I found a little poem by my daughter Scarlett many years ago.
It was just a scrap of paper on a desk. It said...
'If you die, I'll cry and cry
and I won't come out of my room.'
What started her thinking of that? Were you sick?
It was a funny week.
I had a...funny...
On the Monday I got hearing aids.
On the Tuesday I got...pills for heartburn,
which have to take all the time.
And on the Wednesday I got news that I had prostate cancer.
And Parkinson's disease.
It's not something to be worried about, that.
If you are a good person and you have done everything right in life,
then that is what counts, right?
I think that's what worries me most.
(LAUGHS)
I've always been fascinated by death.
I've looked at how others have dealt with it and make money out of it
but I'll be honest with you, when I first started exploring it
my own demise was the furthest thing from my mind.
There is a kind of conceit in me
that is often mistaken for gentleness.
When a doctor said you are not going to die
when I had the cancer thing,
it kind of shocked me.
I thought, 'Of course I'm not going to die.'
You know, I had no intention of dying.
It never crossed my mind that I might die.
Not that I feel infallible or I'm going to last forever
but it just never crossed my mind as an option.
So I am not going anywhere any time soon.
All the same, I guess this is now my personal look at death.
How do I want to go? How will I be remembered?
And what do I think comes next?
And if that's the case we may as well start
where it all began for me. My home, Glasgow.
In a place where, as a kid, I would never have dreamt of going.
How are you doing?
This is a mad place. Isn't it good?
It is absolute madness.
I love it.
This is the Necropolis in Glasgow.
It is the best cemetery in the world probably.
It think it's an absolute beauty.
We'll have a wee look about here and I'll show you some stuff.
# Poor old Granddad
It has been a graveyard since 1840.
So it had a few sensational people buried in her.
William McGavin, author of The Protestant.
I get that faithfully every Friday night.
I read it in my bed.
I always bug my wife,
'Has the latest edition of The Protestant arrived?'
The publisher of the Daily Mail.
Oh, aye?
Moving right along.
And this is a Victorian graveyard.
The funerals then were good, you know.
They were preceded by a wake of three days.
The real reason for it, for having three days,
was to make sure the person was dead
because people were terrified of being buried alive.
They'd keep them for three days in the house
and they'd sing and dance and get pissed.
There is all sorts of stories about them coming alive in the middle of the wake.
They're just folk tales, really.
My favourite concerns a hunchback who was dead in the coffin.
And his friends... He didn't fit in.
He was sitting up with his hunchyback
so his friends tied him back.
And they got a rope and tied him.
And tied him down.
Of course they all proceeded to get pissed and dance around the room.
(SINGS) # This nicht of all nicht!
# Fire and salt and candlelight, and God receive us all
# On this nicht of all nicht, this nicht...
So the room was rocking and shaking and the body shaking in the coffin,
wearing the ropes against the side.
The ropes burst of course
and he set up, farting and shouting,
because corpses release gas, you know.
As the rope was burst, he sat up.
Bwwwpp! Aaggh!
And of course there was a great rush for the door.
'Agghh!' They were running out
and somebody got his coat caught in a nail in the doorpost
and he thought the corpse had a hold of him.
'Let me go! Let me go, you humpty-backed old bastard!'
I've known that since I was about 12 and it always makes me laugh.
Everything here is loaded with meaning.
Draped monuments, triumphant arches
and countless phalluses.
But it is a numbers carved permanently into the granite
that finally stick with you.
Look at this.
They all died really young.
God, I'm 71 and I feel like Father Time when I'm in here.
Dinnae get old, son.
Dinnae get old. It is weird.
You wake up in pain when you're older.
'Oh!
God! Oh, Jesus!'
And then that goes and something else goes.
'Oh! Oh, God.' It is a strange thing getting old.
A pain in the arse.
No, not quite. A pain in the shoulder most of the time.
Although the arse does have its moments.
# I scare myself just thinking about you
# I scare myself...#
At some point we all come to terms with the idea
that we are going to die
but for a kid that is a huge milestone.
We construct tales of pets going to play in the farm,
and grandpas having a big sleep.
When you're explaining it to children
it's much more convenient to say granny is away to heaven
with the angels, and she is having a lovely time.
You can hardly say to them,
'Well, she is actually decomposing in a box.'
