‘Last Flight Home’: Filmmaker Ondi Timoner Documents Her Ailing Father’s Wish To Go Out On His Own Terms

Towards the end of his life, when Eli Timoner’s weakened body was failing him, he called his daughter, the filmmaker Ondi Timoner, and told her he was ready to go.

“If they can give me goodbye powder, I’d take it,” he said. “I just want to be in the ground.” He pleaded with Ondi, “Help me go there and end all this agony.”

As a resident of California, Timoner could avail himself of the state’s End of Life Option Act, a law that “allows a terminally-ill adult… to request a drug from his or her physician that will end his or her life,” as the UCLA Health website describes it. “People who choose to end their lives this way, and who carefully follow the steps in the law, will not be considered to have committed suicide.”

Related Story

MTV Documentary Films Sets Release Date For 'Art & Krimes By Krimes,' Doc About Artist Who Made "Secret Masterpiece" Behind Bars

The state reported that 486 people took life-ending drugs under these circumstances in 2021. Eli Timoner was one of them. 

Ondi Timoner’s new film, Last Flight Home, offers a remarkably intimate view of the last few weeks of her father’s life as he carried out his wishes with the support of his family – his wife Lisa, and their children Rachel, Ondi and David. Ondi’s camera recorded as family and friends gathered around Eli, who was alert but debilitated in a hospital bed set up in the living room of his home.

It was Ondi’s impulse to film, yet one she questioned.

“I, personally, was worried that I was trying to mediate my experience or that I was going to be hurting my family’s experience,” Timoner tells Deadline. “So I went to see this consultant therapist-type person and said, ‘I feel like I have to film and I don’t know what to do and is this a bad idea?’ And she said, ‘No. If you feel like you have to film, you should film.’ Thank god she said that because I probably wouldn’t have if she said not to.”

Her father agreed to the idea as did her mother. Only Ondi’s older sister Rachel, a rabbi who serves a congregation in Brooklyn, expressed reservations. 

“We asked her permission and she said, ‘It wouldn’t be my choice. But dad, if this is what you want…’ And he said he did. So she said okay,” Timoner recalls. “Once she realized, okay, there’s going to be cameras there, she made a determination that nothing would get in the way of her just being with dad. And she just like forgot about the cameras. And my brother has said the same thing.”

The MTV Documentary Films release is now playing in Los Angeles and expands to more cities in the coming days and weeks. Earlier this week it was named to DOC NYC’s shortlist of the year’s best feature documentaries.

The film traces the meticulous steps Eli and his family had to take over a 15-day period to fulfill the legal requirements of the End of Life Option Act (provisions of the law were simplified somewhat in January of this year, less than a year after Timoner’s death). Eli repeatedly told his family he would be looking after them after his death.

“Dad felt like he would be of more use to us and that he would be able to provide more for us if he could be free of his body,” Ondi tells Deadline. “He could do more if he could be putting a protective shield around us. Part of it might have been him comforting us or comforting himself with this decision to depart.”

Last Flight Home recounts the sudden turn Eli Timoner’s life took when he was in his early 50s. He had built a successful business career in Miami, launching Air Florida in 1972 which became the fastest growing airline in the world. He was also a man of great physical vitality, an avid long-distance runner and tennis player. But then, in an instant, it all changed.

“At age 53, Eli collapsed in the shower after his weekly massage in which his neck was cracked,” the film’s website relates. “A massive stroke permanently paralyzed the left side of his body.”

His mind remained sharp, but for 40 years he coped with significant disability. Advancing age eventually worsened his physical condition and then in January 2021 he was hospitalized for breathing difficulties.

“He was told after five days there that though they had solved the breathing issues that he would never walk again,” Ondi says. Not only that, he would have to go to a rehabilitation facility, a place he might never leave. It was at that point he revealed he no longer wanted to live.

“He said to me, ‘I served my sentence, please, if you love me you’ll help me.’ He begged us all, soon as he heard he was going to have to go to a facility,” Timoner recalls. “He lived for his family and he wanted out and we wanted to honor that.”

In Last Flight Home, Eli makes witty remarks and cracks jokes to his last days. He never wavers on his decision to end his life. Ondi began editing the footage she had recorded within a couple of weeks of her father’s death, initially to make a video for a memorial. 

“It was the way that I grieved my father. It was the way that I processed his loss, losing him,” she says. “I couldn’t stop editing after that because dad was alive inside the Avid.”

She shared a rough cut of the film at a secret screening at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Ala.

“I was so nervous that I was sharing something too personal and maybe it wouldn’t be relevant to people,” she notes. “I wanted to make sure it was going to be something that was important to other people – like, why share my family at its most vulnerable if it’s not going to be important to other people? And that screening, the reaction proved to me that people could use this. So I kept going.”

It’s not a political film, but at the same time it engages with consequential issues, like whether a person has the right to bodily autonomy, including making end of life decisions.

“We’ve done a lot of talking and thinking — after [the reversal of] Roe v Wade — about our rights over our own bodies. But this falls right in that category,” Timoner insists. “It’s our own right over our bodies that’s at stake… There’s all these terminally ill people that just want to have that agency at the end and they want to stop suffering.”

She adds, “I think the tide is turning on that, but that’s not why I made the film. But it would be an incredible part of dad’s legacy if this film could contribute to helping others suffer less. We, as a family, would just love that if the film could help the [end of life] laws change and pass in different states.”

Eli Timoner’s legacy of love and kindness lives on through his family – his widow, three children and five grandchildren. “He didn’t have to try to be good,” Ondi says. “He just was.”

Ondi recalls a conversation she had with her father towards the end, where he talked about how he would let her know he was still with her, even from the afterlife.

He said to me one time, ‘You know how you’ll know? You’ll know because I’ll warm your hands.’ Because he loved to warm people’s hands with his one warm hand — his right hand,” she says. “And that’s happened to me… Just out of nowhere, I’m lying there, totally normal temperature. My hands get really warm.”

Must Read Stories

‘The Crown’ Season 5 Trailer: Prince Charles Pressures Queen Over Diana Divorce

A Casino In Times Square? Broadway Divided On Development Gamble

Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel Urges Companies To Stop Doing Business With Rapper

DC Films Boss Walter Hamada Has Left Studio; WBD Finalizing Exit Payout

Read More About:

Source: Read Full Article