My father, Gary, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2008. Disease doesn’t happen to just one person in a family — it happens to everyone. As a family, we made a collective decision to lean in and explore what the disease would ask of us. This meant showing up, listening and finding a new rhythm together. Over the past 18 years of Gary’s illness, I’ve learned to move between resistance and acceptance, practicing how to live, love and let go. But most of all, I’ve learned how to navigate the path of anticipatory grief.
Living inside Contradiction
Grieving someone who is still alive asks us to live inside contradiction — learning to sit with the unknown and to search for meaning within unexpected loss. In the early years after my father’s diagnosis, this weight pressed heavily on me. Our lives were suddenly filtered through what was disappearing in him, and what was becoming harder to reach. I felt these shifts like a lead weight, pulling me into a sadness that was unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
I recognized early on that coping would require turning toward what I knew best — storytelling. In 2015, I made my first short documentary with Gary. Present Moment was my attempt to begin a difficult but necessary conversation about how Parkinson’s was shaping his life — and mine. The film screened at MJFF online that year and went on to film festivals and events around the world. Ten years later, in 2025, I made a second film, Surrender | A State of Being. This work offered a more tender reflection on long-term illness and the quiet reckoning of facing one’s own end of life. It revealed our collective grief and the ways it can define and shape us.