But all societies work out a way for kids
to get used to the idea of it all ending.
We in the West have Halloween,
a night where we remember our dead by dressing up like tarty vampires and clowns.
And that's OK.
Kids should laugh in the face of it all. Lord knows what's coming next.
I just believe your time of death is written when you are conceived.
No matter how you die, or where you die or how old you are,
it has already been planned.
I hope is not painful and I hope I don't die of a disease like cancer.
My wife's family has a beautiful plot at a cemetery
and there are days when I will go and literally sit on what will some day be my grave.
The only thing about death is,
what happens after?
# I scare myself, and I don't mean lightly
# I scare myself...#
My grandson came home from school. One of the pets in the class had died.
A mouse or a snake or something had died.
They had a talk with a teacher and she explained that everything dies.
And so he got really depressed and my daughter said to him,
'What's wrong with you?'
He said, I'm going to die and you're gonna die and Barbara is gonna die.'
That's his little sister.
And she said, 'What?'
He said, 'Yeah, everything dies.'
And she said, 'Oh! Of course everything dies
but it doesn't happen till you are very, very, very old.'
He said, 'Granddad is very, very, very old.'
And with that he condemned me.
# People try to put us down...
You know you're an adult when you laugh nervously
when singing, 'I hope I die before I get old.'
♪ Why don't you all f...fade away? ♪
But when I met Keith Moon he was 32.
A long way off from being old, in my book.
Nobody introduced Moon and I.
We are in an ice cream place in London
and there was booths that sat about six or eight people.
And he was directly behind me.
So we were talking like this.
There is a photograph somewhere
and my son used to treasure it because he was a Mod
and he couldn't believe that I knew Keith Moon.
So we got talking and talking and he said,
'What are you doing later?'
He said, 'Let's have a laugh.'
So he and John Hurt and I went out on the town
and we are getting pissed but he wasn't.
He wasn't touching anything
but John Hurt and I and whoever the other guy was
were giving it plenty.
And he was being very funny
and chatting away, and I thought, 'What a nice guy.'
What a good new friend to have.
I got up in the morning and flew to Australia
and I got to my hotel room
and I put the television on, and he was dead.
I was absolutely brokenhearted.
All I knew him for a couple of hours
but I was devastated because I was really looking forward to having him as a friend,
looking to the future with him.
You know, daft letters and silly contacts and all that
that you get when you like somebody.
But he was snatched away.
♪ Got no grave to hold my body down ♪
There is a saying that you only die the last time someone speaks your name.
That's why you've got to love Mexico's Day of the Dead,
a week-long celebration of food, parades and dance
that climaxes in All Saints Day, November 1st.
That's when families congregate in cemeteries to clean graves
and eat and drink and make merry with the family members who are no longer breathing.
What is rather marvellous is how the people in the States
have taken this celebration to their hearts.
# A rose tattoo and a rose tattoo
# I got your name written here in a rose tattoo...
November 1st is now Memorial Tattoo Day
for John Reid's tattoo parlour in Austin, Texas.
An annual event that is so popular
people, primarily women, will travel over multiple state lines to get there.
# This one's for the man that raised me
# Taught me sacrifice and bravery...
And this is a memorial one.
Yeah. Actually I got it for my grandmother.
She had a bunch of wild peacocks roaming around her land.
So every time I would see peacocks it would remind me of my grandmother.
It is actually after I got this tattoo
that I found out she hated them and shot them all.
Oh, never!
Oh, I love your granny.
She is a crazy broad.
Splendid. I fancy your granny.
I love the fact she hated them.
Oh, yeah. She did.
# The pictures tell the story...
Everybody has their own reason for it.
It's not like you can put in a box and say this is the reason
why everyone gets a memorial tattoo.
It doesn't necessarily have to be the death of a person.
It can be the death of a moment in time.
I thought it could be that you know when someone dies
you're going to deal with it your whole life.
It's not going to go away.
So you put it somewhere you can handle it, access it.
I can see that. I think THAT does that.
You put it there, it's there, you can access it when you like.
No, no, that's true.
And also sometimes you forget
and when you have a tattoo it's almost like a spark
that ignites that memory.
I'll show you one. Have you got a tattoo?
Yeah. I didn't know that.
Whoa.
This is the day I forgot my wife's birthday.
(LAUGHS) That could have led to a memorial tattoo.
