Imminent death isn’t a great selling point for a TV show, which is probably why the CW is airing the docu-series My Last Days in an off-peak month when viewers could choose instead to watch, say, the Olympics.
But those who watch My Last Days, which airs Wednesday through Friday at 9 p.m. ET, will find that in their own way, the subjects here are as inspiring as any gymnast or sprinter.
The six people profiled here, two each night, are all suffering from terminal illnesses that seem almost certain to kill them much earlier than we have come to expect people will die.
While they live in very different circumstances, they have a common message: They’re going to live as well as possible, even if it’s only for a few more months or years.
This isn’t an unfamiliar message. We all know people who have lived their final days with courage and a remarkable spirit, enjoying what they have rather than lamenting what they never will.
But it’s not an attitude that ever grows tired or feels old, because each person who displays it, whether in our own lives or on a TV screen, reminds us of everything we admire about it.
And while we don’t tend to articulate it, there’s also the lurking certainty that dying is something we will all eventually do. The question is what we do before then, and that’s clearly the larger goal of My Last Days: to suggest we try to make it good.
The series leads off with Claire Wineland from Venice Beach, Calif. She could pass for a quintessential California girl, enthusiastically making videos for YouTube in the vernacular that anyone who knows a teenage girl will recognize by the end of the first sentence.
The difference lies in the breathing tube that Claire wears all the time, because she was born with cystic fibrosis.
That’s a condition where the body manufactures too much salt, which thickens all its fluids and eventually shuts down essential functions like the lungs.
Claire explains how she almost died when she was 13, which would not be abnormal for cystic fibrosis patients. But she survived, and she has spent her teenage years creating the Claire’s Place Foundation, writing a book and becoming a motivational speaker who travels around the world.
It’s an impressive life, and while it sometimes seems hard to believe she could always remain as upbeat as this film suggests, it’s impossible to listen to her and not be both impressed and a little humbled.
The second subject of the first night could hardly be more different. He’s a man from New York who legally changed his name to Darth Vader and has had 13 surgeries over the last 14 years while fighting leukemia.
He has also completed more than 50 Tough Mudder competitions, which might be described as an obstacle course on steroids.
The core of his story, though, is his relationship with his daughter, whose bond with her father has deepened through his illness and who now enters Tough Mudders herself.
There are presumably as many ways to face the end as there are endings. My Last Days, in a way, simply seconds the line often attributed to the late Yogi Berra: It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.