Stopping for Death: The Nurses of Wells House Hospice

STOPPING FOR DEATH: The Nurses of Wells House Hospice is a documentary that I encourage everyone to see. Over the course of a year Wendy Roderweiss follows the various lives that are woven together in the face of the inevitable. Despite residents facing their impending deaths, crippling financial dilemmas, and overworked staff members with their own personal problems, life in the house marches on relentlessly, is lived to its fullest, and is celebrated even in the smallest of ways. One only needs to see the faces of the people surrounding Mary as she takes her last breath, the finger raised in defiance of the "system", or the back patio bantering between staff and patients. With an unflinching eye, a compassionate nature, grace,humor, and love, Ms. Roderweiss and her cinematographer Ms. Bayus ask us to look beyond the lesions, crying, and yelling, to find the amazing humanity that's there to be witnessed.