Wow!
# This one is for my family name
♪ With pride I'll wear it to the grave ♪
There is nothing new about having a memorial tattoo
but the way that the middle classes, women and hipsters alike,
think of having a tattoo to mark a death is very much a modern trend.
This is for Mel. He is still alive
but his wife, Jeannie, passed away,
and to me they belong together.
So that is for them,
and their marriage and their life together.
That's a beautiful thing to do.
Unlike everything else this world
it is literally the only thing you can take to your grave.
You know what I mean? When I'm in my grave I will still have these tattoos.
I met a guy who had a tattoo of me on him.
Are you serious?
What does that feel like to see yourself tattooed?
It's lovely. It's a great feeling.
Oh, nice.
This is serious.
I think tattoos are marvellous memorials.
I like the idea that you invite someone to ask why and who.
Now every time I see a peacock I'll think of punk girl's granny
and I will laugh.
Isn't that a fantastic way to be remembered? Laughter.
♪ My heart hurts ♪
That is how to celebrate life - through a joyful noise.
That's what they do in New Orleans.
A city where death and music make for the most unexpected bedfellows.
The iconic jazz funeral, once the preserve of musicians,
are now impromptu celebrations that march through the city's quarters and graveyards
with no rhyme or reason other than that someone is dead, let's have a party.
But don't get the wrong idea.
This city, blighted by yellow fever and mired in slave trading
and more recently devastated by Hurricane Katrina,
has always walked hand-in-hand with the Grim Reaper.
But the folks here choose to embrace and own that relationship.
It's a farewell song to y'all.
# May the good Lord bless and keep you
♪ Whether near or far away ♪
And just like the jazz that surrounds the French Quarter
no-one can pinpoint the exact origins of the memorial tee-shirt.
But everyone agrees it is now a New Orleans thing.
Today I'm wearing a shirt with my dad on it.
Today is his birthday
and I'm wearing a shirt in remembrance of him.
He is 85 today. His name is Clifton.
He died of cancer.
RIP, Daddy.
Today was the day so many years ago
you came into this world.
I didn't get to see you before you left
but to worship you from afar.
You're my dad and my star.
I love you and I miss you so much.
Sleep well, and take care all who went before you.
Sadly tee-shirts are not the only unique memorial
found in New Orleans.
There are almost three murders a week here
and this relentless violence has created an impromptu memorial
known locally as the Murder Wall.
This is a very mixed city.
The crime tends to be black on black.
Easily half the murders are young men under the age of 30.
There are a lot of young children that are murdered.
We have had a mother holding a baby shot and murdered a few times.
My own daughter died several years ago at the age of 19
to a violent death.
Our mayor in a speech a couple of years ago
said that children in John McDonogh High School,
which is about four blocks down the street,
have a higher risk of being shot then a soldier in Afghanistan.
That came from the mayor.
Father Bill keeps a record of every murder
in New Orleans on his church wall.
It is a memorial but it is not beautiful or stirring or inspiring.
It is shocking, and it just keeps growing.
One phenomenon we know whenever someone talks about death
we always use numbers.
Numbers are very comfortable. They are dehumanising.
We talk about murder rate
but we never hear names because names have power.
I had one priest say do you really think it does any good?
I have families that come up
and ask to see the name of their loved one,
usually very poor people.
And quite often they will say this is the only public acknowledgement
that my baby ever lived.
It is the best memorial I've ever seen.
Just a wall with names on it.
And the thing that makes it outstanding is the way people behave towards it.
You see them caressing the names.
You see them kissing the name and leaving stuff.
That is lovely.
I remember Chic Murray's funeral.
It was one of the best funerals I've ever been to.
We went outside the crematorium.
In the car park the tables with all champagne and glasses
all ready for us.
We all dived over to get a glass
and David said, 'Don't drink. Just hold your glass.
Hold your glass.'
And everybody went, 'What are you talking about? Hold your glass?'
And he kept looking to the door of the crematorium
and eventually a wee man in overalls appears at the door from inside.
And he goes.
And David went, 'Right, just a second.'
We looked up and smoke came out of the chimney.
And he went, 'Chic Murray.'
And we all went, 'Chic!'
Believe it or not the smoke came out and went whoosh!
And came down and swirled among us.
It was the most moving thing.
