By Ann Neumann

Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist and director of the new documentary Tender, the story of a community in Port Kembla, an industrial city south of Sydney, that decides to start its own funeral service. Tender follows the community as they learn how to take care of their own dead and it touchingly captures their grief and cohesion when they discover one of their members, Nigel, has a terminal illness. But Tender is also a story of resistance: Port Kembla is a company town; the film documents the Port Kembla Community Project’s efforts to take back the lives of it’s members from the industry that dominates its skyline as well as take back their deaths from the funeral industry. Marked by both humor and sadness, it is visually and aurally beautiful. Tender screened at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York at the end of October. I spoke with Wallworth by telephone last week. It was a Friday afternoon in New York and a sunny Saturday morning in Australia. We began our conversation by discussing how people try to avoid death and why.

The Revealer: We don’t have any way around death so we have to deal with it or identify the ways in which we don’t.

Lynette Wallworth: Yes, yes, that’s really true. There’s a big culture of avoidance, isn’t there? That’s what I thought about the funeral industry. It’s sort of supporting the avoidance of the experience of death in many ways.

TR: Wherever there’s Westernized medicine it seems this culture of avoidance has risen up over the past few decades. It’s a beautiful film and I don’t just mean that it’s important and that it gets at something very vital but also that it’s beautiful to look at. And I imagine in part that that comes from your good eye.

LW: Yeah, it comes from being an artist first I think. That appreciation of what a beautiful frame can do, not just on a superficial level, but on a deeper level. It can help you breath and relax. It makes the subject accessible maybe. Tender is highly sculpted in terms of audience experience so I think it’s surprisingly funny for people in the beginning. I cared very much about audience experience. My feeling is that it’s a difficult subject and I wanted people to relax. The laughter helps. You can actually open to the experience of the film, which is the opposite of avoidance. That’s what I was thinking in terms of the crafting of it.

TR: So Tender directly counters the avoidance of death we’ve developed in Western medicine?

LW: Yes, if you think about where it’s leading you to, especially those final image with the body.

TR: You said something after the screening at the Mead Film Festival here in New York about your decision to use still photos to show the preparation of Nigel’s body. You felt they were more powerful than moving images?

LW: I come from a background in photography, visual arts and presentation galleries. I know the power of the still image intimately. I know that if you really want to be able to see something, still image is more powerful than moving image because of the way we are able to hold it in our minds afterwards. That was for me the singularly most important moment in the film. To be able to present images of being with the body that were classically beautiful and compelling and that would do something to take away fear. I don’t mean something fictionalized but something that we know to be true. That was my goal; that the film would always contain something that showed you that this was possible, that this was not something to fear. If you could imagine it, you would be more likely to be able to do it.

TR: The closest thing I can recall, not from our era, are Victorian photos where the dead are dressed and posed for photographs.

LW: I know it in my bones that if you’re unable to hold the images, if they are fleeting, they can’t be seared into the memory. I wanted them to be remembered. Stills were just the most powerful way to do that. To offer that moment.

TR: Does seeing the body help one to avoid protracted grief?

LW: Yes. Purely on the basis of all the interviews I did when making Tender—and there are many interviews which don’t make it into the film—it was clear to me. It was like a refrain. I could hear it in people’s voices when they had some simple time with the body of someone they loved. The sense of knowing—I would say of knowing in heart and mind—that this had happened. It seems to me that there is something about having touched the body that tells us through our hands that the person is gone. It’s so clear that the person we knew is no longer there. What remains is more like what was holding them, but they are gone. People said over and over again almost the same words. They would say, She was gone.

When the body was whisked away and either the person had no time with the body at all or they got a phone call telling them the person had died and next they’re at the funeral… here we don’t have open caskets and we don’t have viewings. Maybe those things do help people but my feeling is that the intimate moment just after death really helps people. There’s a different kind of sadness often still there, the mind and body still struggling to accept that death has happened. I have no other reason for saying that except from listening to people talk about their experiences, hearing the state that they’re in now in terms of a kind of calm and peaceful acceptance of the reality of death or an ongoing sadness that feels to me like a grief that hasn’t resolved.

TR: So many changes have taken place over the past few decades. Medicine has institutionalized death. The structure of our families has changed. Women are not necessarily the ones who are full-time care taking at home. Multiple members of the family have jobs. The “traditional” family structure is changing. I was most interested in how Jen and her colleagues created a family around Nigel. The gay community in the 1980s [during the AIDS epidemic] had to make their own families because people were shunned or put out of their blood families. The hospice movement is very good at this, creating community, but to see the Port Kembla group surround and care for Nigel was moving.

