Movie About Compassion as Medicine for Dementia: It Is Not Over Yet

"It is Not Over Yet" is a documentary about a Danish memory care facility that treats residents with compaassion -- nature, cake, and above all, listening to them. 

Matt Zoller Seitz's Extraordinary, Heartbreaking Essays on Love and Grief

 Film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz has a series of essays on rogerebert.com about the people he has loved and lost, including his second wife, his step-mother, and his mother. He writes with grace, insight, and generosity, not just toward the people he writes about but to death itself, and to us, his readers in sharing his own vulnerability. 

On April 2 of this year, I lost my mother, Bettye Seitz, with whom I had a long and contentious relationship. On April 27 of last year, I lost my second wife, Nancy, to metastatic breast cancer. That's the same day I lost my first wife, Nancy's younger sister Jennifer, to an undiagnosed heart ailment, fifteen years earlier, on April 27, 2006. Nancy and Jennifer's times of death were minutes apart. 

April 25 is the day I lost my stepmother, Genie Grant, a jazz singer and union administrator in Dallas, Texas. The year was 2009. Genie was the most benign and loving parental figure I ever knew, such a bright light that she made up for the conspicuous failings of the others. It was Genie who brokered a series of meetings between myself and my father, Dave Zoller, who had been estranged throughout my youth due to mutual misunderstandings, his own limitations as a dad, and generous doses of anti-father propaganda supplied by my mother and stepfather. Genie's diplomatic, embracing personality brought me and Dad together in a meaningful way for the first time. Her death brought us even closer, because now we had something horrible in common. "This is the month we both lost our ladies," Dad told me. It was very strange being his guide through an emotional experience that I'd had first. It wasn't how things were supposed to work. But Nancy and Jennifer's parents losing their only two children isn't how things are supposed to work, either. As John Galsworthy wrote: life calls the tune, we dance.

Rachel Brougham on Grief

 Rachel Brougham wrote about mourning the loss of her husband on Twitter.  The entire essay is well worth reading. An excerpt:

My life as I knew it changed in an instant. My future as I imagined was stolen. Grief changes your brain chemistry. It changes how you think, how you interact with others, how you work. It literally changes every single thing about your life. Think about that for a moment....You don’t “get through it.” You don’t “move on.” I carry this load every minute of every day and I hate it. I’m an over-achiever by nature and you don’t over-achieve at grief. I can’t “beat it.” Trust me, I’ve tried...I promise that someday you’ll finally be ready to throw your person’s hot sauce/shampoo/toothbrush/whatever away. And if you’re not there yet, that’s OK, too. I promise there will come a day when you can say their name and tell a story about them without tears streaming down your face. You’ll laugh again. And even have good days.

After the Fire -- poem about grief

 

after the fire :: ada limón

You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind? I live in the low parts now, most
days a little hazy with fever and waiting
for the water to stop shivering out of the
body. Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.