Posted by lovinglegacyvideo on September, 22, 2018
The idea of legacy can manifest in so many ways, and the tools available to us are unique and powerful.
“I don’t want to wait until somebody dies to tell them what I value or what I remember. I want to do it now!”
“I can decide how much of this I want to share with my children and who gets to see this, which I love.”
“And as I sat here speaking, it occurred to me that parts of this video could play at my memorial ceremony, as if I were addressing my community directly.”
These were some of the sentiments shared by Rebecca Crichton, the Executive Director of the NW Center for Creative Aging during her Loving Legacy Video interview. I loved how she wove together her own life story, her culture and family traditions, together with the work she does with elders, talking frequently about death and dying, memory, family, and so much more. A great testament to the power of this work.
Loving Legacy Video will be doing interviews in Boston during the week of September 13th-20th and in NYC the week of October 14th-21st. We are currently scheduling interviews during those dates. Please share the service with friends, colleagues and family members who may be interested. The interviews are typically done in client homes and are conducted over the course of 1 day.
There’s lots of information, details, samples, and pricing throughout the pages of our website. Book now as the dates will fill up quickly. Best way to do so is by contacting us or calling 206-679-8381 to start the process. We look forward to working with you.
The 2 videos below are different kinds of legacy or end of life videos. In these beautiful and sad videos, 2 adult children explore their parent’s aging process. More specifically they share their parent’s increasing dementia and memory loss.
In the video above, an old father can’t remember his family members, his life from day to day or other recent events but when his son takes him driving and plays the songs he sang throughout his career as a musician, the words are all there and he comes alive joyfully singing and returning to his old self. The son has begun using the videos he records to raise money to record an album with his dad singing and all proceeds going toward supporting The Alzheimers Society. So far he’s raised $163,000.
From his website:
I’m fundraising for the Alzheimer’s Society because of the advice they’ve given us in the last few years. Without them we would have had very little idea or support about how to deal with even the basics of Dad’s condition.
The more Alzheimer’s kicked in, the more Dad became violent – both physically and verbally – it was incredibly difficult to manage. And terrifying at times.
Alzheimer’s Society provide a telephone helpline to sufferers and their families. I cannot begin to describe how a stranger’s voice at the end of the phoneline helped when things got really bad.
Dad was a singer throughout his life – he was a Butlin’s Redcoat and then travelled around singing in clubs around the country. He worked in a factory when he got married and did the occasional bit of singing on side. His nickname is The Songaminute Man – simply because of how many songs he knows.
In the last few years his memory has deteriorated a lot – often not recognising me as his son. Its a horrible illness.However, now when we’ve got him singing again he’s back in the room. It’s these moments that we treasure.
The plan is to share as much of Dad’s singing as we can and hopefully it will help raise money to fund the work of the Alzheimer’s Society – more specifically to go towards paying for a person at the end of the phoneline to help other people like us.
The other video doesn’t have the same feel good thread, but is a very authentic and painful window into how it feels to see his aging mother lose her memory and even the awareness of who her son is to her.
‘Directed by Tweetie’ is a very sweet Scottish documentary film made by a 23 year old with his ageing grandparents. It’s a beautiful family portrait in which very little actually happens. It’s all just him interacting with his grandparents, putting the microphone on them, talking about why he’s filming them, visiting parts of their home and garden, etc. The grandparents very innocently cooperate, answering his casual questions, watching him assembling and adjusting his equipment, and along the way engaging about how they see themselves, including reacting to watching the footage that’s been shot. It’s simple and sweet.
This is a sweet video passed along by a friend. The video’s title ‘How to Talk to Old People’ is what first caught my eye but then I stuck around to learn some insights. It’s a goofy interview with a 100 year old grandmother in Bellevue WA. Her grandson is interviewing her about the kinds of questions she loves to be asked. She also talks about the most common questions she’s asked by people who marvel at her age. It’s beautiful to see her so vibrant and clear at a full 100 years of age.
Tell those who need to hear it that you love them and share your wisdom while you still can. These are some of the insights and encouraging words from hospice chaplain Kerry Egan. Egan has been on a national book tour promoting her new work ‘On Living Book‘. I caught her interview with Terry Gross and this short PBS video and at the heart of it is the opportunity that Loving Legacy Video exists to enable; the sharing of our lives, stories, ideas and experiences to better know ourselves and our loved ones. Her work is rooted in hospice work and speaking with people in their end of life but the sentiment is the same for all, that there’s no reason to wait to share your life with the people you love while you can. And especially meaningful for me was this list of 5 important things that dying people want you to know. Overall, I loved listening to her interview and went looking for more of her work. I’m excited to read her book as it seems especially relevant in the work of Loving Legacy Video, specifically for me that we’re not just collecting the familiar stories your friends and family have been hearing for years. While those are meaningful and valuable, it is in my experience the deeper questions about the life one’s lived, choices they wish they’d made differently, the parent or adult child that they wanted to be, and thoughts about death and dying that bring out the most powerful content in our interviews. Those are the spaces where you get a true sense of people’s experience, their values and what they at this stage in life see as most important and central to their own lives.
In the work I do at Loving Legacy Video, I show up without much prior knowledge of the life my clients have lived. Sure we have the opportunity ahead of time to discuss areas they’d like to highlight or avoid in the video, but for the most part, the discussion is lead by the direction they take our interview. I listen well and dive into the things that are being presented, but people tell their story, they craft their won personal narrative and they have choices about how they want this document to reflect their experience. I found this Ideas.Ted.Com article to be insightful when considering how people choose to tell stories about the life they’ve lived.
“In his interviews, he asks research subjects to divide their lives into chapters and to recount key scenes, such as a high point, a low point, a turning point or an early memory. He encourages participants to think about their personal beliefs and values. Finally, he asks them to reflect on their story’s central theme. He has discovered interesting patterns in how people living meaningful lives understand and interpret their experiences. People who are driven to contribute to society and to future generations, he found, are more likely to tell redemptive stories about their lives, or stories that transition from bad to good. There was the man who grew up in dire poverty but told McAdams that his hard circumstances brought him and his family closer together. There was the woman who told him that caring for a close friend as the friend was dying was a harrowing experience, but one that ultimately renewed her commitment to being a nurse, a career she’d abandoned. These people rate their lives as more meaningful than those who tell stories that have either no or fewer redemptive sequences.”