His final words? “It was easy, folks. It was easy.”

Watching this documentary (which airs on HBO this Thursday), however, was not. In fact, it took me three separate viewings to get through my advance copy. Given that my mother ended her life after struggling with Parkinson’s for many years, an experience I wrote about in my memoir, “Imperfect Endings,” I was perhaps especially predisposed to find it difficult viewing. But apparently even hardened HBO staffers couldn’t sit through the entire film, and the film’s publicity team at this year’s Sundance was astonished at the reluctance of the media to attend the screening.

This is unfortunate because, while the film does ask its viewers to be willing to be moved and, yes, saddened, “How to Die in Oregon” is a well-crafted, beautifully understated film about an important topic: whether people should have the legal right to end their lives. Without resorting to Michael Moore-type polemics, director Peter D. Richardson follows a half-dozen terminally ill people as they go about the business of planning the end of their lives under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act. (Passed in 1994, the law makes it legal for physicians to provide “aid-in-dying” for their terminally ill patients.)

Although Richardson clearly supports individuals’ rights to end their own lives, he keeps the proselytizing — and the politics — to a minimum. Instead, he gives us a series of fly-on-the-wall scenes with patients, as well as interviews with oncologists, activists and volunteers. We see how planning for death can involve everything from the mundane (filling prescriptions, giving away one’s clothes and jewelry, even getting a final haircut), to the wrenching and the profound (tearful conversations between family members, and the final recording of a personal eulogy by an 84-year-old terminally ill broadcaster named Ray Carnay). And thankfully, we see people who, despite being in pain and close to the end, have maintained a sense of self — and even a sense of humor, although largely of the gallows variety.

But the warm, beating heart of “How to Die in Oregon” is Cody Curtis, a lovely, articulate 54-year-old wife and mother who has liver cancer. We see her taking walks with her daughter, meeting with her doctor, and joking with her husband all while stockpiling barbiturates and planning her own death. Although in good shape when the film opens, she has suffered the cruel effects of her disease and is determined not to repeat it. “I’m not going to die with the fluid oozing out of the pores in my legs,” she says in one of numerous interviews. “I’m not going to lose my hair again. I’m not going to weigh 200 pounds again. I’m not going to be humiliated with losing control of my bodily functions again.”

In short, she plans to get out while the getting is good, an attitude shared by my mother whose need for control made the Parkinson’s endgame intolerable. But unlike my family, in which my sisters and I debated about whether my mother was actually serious about ending her life, and tried to talk her out of it, the Curtis family is remarkably unified in their support. Her son, “T,” does express some trepidation about the death itself — something I could relate to — but none of them challenges her decision.

As death circles closer, Cody openly shares her shifting emotions, often moving from tears to laughter in the space of a sentence. By contrast, my mother never cried, never expressed any doubt, and never asked us how we felt about being there when she ended her life: She maintained a stoic, unsentimental attitude right to the end. And while I’ve always chalked this up to emotional reticence on her part, when Cody tells the filmmaker, “I want to model for my children a kind of grace and acceptance because I’m really scared of being a coward at the end,” I wondered if my mother was also protecting us from the burden of her ambivalence.

Of course, Cody is anything but a coward in the end and her last words — “This is so easy … I wish people knew how easy it was” – echoes Sagner’s in the beginning of the film. Although this bookending of sentiments may have been coincidental, it does highlight the film’s one-sidedness. With one notable exception, there are very few dissenting voices in “How to Die in Oregon.” That exception is Randy Stroup, a 53-year-old uninsured Oregonian with prostate cancer who was denied coverage for additional treatment by the state. In a letter to Stroup, they suggested he look into doctor-assisted suicide instead. Although the state reversed its decision after he went public, his understandable bitterness – “They’ll pay to kill me, but not to help me!” — provides a disturbing counterpoint to the rest of the film.

Having never understood the argument that laws like the one in Oregon might imperil the uninsured and disadvantaged, I found Stroup’s story eye-opening and I would have liked to hear more of a rebuttal or discussion. Also, given that assisted suicide is legal in only three states in this country and we have right-wing pundits shouting about “death panels” every time healthcare reform comes up, it would have been useful to get a better sense of the larger debate. As a strong supporter of the Death With Dignity laws, I am reluctant to give those who oppose them more of a platform, but I think the film would have benefited from their inclusion.

And yet, Richardson’s decision to eschew overt politics — both pro and con — in “How to Die in Oregon” allows him to do something more quietly radical: to show real people talking honestly with each other about their own impending deaths. In this death-phobic society where doctors offer sure-to-fail, last-ditch treatments instead of gently telling their patients to go home and prepare for death, Richardson’s film is a much-needed antidote.

Zoe FitzGerald Carter is a journalist and author of the memoir, “Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Love, Loss, and Letting Go” (Simon & Schuster). She can be reached at http://www.imperfectendings.com/

My mother would need to be alone in the house with only one person there to let him in, he explained. On the designated night, he and another volunteer would arrive with a plastic bag, tubing and a canister of helium.

“Then,” he drawled, pulling out what looked like a dirty white headband, “your mother puts the plastic bag over her head, feeds the tubin’ up underneath it and puts this band around her neck to secure it. She then reaches down and releases the valve on the canister of helium. The helium will cause her to fall unconscious in just a few minutes. When she’s dead, we take the plastic bag, the helium and everythin’ and leave the house. You call the medical examiner’s office to certify that she’s dead, and we’re done.”