I think we in the West forget the value of a good sendoff.
In Ghana families put themselves in debt for the rest of our lives
to cover the cost of elaborate coffins,
like this giant coconut made to honour the dead coconut farmer inside.
In fact they love a funeral so much
there is now a demand for a four-day week
so people can get over the funeral hangovers.
Few funerals however could match a Balinese cremation.
This one is for a member of the royal family
who has been placed inside this giant bull
and cremated alongside 68 working class commoners.
The fires release the spirits of the dead,
enabling them to go to heaven or to be reincarnated.
Funerals are amazingly therapeutic.
There is a point when the person goes into the ground
or into the oven
and you know it is over.
There is an instant change comes over everybody.
Nobody is crying any more.
Even the widow or the partner who was left stops crying
and an end comes to it.
An exclamation mark comes, done!
They instantly start to get better.
I love the way that is constructed.
Did you know that when people are reminded they are going to die
they are twice as likely to believe in life after death.
For most, it is religion
but there are those who claim that science has the answer to eternal life.
Sort of.
And that has brought me to an unremarkable looking parking lot
on the outskirts of San Francisco.
How would you like to live till you are a thousand?
Yes, a thousand years of age.
I have almost achieved it
but I'm talking to you now.
How would you like to live till you're a thousand?
I know man who believes you can.
I am not planning on dying. Goodness me, that would be ridiculous.
That's Dr Aubrey de Grey,
Fellow Professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics
and chief science officer of the SENS laboratory.
He and his team of scientists believe ageing is a disease
and therefore curable.
It may sound like science fiction
but millions of dollars are being invested in this work
from all over the world.
And here is the real mindbender.
Aubry thinks people have already been born that will live to a thousand.
You'll have to explain everything to me. First of all SENS. S-E-N-S. What is that?
You really want to know what it stands for?
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.
Now do you really want to know what it stands for?
I don't know it senescence means. It just means getting old. It's the bad part of ageing.
The basic philosophy is really simple.
All we are pointing out is that
there is no difference between ageing and the diseases of old age.
You can't cure Alzheimer's or cardiovascular disease
in the same way that you can cure tuberculosis or something.
Because Alzheimer's is a side-effect of being alive in the first place.
But that doesn't mean they are inevitable.
It just means you have to attack them with different kinds of medicine.
Well, I'm a rapidly ageing man with Parkinson's disease.
Is there anything you can do for me?
Parkinson's disease is actually one of the easiest things
and I think we are in a pretty good state there.
As I'm sure you know Parkinson's is basically caused by the death of cells
in a very specific part of the brain called the substantia nigra.
Everyone loses cells in the part of the brain at a respectable rate
but some people lose those cells a bit faster than average
and those are the people that get Parkinson's disease.
So what we want to do to fix that is to put those cells back.
And of course that's exactly what stem cell therapy is.
Now at the moment it is at a relatively early stage.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work.
But when it does work it works spectacularly well.
There are people who received stem cell transplants 10, 20 years ago now
who have since then had absolutely no symptoms.
It all sounds too good to be true and maybe it is
but it's a good dream to chase.
And who knows what miracles may come of it?
These cells have been modified.
Unfortunately I doubt it'll be my or your life extended to a thousand years.
Not just yet anyway.
But what if I told you there is a way that you can live on
after you die? Just up up the road from Aubry in Oakland, California,
leaves the delightful science writer Mary Roach,
author of Stiff, The Secret Life of Cadavers.
How would I describe the dead?
They are kind of endearing in their helpless clumsiness.
Which is why I love the notion
of something useful being done with you.
If you give yourself to science
your head might be in one lab
and your hand in some automatic window testing,
and your legs over here, so you get to be in three places at once.
And it is a superpower.
The world of science always needs dead folk.
These crash test dummies are built using data gathered
from real human bodies being tossed off buildings and crashed into walls.
And Mary thinks if we want to leave a mark on the world once we are dead
donating your body to science is a way to go.
When I was working on the crash test dummy lab
and they had the guy in the blue leotard.
And it was kind of comical because they had to get him in driving posture.
You know? And the dead they don't follow orders well.
They don't respond well.
So he had this great comic timing.
They'd get him all set up and then you'd see him kind of go...
(LAUGHS)
And they'd be like, 'Get the winch. Get the duct tape.'