LW: A lot of the people who use that community center are, in some way or another, estranged from their families. When women who were on the street died, sometimes from an overdose, one was murdered, their families, who they were estranged from for many, many years were called upon to reclaim that body in death. Family, who they possibly had nothing to do with for twenty years were now being given the responsibility of farewelling that person. These people were part of the Kembla community but they had no right to care for them in death. Had they had the money to or had the organization of this funeral business [been already established] they would have been able to say to the family, “We can do this together because these people made a community here, they made a family here.” That was one of the community project’s big motivations.

TR: In the film Nigel’s brother was taken in by the community, right?

LW: Yes. They weren’t estranged. Nigel’s brother just lived a very different life and I don’t think his brother saw him very often but you see that happening so beautifully in the film. The richness of Nigel’s life in this community. Many of us live that sort of a life where we don’t form a traditional family unit. We have this other family. What’s interesting in Port Kembla, and I completely understand it now, is that now they’ve taken on board to manage funerals for one another, an enormous stress has been taken out of that community. Many people there are, for one reason or another, alone. Now they have no fear about their death. To know in death they won’t be alone is a tremendous salve.

TR: One of the great sadnesses of life is fear of being alone.

LW: Yes and I was really aware of this with Nigel those last weeks. It was almost like I could contain in my mind a parallel film where he would be, if not for that community, dying in a very isolated way. I could see the void of community—and the richness that he had at the end of his life. That’s what many people are looking at, you know, they’re looking at fearful isolation and the horrible imagining of a funeral with no one at it.

TR: Knowing that the community center was there to take care took a stress out of the entire community?

LW: Yes it definitely has. It comes back to avoidance and it makes me realize that a lot of that avoidance is just about fear. People are not comfortable to talk with one another about their own funerals, to make plans with one another. [The community center] removes the fear. These are not people who are sick. These are just people in the community who are alone and who don’t have family. By default we bequeath it to the people we’re leaving behind, but I don’t think that’s the best way to do it.

TR: Because the visual landscape is so prominent in Tender, those moments where you show the skyline and the rusting industry, it seems to me you’re making a broader statement about —and I don’t want to reach too far here—but you’re making a broader statement about, say, capitalism, or corporations. The community is taking back this work from corporations.

LW: There was a great comment from one of the workers that didn’t make it into the film. She said, “I’m happy for the corporation to build my car but I don’t want them to do my funeral.” And you do feel that when you see the industry and you realize that with especially the men of the township. Their lives were gobbled, swallowed up into that megalith corporation that dominates that town. It swallows up the lives of the people. To me still the most moving moment in the film is when I ask Nigel what he would have done in his life had he been able to choose. He said, “Something with nature.” We spend a lot of this film watching the opposite of nature which is this industry that dominates life. Which dominated his life. It is really pertinent and it does overshadow the film and you’re not wrong to make that analogy. What these people are trying to do is counteract the impersonal. Any industry where time is equated with money. That’s the antithesis of what you need when you’re grieving.

TR: In a recent interview Keith Gallasch summarizes something that you’ve stated, that the community’s funeral service perhaps allows the community to “retrieve everyday ritual.” It’s a counter to the impersonal aspects of business, whatever he meant by ritual, it seems as though this community is building a ritual.

LW: Yes, they do it in various ways and they are bringing ritual back to the heart of the community, bringing back markers in time. The very first scene we filmed was their Christmas party. The party every year involves the naming of everyone who has died that year from their community and the planting of a new tree for each of those names. So at the end of each cycle of a year they recount to themselves the people they’ve lost and they plant new life on their behalf. They’re creating such strength in themselves through those rituals. It relaxes—it seems like such a strange word about this, relaxes—something in you. To just be calm in the fact that you know you’re in a group of people who are going to support you in making a mark around this moment, around your loss, around your grief, around another period of time. They’re going to be around for the new beginning. They are instilling those cycles in their community with ritual. I would say it’s created great strength and resilience.

TR: In my hospice experience I’ve seen families look to not just medical practitioners around them but also to clergy as authority to tell them how to get through it or how to overlay a ritual onto this process. You’ve said you didn’t know Nigel as well as everyone else and so that slight distance allowed him to talk to you about things because he didn’t worry in the same way about hurting you.

LW: It was a revelation to me. I was watching all the people who loved Nigel dearly desperately trying to talk to him and being unable to find that inroad to opening up that conversation around the fact that he was dying. Even with all the knowledge they had and with their devotion and interest in wanting to have that opening up. He made that very difficult for them. It was apparent to me—this is important, I think there’s something useful in this—that while it was difficult for me, it wasn’t impossible. And certainly I had the feeling that Nigel did want to talk about this. He struggled to talk about it, but it was much easier for him to have that conversation with me. I wasn’t the closest person to him and it made me wonder if sometimes we come at this in a way that doesn’t help necessarily. We think that that person’s going to talk to the person who’s closest to him but really if we want to give them an opportunity to talk about their fears and their worries it may be someone who’s a little bit removed. I have the feeling that Nigel was testing out saying these things to me. That having said them once and heard his own voice saying them, because there was a lot of emotion in saying them, that he onward could imagine saying that to his friends.

