Reichert: The kids are beacons. I think of them every day. Alex had blood transfusions; she never had a problem. Tim had a feeding tube, [so] I could do it, it's no big deal. They set the bar high for adults. They want to go on with life. They don't want to sit and bemoan everything. They've been good mentors for me.

And how are you doing?

Reichert: All these tumors I had--one big one, lots of little ones, including one outside my lymph system--all are gone. There's this dead mass--it's like a country western song, "I've got a dead tumor above my heart."

Bognar: As long as the next line isn't, "And it reminds me of you."

Your daughter is now doing well. But what was it like when she had cancer?

Reichert: We experienced such isolation. I did as a mom, Lela did as a teenager, sitting at home, her friends too scared to come over and see her. It was really bad, and it gave me a sense of mission to end the isolation. I'm a filmmaker, a communicator. That's what I do with things that trouble me in my life.

Your film is quite intimate. Parents make decisions that don't always work out for the best. How do the families feel about the movie?

Reichert: They all said, "There's nothing we would change."

Bognar: Scott, the father of the little girl Alex, was criticized by a hospice nurse for continuing treatment when it looked like there was no more that could be done. He said at the end of the screening, "I don't like what she said; it pissed me off. But you gotta leave it in there." Scott felt he was doing the best thing he could. It might prolong her life, give her a little less pain. But he'll go to his grave regretting that he took her in that day.

Has the film changed your religious beliefs?

Bognar: I was raised a Catholic, then I was a lapsed Catholic and a big atheist/agnostic for years. I'm starting to believe I might be a lapsed agnostic. There are so many weird coincidences--the phone call out of the blue from an oncologist asking us if we want to make this film, Julia getting cancer just as we finished the movie. I'm a little shaken in my atheism. I don't pray but I wonder, I grapple.

Reichert: Definitely "yes." This increased my faith in something larger than us collective humans. I didn't believe there was an afterlife and now I do. It makes me feel much calmer. One way I came to understand the children's deaths was that their healing did not take place in front of our eyes. I believe it takes place in another dimension.