Posts tagged "love"

When Have You Felt Most Alive?

One Of The Best Questions I Ask

This is often among the questions I ask that solicits the deepest, most authentic and engaging answers from many of the interviews I do. I usually save it for the end. It’s a good one. After going through the ancestry and relatives, talking about early life, young adulthood, marriage, career and so much more, I start with the introspective questions about how people think and feel. This is also often when I hear in follow up that family and friends learned the most new information about their loved ones.

Understanding Legacy & The Tools Available To Us

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.

Do You Love Me? It’s Nice To Know

‘You’re upset, you’re worn out, go inside, go lie down. Maybe you’ve got indigestion!”

I was recently hired to film a very special 50th wedding anniversary celebration in Edmonds. Together with the photos and videos that the husband had edited to project for the crowd during the reception, was this great clip from Fiddler On The Roof in which the husband grills the wife about whether or not she loves him. The crowd loved it and it was a gentle ode to the challenges of marriage, and how they’d managed to stay strong together after all these years. The family sat together, parents and grandparents with the grandchildren at the head table laughing. The family was also of European descent and there were a number of people in the crowd with accents who’d immigrated to Seattle. It seemed to me like a clip that would be great to share at any similar wedding anniversary party or celebration.

To learn more about our lifecycle event video coverage, visit our page here http://lovinglegacyvideo.com/milestones-memorials/

Don’t Wait Till Your Dying Words…

…To Say What’s Most Important.

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.

Author Kerry Egan of 'On Living' with Video Essay on PBS Newshour Segment 'In My Humble Opinion' from Loving Legacy Video on Vimeo.