Much to my relief, my mother seemed to realize that Bud was not the last person she wanted to see on Earth and she did not, ultimately, choose this route. But after spending my Saturday night watching “You Don’t Know Jack” on HBO, I had to wonder: If Dr. Kevorkian had been available, would he have been the next person my mother turned to?

Fortunately, I never had to find out, as “Dr. Death” was languishing in a jail cell in 2001. Three years earlier, he’d made the rather bizarre decision to kill one of his patients (Thomas Youk) by injecting him with potassium chloride. Up until then, Kevorkian had helped patients kill themselves by flipping the switch on his “mercitron” (a kind of death machine) or inhaling gas — again activated by the patient’s own hand.

Compounding the situation, Kevorkian filmed Youk’s death and gave the footage to “60 Minutes.” Why did he do this? It seems that both he and his cause were fading from the limelight by then, and he couldn’t bear it. In other words, it was a media stunt, pure and simple, one that landed him in jail for eight and a half years. (He was released in June of 2007 at the age of 79.)

Besides being something of a media hound, Kevorkian (played by Al Pacino in the film) was also a full-on eccentric with a major social gene missing. “There’s nothing further to be gained from talking to you!” he shouts at Janet Good (Susan Sarandon), a Hemlock Society supporter who is clearly an ally, but isn’t willing to let him use her house as a site for one of his mercy killings. And he seems to have an almost pathological fear of food. 

“This is full of fat and sugar,” he grouses to his lawyer when he is handed a piece of pie. “Are you trying to kill me?”

 ”Just eat the fucking pie, Jack,” the lawyer shoots back, clearly tired of the skeletal Kevorkian’s ascetic eating habits. (In another scene, he growls, “Decaf is for cowards.”)

But while much of the humor in the movie comes from showing Kevorkian’s odd, antisocial behavior, there is clearly much to admire about the man — at least as he is portrayed by the screenwriters for HBO. In fact, the whole movie is something of an apologia, starting with the title, which is a fragment of a longer title: “Until You Know the Whole Story, You Don’t Know Jack.”

So, while we see many instances of Kevorkian’s self-aggrandizing behavior, we also see his compassion, even tenderness, when shepherding his patients through the last moments of their lives. “It’s not too late to stop now, my dear,” he tells Janet Adkins, the first woman he helps to die, who seems to hesitate before switching the valve on the lethal canister of gas at her side. “You wouldn’t offend me.” And then, when she determinedly pulls the switch, he strokes her hair as she dies, a moment that brought me to tears. 

And time and again, we see his deep commitment to ending his patients’ suffering: his deep belief that he is helping them fulfill a basic human right to choose death over suffering. When his sister objects to his helping Adkins because her early dementia makes her a difficult first “test case,” he demands: “But what about her? Who cares what people think. It’s what my patient feels.”

It’s also revealed that much of what motivated Kevorkian was guilt over having allowed his mother to suffer at the end of her life. “I failed her,” he tells Good in a rare moment of introspection. “She once said to me, ‘Imagine, Jack, the worst toothache in the world. Now imagine that toothache in every bone in your body.’”

This is one of the great strengths of the film: We see Kevorkian’s sense of mission and his compassion, but also his self-delusion and hubris. In the most brilliant scene in the movie, we see him confront defeat. Having insisted on representing himself against murder charges in the Youk case, he quickly finds himself in way over his head. Unlike previous court cases, he is not being accused of assisted suicide but of murder, and it’s almost as if Kevorkian cannot comprehend this. Pacino, who is fabulous throughout, with his flat Midwestern twang and awkward gait, is completely riveting as he leans over the defense table, taking on and off his glasses, his face a study of exhausted defeat.

So why, given all Kevorkian’s strengths, am I relieved that my own mother’s path to “self-deliverance” never led to Kevorkian’s door? Well, just as I hated the idea that “Bud” might have been the last person my mother saw on this earth, I feel the same way about Kevorkian.

This is largely due to one scene that was so disturbing, I only hope to forget it as soon as possible. It happens about halfway through the movie, when Kevorkian has switched from the “mercitron” to gas. In an attempt to save his meager supply of it, he builds a plastic box to intensify the effects of the gas. In this scene, he places the box over the head of an elderly man with emphysema and then reacts impatiently when the box grows unbearably hot and the poor man rips it off his head, shouting, “Take it off, take it off.” In the end, realizing that he is only coming back to the same hell, he agrees to place the box back over his head. His head soon drops forward against the plastic contraption as his wife cries out in horror.

Having talked to Derek Humphry about the plastic bag/helium option that he describes in the most recent edition of his assisted suicide manual “Final Exit,” I understand that it does not have to be so terrible. But what really bothered me in this scene was Kevorkian’s cold response, not only when the man was dying, but afterward when his friend, Neal Nicol (John Goodman), chastises him for trying to “cut corners.”

“These are my decisions to make, Neal,” he snarls. “Mine alone.”

Now, I understand that this is a movie, not a documentary, and I can only hope that Kevorkian’s impatience with the process didn’t override his usual compassion the way it was depicted in this scene. But this scene was so repulsive to me — perhaps because I can imagine a scenario where that was my mother under Kevorkian’s plastic hood — that for all of the movie’s careful efforts to show Kevorkian in a good (if imperfect) light, I was no longer buying it. I still believe in what he fought for — the legal right to have a physician help you end your life in a quick and compassionate manner — but in the most profound way, getting to “know” Jack was to find him pretty repellent.