That appeals to me because that's kind of the way I behave.
Yeah, it was like he was messing with them.
# They took the moonlight out of the skies
# And put the moonlight right in your eyes
♪ Like a June night, you're a heavenly thing ♪
I am still not sure if body donation is for me.
I don't want people looking at my bits on parade even if I am dead.
Mary, however, is having none of it
and has helped arrange some extraordinary access
into world that I, and I suspect you, have ever seen.
There are 40 dead people in this room
and each one of them over the course of the next year will change,
help and save countless lives in the future.
♪ Stars that shine ♪
I am outside the anatomy lab at the University of California, San Francisco.
If you're ever thinking of donating your body to science
you'd be encouraged by this board over here.
These are letters to the dead people,
to the donors of the bodies, from the students
after they've worked on them.
It's a totally unique thing,
commemorating the help they gave them.
Like, for instance, 'Dearest Jerry...'
That is the dead guy.
'We are deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from you.
We greatly appreciate your contribution
to our incredible and unique anatomy lab experience.
The three of us are forever bonded.
Trisha and Siobhan.
P.S. Your tattoos are bad ass.'
Huh?
'In your 91 years I'm sure you gave many gifts
but I can only thank you for your last.
I will never be able to repay you in full
but I know any life I change in my future career,
any grace my patients may see in my hands,
will be in your debt. Thank you.'
How about that?
I thought they just sawed people up and laughed.
And some dead guys.
Hello. Hello, how are you?
Who is this?
The least we can do is say hello to each other.
One of our teaching friends.
I was just reading those cards outside. It is extraordinary.
It is, yes.
That has totally shattered my illusions of what it would be, you know?
I thought they were cutting bits off and throwing them across the room.
No, no. Exactly the opposite.
A guy once told me in Glasgow
the testicles were flying across the room.
Well, that's Glasgow. This is San Francisco.
Whoa!
No, it is a little bit different.
Our view is, this is their first patient.
So you treat it with respect.
The donors' bodies are meticulously stripped back,
each layer revealing more and more to the trainee doctors.
Finally, after a full academic year
families, friends and the young doctors gather
for a memorial service over the few remains that are left.
These are cremated and scattered at sea.
It is a selfless way to go, a truly noble death.
Does everybody get over their initial horror of this?
Because I was reading in Mary Roach's book
that there was a lovely part where one student
was cutting off the arm of the cadaver
and the other student was patting the remaining arm,
and saying, 'There, there, it's OK.'
It gets stuck in your mind that there is a sort of horror involved.
I have never been exposed to the beauty involved.
Right, yes. Which has taken me aback.
And the impressiveness of the body.
Periodically we will have cadavers that are 98 years old.
They are in great shape.
I meant to ask you. How old do you need to be?
Or how young you need to be?
The oldest person we have here is 101 years old.
I find myself going off the idea
as I get closer to the finishing line.
(LAUGHTER)
As I become uglier and uglier.
I don't want anybody to see my saggy old tits.
Right!
We don't view it like that.
No, you'll be OK.
The idea is that the reason you're doing anatomy
is to learn the inside of the body
so you can be a better physician.
I think this whole process is this interesting thing
about this interface between life and death.
You know, even though the cadavers, the donors, are dead,
we are thinking more about the living.
And how we can inform the living and help the living.
Where do I sign up?
Yes! We are happy to have you.
I'm completely sold.
Sold to the man in glasses.
You can join me. Absolutely. We will lie together.
♪ Baby, you are a heavenly thing ♪
See, I learnt Buddhist meditation some years ago.
And there is part of it, Buddhist meditation,
that would do people a lot of good to know this,
to take away the fear of death.
It's when you see a bit of roadkill, a rabbit,
a dead rabbit or a dead bird on the road, or a cat or dog or something,
you say to yourself,
'That is the way of all things,
and it will be the way with me.'
That all things pass.
And it takes away that fear of death.
For me, I'm not scared to die.
♪ Lie down, fear not, close your eyes... ♪
Throughout the course of making this documentary
I have seen a city of graveyards,
a drive-through funeral parlour,
a voodoo ceremony, and countless tokens of love.
But I think this small nine-and-a-half acre plot of land in Texas
is the most beautiful place I've visited.
This is Eloise Woods. It was opened two-and-a-half years ago
by Ellen Mcdonald, who was a neuroscientist.
