Loving Legacy Video was proud to be an official sponsor of the Senior Matters 2018 organized by Aging Options. The annual conference brings together a host of organizations and businesses supporting seniors, and welcomed keynote speakers Mike Holmgren, the former Superbowl champion coach of the Greenbay Packers, and then Seattle Seahawks on Friday, and then on Saturday multimedia personality Kerri Kasem. The conference was a great opportunity to network with a host of others serving Puget Sound area seniors in all areas of life. Here’s a short video of Keith of Loving Legacy Video addressing the lunchtime audience to share the power in the work we do.
I enjoyed the opportunity to spend this morning with the folks at Silver Kite, a Seattle intergenerational community arts program. They’re doing great things using art as a vehicle for connecting across generations and cultures, promoting social change and bringing people together. They also offer professional development workshops for older adult service providers and educators in arts leadership, and intergenerational programming. A mutual friend had introduced me to the founder/director Jen Kulik who shared with me her personal story around the birth of Silver Kite and what’s at the heart of their work. One of the coolest projects they have is something called the Spark Box, which is a subscription based art box with materials and activities that prompt the creation of artworks with personal storytelling exercises. I think it’s a beautiful idea and was happy to see examples of what the boxes contain. It’s amazing to me that Silver Kite offers classes in graphic memoir, visual and digital storytelling, dementia friendly poetry and storytelling and so much more. Intergenerational theater programs are also one core piece of their work, both leading exercises and performances with youth and elders acting together. And they bring the exercises and games to the community, to libraries, assisted living communities and nursing homes around the Seattle area. Very impressive work. To learn more, visit their class listings page at http://www.silverkite.us/arts-with-older-adults
Studies have shown participation in the arts is beneficial to older adults’ self-esteem, socialization, communication skills, and emotional health.
For me, watching this beautiful video of an elderly man singing to his dying wife in her hospital bed brings back memories of sitting by my own grandmother’s nursing home bedside. I’d hold her hand and stay talking to her. By that time, she was almost fully incapable of speaking but would every once in a while blurt something out that would so clearly confirm that she was hearing everything I was saying. Sometimes it was just the confirmation of her eyes, making clear she was hearing me. Other times she’d speak a few words that would surprise me. Sometimes I would kind of climb onto the bed by her side. Not smooshing her but half on half off, my torso by her side and head on her shoulder but off the bed from the waist down. I had a similar experience when my other grandmother’s sister was on the verge of dying. We’d flown in from Seattle to see her one last time, and she was laying in the hospital bed barely conscious. We’d been told she wasn’t speaking and had little time to live. Out of nowhere in response to our presence and speaking to her, she blurted out a series of words clarifying that she was right there with us. It was powerful and beautiful. She died shortly after.
This is a beautiful animation of a final conversation between an elderly father and his adult daughter. I believe it was produced by the health and wellness website CureJoy. It was meaningful to me in considering these challenging conversations we have with our ageing or dying parents. How to say goodbye in the last few times we see each other. How to have difficult conversations about painful subjects. How to get past previous conflicts and patterns in the way we communicate with each other. I liked the simplicity of the animation in tackling these situations. It was upbeat and feel good, but spoke to these situations in general. In the work of Loving Legacy Video, it’s amazing to know that the videos we produce intentionally ask deeper questions about the things people want others to know about their life, about regrets they’ve had or situations they wish they’d handled differently or made other choices about the path they took. Or about the type of parent or grandparent they tried to be.