TR: In some ways it seems as though the camera helped that. Where he could say these things to the camera and you and he wouldn’t be judged for them. He wouldn’t be blamed for giving up or for being morbid or not having more hope or all of the things we hear when people do want to talk about these issues.

LW: Anyone who works with a camera knows this is true. I had the experience many years ago where I worked in a place in the city for people who had come from the country or regional Australia for cancer treatments. I took a video history of an elderly woman. She went back [in her memory] and she told me a lot and she just gave so much information. She wasn’t talking about her death, she wasn’t thinking about death, but she put her life in front of the camera. The next day when I came to work my manager took me in to her office to tell me that the woman had died in the night. It was unexpected because of where she was in terms of her illness. My manager, knowing that this was probably going to be distressing for me, spent time talking with me. She said, “What you gave her was the opportunity to have someone holding her life story somewhere.” And then my manager took me up to her room to see this woman lying dead on her bed. Subsequently, when I studied photography, a photographer who would often spend time in the hospital told me the same thing. That you have to be conscious when you bring the camera to some people. That is what they’re waiting for. They’re waiting for the knowledge that someone is holding them somewhere and when you give them that, it may let the living go easier.

TR: I know this from my current hospice patient. I was called in to help her write her memoir. But as soon as she began talking to me about her life she stopped talking about the book. Maybe all she needed was someone outside of the intimate people in her life to know her story, to listen.

LW: It’s so powerful, isn’t it? And also it’s important to be aware of the impact of that. It’s a powerful tool.

TR: Storytelling.

LW: Yeah. It’s essential, isn’t it?

TR: Storytelling matches the fear of death with the pragmatics of it.

LW: Yes, they’re incredibly pragmatic. And that’s the thing, you see, it’s a part of that community. And that’s why they were the perfect community for doing this. There’s nothing precious about them, which they say, and it’s just that incredible pragmatic way of looking something in the eye and deciding what it would take in order to grapple with it. That is what’s funny. That they don’t turn away from any of it.

TR: Funny and brave. There’s a quote on the Tender site from the community group. I wonder if you can tell me about it. “The project will seek to realign the care of our dead with the changing values of our culture.” In this quote, the term I’m interested in is values. So I guess my question would be what are those changing values and why must this realignment take place?

LW: I can’t say exactly what it was that they meant but the changing values are in one sense to accommodate various religions which require their own expression at the time of death. What the corporate funeral industry does is the template, the one–size–fits–all funeral. That doesn’t work because what needs to be expressed is so various. There are cultural differences you know, or you could say religious differences or spiritual differences, all of which come into play at the most essential points of life, like death. A corporation cannot meet those needs because it can’t get at the heart of what is specific to that person in that moment or that family in that moment. We can’t go to a one-size-fits-all model for grace.

We don’t want to see ourselves as just consumers. My parents are very religious and what that gives them is the sense that they are valued and embraced as specific individuals within their community. That’s what a lot of religious life is: belonging to a community. Community recognizes and holds those individuals. Port Kembla is not a religious community but it often offers the same kind of support. People are held and they know they will be cared for. In Australia there are many people who don’t participate in a religion but have the same need and the same longing to belong somewhere.

TR: So instead of a church community they’ve made their own community. Is that where  the title came from, the community?

Tender? I really struggled with the title. I thought of that title before I made the film. It’s on the very first supporting documents when I was trying to get the film made. It’s such a beautiful word and because it’s a difficult subject, it needed that softness. It needed that gentleness in the title, I thought, in order to let people in. It’s interesting that the community was going to call their funeral services Community Undertakings. They changed it to Tender Funerals because Community Undertakings was maybe not soft enough when you think of someone needing to find you in grief. I think it’s the same with Tender. There’s a kindness about it that I thought would maybe make it easier to come to this film. You write a couple of statements about a film and that’s what people read. Often I read them and think, “I would never go see that film.” You say something about death and it’s a struggle, you need to see the humor there. The word itself involves exactly what they were doing. The tending to one another.

This interview has been edited for length.

Special thanks to Faye Ginsberg.

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“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about the intersection of religion and medicine. Prior columns can be read here:

Moral Highs and Lows

Old Philosophical Certainties

On Suicide

Reading HuffPo’s “Hospice, Inc.”

The End of Eating

Wakeful Unawareness

Faith, a Chronic Condition

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

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Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. Neumann‘s book about a good death, SITTING VIGIL, will be published by Beacon Press in 2015.