A bloody neuroscientist.
It is a green burial ground.
You can be buried here without all the chemicals and nonsense
that pollutes the earth.
Plus, you can be buried with your pets.
It has a lot going for it.
Nice to meet you. I am Ellen. Hello, Ellen.
This is Sarah. I'm Sarah, nice to meet you.
Oh, Hank Williams, my hero.
Oh, you see? You're in the right place.
You can mark your grave with a flat natural stone
but we don't have anything upright.
No crosses, no decorations.
The idea is that you can be standing in the middle of the woods
and look around, and you can't tell the people are buried here.
It just looks like woods. That is wonderful.
If you want to feel good about yourself, go green.
God knows the five million gallons of embalming fluid
poured into the ground each year isn't doing the planet any good.
But the thing I love about this place
is that as long as everything that goes into the ground is biodegradable
there is no rules.
We've had about eight families bring the body up here for themselves
in the back of a truck or a van.
Is it in a sitting position or is it lying?
No, they're usually flat.
It's not...
No, they're not sitting there.
Scrunched in.
They can actually do anything they want here.
They can dig the grave themselves.
And we've had a family... Well, the husband is dead.
When he found out it was an option to dig the grave, it was no longer an option for him.
He had to do it.
It was very therapeutic. He brought a lot of his friends up.
And they all spent the whole day digging.
And all his sisters came up with food.
And when they finished digging the grave they all stepped inside it
and put their arms around each other in this little huddle
and said a little prayer.
They feel very good to be involved.
Yeah. But the older I get the more I'm drawn to your kind of thing.
Or the spectacular.
Go to the Moon? Being shot into the air.
Fireworks. Yep.
This is a sort of a different idea to lying in a casket with makeup all over your face.
Yeah, there is something very well weird about that.
Putting lipstick on men.
The whole idea is just to make the person look alive,
which strikes me as just really creepy and weird
because they're not alive.
And it's just this whole denial of death that we have in our culture.
They don't have it so much in other places.
But in our country we don't like to think of people as being dead.
We'd rather that they look, you know, like they're sleeping!
They even put it on the stones - 'asleep'.
Yeah. For children that can be really perplexing
because they have magical thinking,
and if they don't know where the person went
then their person might still be around somewhere.
A simple shroud, a wooden box
and a shallow grave. That's it.
No drama. Just love giving way to the nature of all things.
It's not a bad way to go, is it?
Which I guess leaves one more question.
What, if anything, happens next?
I believe that when you die
some people are offered the opportunity to reincarnate.
And they can choose to reincarnate or not.
Some people are offered the chance to be like spirit guides,
to stay in the earthly realm.
And then other people just boom, cross over.
You cannot do nothing about that.
But you can do a lot about life.
The morning he died he told me that the only thing that's real is love.
It was wisdom he had gained
the instant he died.
Is there somewhere else?
If I die, will I see my dad again?
I don't know.
INTERVIEWER: Have you found yourself thinking more about it as you've got older?
Yeah.
And the conclusion I've come to is I don't know.
I have absolutely no idea.
But I'm completely open. For instance,
I have no idea what a black hole is.
But I believe they exist. You know, no-one has ever seen one.
Well, if there was a post-life experience,
there may be some grand plan.
But I've no idea what it is or whose plan it is.
And I am but a welder.
Leave me alone.
You know, ask me something I know.
In the end the only certainty we know is that death is coming.
It's not easy to accept, especially when like Californian artist Richard Wood,
you know you only have weeks, maybe days, left to live.
Richard is being eaten inside out by chronic ulcerative colitis.
And the reason I want to meet him
is that his hospice carers say the way he has embraced death
is a very special thing to witness first hand.
Billy Connolly.
I know you.
You ever had a heart hump? No.
(LAUGHS)
I've been waiting a long time to do this.
(LAUGHS)
How was that?
It was lovely. I'm a changed man.
Oh, I would hope so.
I weigh about 90lb.
I'm 6"1'.
So how much longer can I... How much weight can I lose?
You look great to me, though. I must say.
You don't look like a 90lb man.
Well, I'll show you, like.
Here.
Charles Atlas. That's a leg, eh?
Huh?
I used to have a 16" arm.
Look at this.
My God, you're hardly with us at all.
