Posted by lovinglegacyvideo on September, 21, 2018
Welcome to friends and family of Mark Day School
Thank you for your interest in the work of Loving Legacy Video, where we facilitate and film autobiographical interviews with elders and new parents. It’s powerful work. It makes an amazing gift, and our clients frequently share the impact our videos have had on their families. Our videos help people in connecting generations, learning in profound ways about themselves and their parents.
Our elder interviews are roughly 2/3 chronological questions beginning with ancestry and early life, and follow a natural progression through life and life cycle events. But perhaps the greatest reflections we hear from our clients come from the roughly 1/3 introspective questions we ask about when you felt most alive, choices you wish you’d made differently in life, recurring dreams you’ve had, themes you see playing out in your life, your approach to parenting or grandparenting, and many more.
Once a session has been booked, we share with you a welcome kit to prepare for the interview (if you like) with lists of questions as food for thought, articles, animations and videos from a variety of sources.
With our birth videos, we recognize that the process of growing a child, giving birth and the very early days of parenthood can fly by without having the chance to really share what you’re going through, how your body, relationship, and life are changing.
‘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.
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.
