idea9.jpg

Callout

Search


follow drbillthomas at http://twitter.com

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Category Archives

Monthly Archives

Subscribe to this blog's feed Subscribe to this blog's feed

ElderbloggersRule.gif

Announcements Retirement Living TV


Blog Data

Top Blogs

Add to Technorati Favorites

Politics blogs

Directories Blogs - Blog Catalog Blog Directory

Directory of Politics Blogs

Ageless Project

Bigger Blogger

Blog Directory

Blog Universe

« BIZZARO news headline | Main | TGB's "This Week in Elder News" »

February 1, 2008 |Permalink |Comments (5)

Power Up Friday: “Away From Her"

The subject matter of this film - a woman in her early 60’s who develops Alzheimer’s disease - may put more than a few people off. But to avoid seeing “Away From Her” would be a mistake. It is simply one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen.

Julie Christie certainly deserves an Oscar for her amazing performance, but Gordon Pinsent is also remarkable as her husband, and Olympia Dukakis puts a special magic into everything she does. Here are my thoughts about the film’s subject matter:

awayfromherposterbig.jpgThe movie transcends others I have seen on this topic by looking past the usual “movie of the week” portrayal of the illness and discovering the richness of life, rather than the tragedy of disease. In doing so, it instructs us in the art of caring for people with dementia.

We see that a beautiful facility with bright natural light, family-style dining, a variety of programming choices and positive, friendly staff can nevertheless be lacking in the qualities that create home for others. We see the critical importance of preserving ones ability to give care as well as to receive it. We also see a richness of experiential observations from Fiona (Christie) that show that a person with dementia is so much more than a sum of what they can and cannot do.

In spite of her illness, Fiona is able to exhibit grace, wisdom, humor and compassion. She also shows that by letting go and entering the world of the person with Alzheimer’s you can often best reveal the person inside. And the film reaffirms my somewhat unpopular belief that people should not be segregated or stratified based on a disease or level of function.

There is certainly sadness, but it never appears in the places you might expect. Instead it dwells in the complexities of life, love and relationships, rather than in simplistic portrayals of the disease.

Most of all, the film shows the power of love. It reminds us that love is easy and rather common when things are going well, but it is an uncommon love indeed that navigates the rougher waters of life. And the greatest irony is that the wisest words throughout the remarkable script always seem to be spoken by the person with dementia:

“Sometimes there’s something delicious in oblivion.”

“I’m going, but I’m not gone.”

And, “People ought to be in love every single day.”

-- Al Power

Comments ( 5)

I gotta disagree with you on this one - except for the word "incredible."

I thought "Away From Her" was about alzheimer's the way "Juno" was about teenage pregnancy or "Lars and the Real Girl" was about mental illness. I'll grant you that there was beauty and hope and passion and nice people and all that; and that there may be a possibility of in-the-moment happiness and "deliciousness" in oblivion, but it's still oblivion. And it's still loss. The best people, the best system, the best processes in dealing with that loss cannot erase the loss. We're all beautiful, but Julie Christie is quite a bit more beautiful than the rest of us.

All three movies are distillations of what good can be found if we scratch around in a desperate situation and clean it up and use a little Doris-Day-vaseline-on-the-lens to smooth out some of the edges. All three are, perhaps, a form of prayer. There's a lot to be said for hope and working for and striving for something better, for perfection. Without that effort, life would be dismal.

You're right and you tell the truth when you say love helps us through things. But I really believe that I saw more of the truth about love and family and long term care in "The Savages" than I did in "Away From Her."

Hi Al - Welcome to my world. I see dementia every day in my work and I've never seen it like that (although I would love to). Imagine - a woman is being "put in" to a nursing home and when she gets there, she asks for just "one more " session of making love with her husband. In my experience the women and men going into nursing homes have been in depends for many years - make love? I think not. Fall in love- walk around holding hands, not remembering your spouse, absolutely- that would be the real world in a nursing home. But to look realistically at "away from her" what happened would never have happened. Would love to talk with you about my perspective (from my client's eyes) of nursing homes. I feel like I''ve lived parts of "The Savages" but "Away From Her" was a little to close to heaven for me.

Well, now we're getting somewhere!!

