Work in progress film maker in residence at festival
Posted on Wed, 20 Jan 2010
I recently finished reading Keeper, Andrea Gillies's prize winning account of a year and a half spent caring for her Alzheimer's suffering mother-in law Nancy, and depressed and ageing father-in law, who had moved in with her and her young family in a big house in the middle of nowhere somewhere in the north of Scotland.
Its an utterly unromantic memoire of a ferociously difficult period of her life. Whereas in John Baily's books about caring for his wife, the writer Iris Murdoch, his profound love for her after a life shared together justified the sacrifices her Alzheimer's forced him to make, it was much harder for Gillies to set her life aside as she'd hardly known her mother-in-law even when she was in good health.
The book reminded me how relatively well my sister currently is given the prognosis of her diagnosis, and how fortunate she is to have remained relatively stable for the past five or so years. It helped crystallise my desire to film her in her good spirits, to find ways to film the way she is still able to get intense pleasure from life despite her lack of a working memory. I have no idea what will happen in the years to come, and I hope that somehow my sister does not follow the same path as Nancy, but for now I am determined to focus on the positive.
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Posted By MARTN HAMPTON to On Memory and Oblivion on 1/20/2010 07:49:00 PM
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