that I got out of the car is the day that I met her in person,” Luckow said. She stayed for six weeks, filming Emmons as she received medical care and as she went about her life, which at that point was still largely possible, especially thanks to husband Calandrino. Luckow ended up returning for two more trips in early fall and for Thanksgiving, for a total of 41 days.
“Kai and I were really partners in making this movie” and “I wanted to give her constant consent,” Luckow said. And Emmons gave it. The footage shows what Luckow observed, that Emmons’s physical decline was rapid and obvious, “like day and night” from visit to visit. Luckow was there for Emmons’s final decision to proceed with medically assisted dying, when she realized she had been “too performative” with her doctor and wrote him to explain that her body was done. She was there, too, to see the other side of that performance, as Emmons gradually lost the ability to stand, and as Calandrino in time had to put her to bed each night.
But she was also there for visits with friends and family, for walks in the woods, for boisterous dinners and book readings, for political protests and quiet moments at home, that showed just how much more Emmons was than her death, and perhaps, how much more we all are than our own.
“She had it all planned out,” Luckow said.
Emmons’s original plan was to die on her birthday, Jan. 15. But her disease moved faster than that. She called Luckow on New Year’s Day of 2023 to tell her it was happening the next day. Luckow couldn’t make it to Eugene fast enough, “which is why we had it on Zoom,” Luckow said. “Even if I had been in the room, I think this is the better way to show it,” in its unblinking candor, its flashes of humor, and Emmons’s final moments of bright lucidity.
Aid In Dying
Physician-assisted dying is a controversial subject, beginning with and reflected in the panoply of terms used to describe it, from death with dignity to assisted suicide. To split a crucial legal hair, the word euthanasia implies that someone is ending another person’s life, and that is illegal everywhere. In physician-assisted dying, patients themselves administer their own lethal medications under medical supervision, and that is currently legal in 11 states, with legislation being considered in 16 others. In Connecticut, legislation has been introduced numerous times since 1995, including this year, but has never made it out of committee. Nationwide,public support for euthanasia — that is, a doctor being able to painlessly end the life of a patient with a terminal illness with patient and family consent — and doctor-assisted suicide remain strong; a 2024 Gallup poll found that 71 percent of respondents thought euthanasia should be legal and 66 percent thought doctor-assisted suicide should be.
Opponents of both practices, however, come from all corners. Religious conservative groups oppose them for the same reasons they oppose abortion; to them, the sanctity of life is at stake. Some progressive groups oppose the practices because they see them as uncomfortably close to eugenics programs of the past. As the Connecticut-based advocacy group Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide states on its website, “we believe that the people who stand in the greatest danger of being further victimized by medical assisted suicide are the poor, elderly, disabled, and people of color who are already marginalized, devalued, and threatened daily under the current medical system.”
In Oregon, from 1998 to 2023, 4,274 people received prescriptions for lethal medications and 2,847 people chose to end their lives under that state’s Death with Dignity Act; over 90 percent of them were white, most over 65 years old, and all of them diagnosed with an incurable illness. As the numbers suggest, not everyone who invokes the act decides to follow it to the end. “A large percentage of them get the prescription but never fill it, and a large percentage get the medication but never take it,” Luckow said.
And Vanishing finally isn’t a referendum on medically assisted dying; it’s a story of one woman who embraced death as she embraced life. For Emmons, it was a question of her being able to end her life on her own terms. “It’s so interesting that she was an advocate of abortion,” Luckow said, as “it’s a similar issue in many ways” regarding a woman’s ability to control what happens to her own body. And Emmons “100 percent knew what she was getting into.”
Luckow finds herself changed by making Vanishing in ways she’s still figuring out. “It has been one of the privileges of my career to have that intimate access into more than one person’s life,” she said. “It’s kind of like that magical expectation of what you hope making a film would be like, what you would learn, what you would glean from it.” But also, “it was hard,” in the way that all things worth doing are hard. “I totally am forever affected by this.” The film’s intense closeness still hasn’t left Luckow. It probably won’t leave you, either.
Vanishing: A Love Story screens at Linsly-Chittenden Hall, (LC) 101, 63 High St., on April 8 at 7 p.m. A Q&A with the director follows. The screening is open to the public and admission is free
