Santa Cruz’s Andrew and Nicole Lencioni on Showtime’s ‘Time of Death,’ which debuts Friday.
“Here’s the thing—you guys are gonna be the reason my mom dies. Literally. Literally. You guys are going to make her sick, and she’s going to die. And you’re gonna regret every second you wasted texting on your phones instead of spending time with that woman. Snap the fuck out of it. Wake the fuck up. You guys have days, weeks. Get real.”
That’s 27-year-old Santa Cruz resident and Cabrillo student Nicole “Little” Lencioni, one of the subjects of Showtime television network’s new documentary series, Time of Death. She’s talking to her two teenage siblings, weeks before their mother, Maria, dies of breast cancer.
In the series, which follows eight terminally ill people and those they are closest to through the end of their lives, Lencioni and her family are caught on camera during some of the darkest, most uncomfortable moments of their lives. But they’re also filmed in some of their most compassionate moments, demonstrating unwavering strength and love, blazing a trail for anyone who has ever wondered: What is it going to be like when I die?
That includes, by the way, one of the show’s producers.
“I’ve lost people I have loved before,” says Time of Death producer Alexandra Lipsitz, “but I was never present until this series. This is the first time I’ve been present for someone’s passing.”
The series, which premieres this Friday at 9pm, is broken into six hour-long episodes, and focuses on a different person each week, showing how they live the months, weeks, days and even minutes leading up to their death. Some of the people even die on camera, followed by shots of loved ones crying and holding their bodies.
The story of Lencioni’s mother, Maria, however, is special. Their storyline is the only one to weave through all six episodes. Cameras followed them for a full year—August to August—before, during, and after Maria’s death.
Throughout all six episodes, Lencioni struggles with not only how to process the impending death of her mother, but whether she will be able to take on the role of caregiver to her two teenage siblings after Maria’s death.
Lencioni herself did not want to comment for this story, except to say that it was easier than she expected to be honest and open during such a sensitive time, and that the project was very intimate.
Indeed, Lipsitz says Lencioni and her mother fully accepted the process, with Lencioni even keeping a camera with her to continue filming their story when the documentary crew wasn’t around, capturing some of the show’s most powerful moments. To that end, the scenes featuring the Lencionis—like the one quoted above—are raw and at times brutally, shockingly honest.
But that’s what the show’s creators intended, says Lipsitz. “We took a very, very personal journey with families and the person who was dying and let them be the storyteller, as opposed to their doctors and hospice and blah, blah, blah.”
The results of this approach are revealing, and can serve as a warning to anyone who holds grudges or pushes loved ones out of their lives.
“One thing I learned is the way you live your life is the way you die. If you’ve been fiercely independent your whole life, you might die fiercely independent, by yourself,” Lipsitz says.
The series is, above all, intended to help bring the topic of death more into the American consciousness, she says.
“In the hospice world sometimes they say, ‘Oh, did they have a good death?’ To me that was such a striking phrase. How does somebody have a good death? That’s two words you don’t put together,” says Lipsitz. “Doing the project helped me to see what that means. To pull the curtain back and take a really unabashed look and not be afraid and see that there can be love, and it can be painless in some ways for the person, and it can be uplifting. It’s just all part of it. Part of the living process.”
And, of course, for the families, the process goes on after the person has died. For the Lencionis, this part of the experience is captured, too. The first scene of the series is a kind of flash-forward, to the moment after Lencioni finds her mother’s dead body. Crying, she talks on the phone to an emergency dispatcher, who macabrely urges her to tell him why she thinks her mother is dead.
“Is she cold to the touch…?” the dispatcher prompts.
“Yeah,” Lencioni says, clearly thrown off. “And she’s not breathing, and she’s blue and stiff and like, fucking dead.”
