TV Reviews : Profiles of Courage in AIDS Documentary on KCET

Watching “Living the Last Days,” the latest documentary from the files of “KCET Journal” (at 8 tonight on Channel 28) recalls the story of Florence Nightingale. Like that great heroine, today’s nurses and doctors who care for AIDS patients are performing a humane vigil, a deathwatch with tenderness. Then, the battlefront was Crimea; now, it is the Chris Brownlie Hospice, nestled in the hills of Elysian Park near downtown Los Angeles.

The hospice was the brainchild of Brownlie and other AIDS-care activists who determined that there was a great need for a facility that cared for terminally ill patients without intensive medical and chemical treatments. For most of the hospice residents, the HIV virus has infected their central nervous systems; round-the-clock attention is a must. At the same time, as a staff member notes, “ Hospice means that the residents have a say in their care.”

This results in the kind of humane hospital environment that the rest of the medical establishment can only dream about (daily charges are also 80% less than most hospitals). Writer-producer Nancy Salter visited the Brownlie hospice this past spring, and her cameras intimately observe a month in the life of the facility. It becomes a story of how individuals confront death with a panorama of responses, from passive acceptance to dogged refusal to give up.

The mind can indeed will death on, as in the case of a teacher, who, one day, is conversing intelligently with the doctors, and then is soon peacefully near death. Robert Childs is willing to stare death down, on the other hand, and his case of determination to leave the hospice and go back to work at UCLA presents the hospice staff with an unprecedented challenge. With the luxury of a longer span of time than “48 Hours,” Salter is able to follow the processes of not only death and acceptance, but the process of how a doctor learns from the patient when the patient has some say in his treatment.

Flawed only by some hearts-and-flowers music and camera angles that typify most films on AIDS, “Living the Last Days” ultimately memorializes some intensely courageous caregivers, who, Nightingale-like, tend to those close to the dying of the light.