Do you ever get angry?
Do you find yourself grieving for yourself?
No, I'm not angry about that. I can get irritated about little shit.
Yeah.
You know, but about the big thing, no.
I'm... I accept it.
I embrace it.
I've come to accept the is-ness of it.
Yeah.
And to make the sweet surrender.
So do you know where you'll die?
Right here in this bed. Right here in the bed.
Yeah.
With a smile.
I'm gonna go out in style with a smile.
I'll be right here.
That's brilliant.
I have no baggage when I leave.
I'm not packing a bag.
As far as the other kind of baggage
that we have about having, you know,
forgiven myself for all the dastardly deeds
that I have committed through time?
Richard, as you've probably already guessed,
has lead an interesting life.
Before becoming a Sixties radical and prolific artist of the cosmos,
he was an armed robber.
In my twenties I was very dangerous person.
And I was lucky on occasions I didn't, erm, kill anyone.
But I could have.
And I have been in situations
where to survive you better have the tombstones in your eyes.
I'm ready to die now.
How about you?
Yes.
I eventually wound up doing a ten-year sentence
for armed robbery.
And then I had this epiphany
and in the next seven years in prison were wonderful.
I began to discover I had a mind.
I began to practice yoga.
And getting rid of the baggage by forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a massively powerful thing.
Yes.
In your quieter moments, what do you think comes next?
Erm, well, you know, it's idle speculation.
My personal philosophy leans a little to the East.
Buddhist.
I don't know about the afterlife.
Or what is next.
My disclaimer is, I believe in everything.
That way I can't be wrong.
# I think it's time to be heading back now
# Back into the black now
# You can chalk it up to a false start...
Are you OK? Oh.
I'll have to stop.
Just stop then. A moment to get my breath.
Yeah, no rush.
(EXHALES)
Out of breath.
'Dying is an expensive business
and as most artists tend to be, Richard is cash-poor.
So to cover the cost of his funeral
Richard is inviting people, for a dollar,
to try out his personalised coffin.'
I'll have a little rehearsal.
You'll probably need to help him a little bit, somebody.
Help him get up out of there. It's not easy.
Wait, put the lid on.
And let him...
# We're not afraid to die
♪ Just the stuff between the start and the other side ♪
Hey!
I have seen the future and it works.
He's alive!
It's alive!
I shall lay my contribution down.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, sir.
Thanks for your time. I know how precious it is.
It is precious.
I feel so enriched by his company.
He is completely different from what I imagined.
He is ready to go. It's a lovely, lovely thing to see.
Well, keep on performing and making people laugh.
Well, thank you very much indeed.
You certainly warmed my heart.
So human, so humane, you know.
His attitude to life, to the afterlife, to the cosmos.
It's just brilliant. I know I sound like a really, really old hippy
but he has got it right.
Goodbye, and thank you very, very much.
And thank you. It is a pleasure.
Bon voyage.
A lesson to us all.
# We're not afraid to die
♪ Just the stuff between the start and the other side... ♪
I've been in the company of people who have died
and it doesn't seem all that bad a thing to me.
They've slipped away.
They didn't seem to be...
Even people who were in pain sometime before that,
when it came to the time of dying there was an acceptance
and they just slipped off.
Even in the case of my father who,
they took him off the life support machine and his eyes were all...
The whites of his eyes were kind of yellow with the morphine.
That the doctor had given him to take away his pain.
And he was breathing that chesty, congested way with the pneumonia.
And then his breathing suddenly changed...
..to a very calm, quiet breathing.
And he looked at my sister and he looked at me
and the whites of his eyes were white again.
And he just slid away.
It was... It seemed a very comfortable thing.
INTERVIEWER: How do you want to be remembered?
As we've established it's a long way away.
So how do you want to be remembered?
A good laugh.
Here lies Billy Connolly, a good laugh.
Instead of having a stone somewhere to commemorate me, my life,
I would rather have it made into a table on an island in Loch Lomond
for fisher guys to have their tea at.
Yeah, just put their cup on.
It's like picnics are uncomfortable things
because your arse is on the same level as your cup.
You sit like that all the time. And it's...
Eventually you'll knock your cup over
and spill it all over your sandwiches.
So I think have a wee table for a fisherman.
# THE THE: This Is The Day
subtitles by Deluxe