Love, death, & visibility
The documentary tells the story of Kim Acquaviva and her wife, Kathy Brandt, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of fifty-four.
Kathy Brandt was a hospice and palliative-care consultant and an advocate for high-quality end-of-life care. When Kathy received her diagnosis of ovarian cancer, she and Acquaviva, a professor of nursing at the University of Virginia and an expert in end-of-life issues for 2SLGBTQ+ people and their families, decided to document Brandt’s decline, and their family’s last days together, through frank and frequent social-media posts.
“There’s a total awkwardness to death. I think it’s grown out of this idea that death is to be fought. We have this call and response. Someone says they have cancer, and you say you’re strong, you’re gonna beat this. There is a stigma around talking about death, sharing pictures of death, because most people don’t know what it would look like. It’s scary. And Kathy said, Let’s just put things out there, let’s be fully transparent, and share this with people. So we started posting on social media”
CW: Contains scenes of death and dying.
You can find the documentary here.
Video credit: Sara Joe Wolansky
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