Then there are all those whose lives have intersected with Ronnie's and have in one way or another been affected by that meeting. One of the hardest moments in the film to watch was Kris Kristofferson finding himself having to give a speech about Ronnie only moments after finding out about the tumour. He's halfway through his speech when he breaks down in tears, unable to continue.
That's when you remember what the reality is for Ronnie at this time in his life. He might be putting on a brave face in public, being his usual bigger than life self, but away from the crowds it's a struggle. It's during these times away from the limelight that director Anne Pick and her crew show their real talent for being the fly on the wall, listening in and recording.
In the approximately two years from the initial diagnosis to the miraculous recovery, Anne and her film crew have created an agonizingly real record of a family struggling in the face of horrible adversity. Not only is Ronnie thought to be dying, there's no money coming in and their bank account is being bled dry.
In fact things are so tight that when the pump for their well breaks they don't have the money to replace it and are reduced to melting snow on their stove for water. Even without that calamity the strain on everyone was finally beginning to show. Ronnie is almost perpetually angry; Wanda looks like she's barely keeping it together, and their children are walking around like automatons.
Just as you think that your heart can't take any more of this, comes the news that the most recent biopsy came back benign. The cancer had vanished. Even more shocking was that a CT scan showed that the tumour, which had been growing, had completely disappeared. Refusing to believe their eyes, the doctors order an MRI scan which only confirms the results. The tumour and the cancer have magically disappeared.
Nobody wants to say it, but it looks like this was the work of a sixteen-year-old young man named Adam in British Columbia. Adam had offered Ronnie his services as a "dream" healer to attempt to break up the cancer and the tumour and clean his body of the disease. Ronnie had agreed, because as he said, what did he have to lose, and Adam had set to work.
Ronnie would simply lie down in bed and try to relax as much as possible, and Adam, nearly 3,000 miles away would visualize the area in his body where the tumour was in terms of a disruption and blockage of energy, and attempt to break up the block to allow energy to flow properly again. However it happened, the one thing everyone agreed on was it was a miracle.
Article comments
1 - PAT LEHMANN
I knew Ronnie back in the late 50s and early sixties at the Cozd'or in Toronto.Always a gentleman. In those days it was nothing normal to relate to girls in the clubs as chics and broads. Ronnie never did that to my girlfriend and I. He's talk to us after his show and if we didn't have to be home right away he'd treat us to a steak at a restaurant down the street and then say goodnight. I am almost seventy now and still remember him.