Let me try to explain where I'm coming from in a somewhat coherent way:
First, regarding plot believability, I tried to steer away from those concerns - I could also nitpick some of the details, but I was looking at this movie from a whole different place. I don't see it as overly pretty or rose-colored at all. In fact I think it asks harder questions than "The Savages" did. The latter movie hits the more obvious problems with nursing home care, (all very legitimate), and the family issues rang extremely true to me in that movie, as I have said previously.
"Away From Her", however, touched on areas that I have been wrestling with in my current writings. A major difficulty most people have with my ideas stems from the nature of this disease. It's far easier to make a film that finds hope in coping with, say, cancer or paraplegia without being accused of being Polyanna-ish. But there's something inherently difficult in the concept of losing one's cognitive abilities - people find it much harder to see this as anything but the worst of tragedies. I think we'd all rather lose just about anything than our mental faculties, and many would choose death first.
What I'm trying to say is that it is this very tragic view of Alzheimer's disease that has caused our whole medical and elder care system to treat it purely as tragedy, and to view the person with dementia as fundamentally and irretrievably broken beyond repair. This has played out in the ways we resort to institutionalized, segregated and programmatic approaches, and resort to medications that we would never rush to use on people in any other state. There is no more disempowered, "abandoned" person in our medical care system than the one with dementia. As a result, most caregivers don't even bother to, as Fiona said, "try to find a little grace" in a bad situation. And that is what to me is much deeper than The Savages. It's easy to show a crowded, dingy nursing home with crass lighting, but to show a country club atmosphere with people that say all the right things and still make such incredibly poor choices for those who live there is, to me, a far deeper indictment of how our elder care system needs fixing.
It is this same attitude toward dementia that leads many loved ones to take on the person's disease more as their own personal tragedy, which is what Fiona's husband did. It certainly was a tragedy for him as well, but he kept trying to shake her back to a place her mind could no longer occupy, because he could not find that grace and acceptance of her illness that she had somehow come to terms with in her own way. That is something I see quite often. And his attempts to shake her back to "normalcy" mirror our usual medical approach to people with dementia - it's like pushing a paraplegic out of their chair to try and force them to walk. And when people fail to respond to our efforts, we medicate them for failing. I liked it that Fiona said that she preferred to sit with Aubrey because "He doesn't confuse me". What I also liked was that Grant finally discovered that the best way to connect to his wife was to go to her place, even if it wasn't his own reality.
This is the core of my work with viewing dementia from an experiential, rather than a neurochemical standpoint, and conforming the environment to the person's needs, rather than trying to force them back into "normal" patterns that no longer exist. While it certainly doesn't cure the disease, some amazing "blossomings" have resulted - and people often do things that many doctors said were beyond their capability. (There are a few people with dementia who have traveled the world as spokespeople for those with the disease. In her book Dancing With Dementia, patient/author Christine Bryden writes that she has been called a "liar" by neurologists, because she shows a picture of her MRI scan at her talks and they refuse to believe that a woman with such a "swiss cheese" brain appearance can stand up and lecture!)
So ultimately, as crazy as it may sound, I choose to see each person with dementia as a person capable of continued growth, development and engagement with life, in spite of the fact that they have a disease that will, as Grant said, "progress". And that view informs my out-of-the-box notions of how to care for people with the disease. This is the only movie I've ever seen about dementia that has dared to challenge our conventional view that there is little more than tragedy and loss, and to show the complex capacities that many people maintain well into their disease, (that our usual approach to care unfortunately stifles and suppresses).
What I'm saying may sound hopelessly naive in theory, but when 40% of people with dementia in nursing homes in the US and other developed countries are on antipsychotic drugs and only 7% of mine are, I think there is reason for hope.
Thanks for the responses!
-- Al

"the savages" felt very real to me at 74 and also to my 38 year old son. away from her did not have the same powerful pull though i was touched by the couple's struggle. perhaps julie christie's beauty got in the way?

al powers, i really wanted to read your reply, consider your ideas but i got lost in the language. also, could you consider shorter pargraphs?

Good comments, Naomi. Bob and I are used to sending each other long commentaries, but when I transferred it to the blog, I didn't revise the writing for the larger community.
If you have further questions about my reply, feel free to write me at apower@stjohnshome.com, and I'll try to answer them.

Al

Post a comment




Remember me?

(You may use HTML tags for style)

©2007 Erickson School