Over a decade ago I was browsing tables of marked down books at a honey of a bookstore on Pike Place in Seattle and stumbled across a slim, off-size, hardcover, slick-paged offering that I've wished many times since I'd bought.  I can't remember the title but it must have intrigued me because I opened the book and began to read.  It was a startling photo-essay of a family who consciously decided, when the father of one of the two parents began to dement, to incorporate him into their household, which included children.  They safety proofed their house and broadened the focus of their life to accomodate the man.  Everyone in the family was involved.  As his dementia progressed, the family flowed around him like a kaleidoscope of nurturance.  Picture after picture showed a child here, an adult there, involved in quotidian activites while communing with their Ancient One in ever changing patterns, seeing to it that, as he drifted, they enclosed his drift in a secure perimeter of love.  I've forgotten most of the details of the photographs and the story, except for one series:  Long after the grandfather had slipped beyond verbal language, long after he'd lost his ability to recognize anything about his family except his sense that they belonged where he was and he belonged with them, daily, when sunshine flowed through a bank of cathedral windows, dressed in nothing but diapers he would dance in the light, arms outstretched, face lifted, twirling and flowing about the room as though the rays were a veil he swirled around himself.  The family captured one of his exuberant dances in breathaking stills.  As I contemplated these images it occurred to me that they were, of a piece, most likely the definitive story the family created about their life with their patriarch and his life in the world.  It was certainly the definitive story I took from the book.

     Children are much more conscious of life as a series of stories than are adults, even though adults are constantly telling their stories.  Children, though, are still crafting theirs, so they are acute and active examiners, ever curious, unafraid to ask any question, to niggle any plot.  The title of the second episode of HBO's The Alzheimer's Project, Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am? is misleading in this respect.  The thirty minute program left me with a sense that the children were really asking, "Grandpa, Can I Know Who You Are, Now that You Have Alzheimer's?"

     The program begins with a surprising session in which three children have been encouraged to talk with their grandfather, who is in the early stages of losing his memory, about what is happening to him, what they can expect and what he and they might feel about the possibilities.  The children's questions are pointed and relentless.  The grandfather is open, focused and unapologetic.  All of them are fearless.  As I watched the segment I was reminded of the old saw that children and the elderly have a special bond.  This segment seemed to point to the source:  A pact, between youth and age, to be nothing but honest with one another.

     As the program continues, a variety of children, some of them active caregivers for their dementing grandparents, struggle to understand their grandparents, themselves and their feelings, sympathetic and resentful, about loving someone who is transforming into a what seems like a stranger before their eyes.  Maria Shriver interrupts the flow to interject summaries of what she's learned, what can be learned, from standing by and supporting children as they come to terms with an elder who is developing dementia.  Her interjections are, mostly, unnecessary.  The lessons are obvious through observing and listening to the children.  During one segment a grandmother suddenly lashes out at her granddaughter, ordering her to "Go home" (they are at home).  The child has just read to her, the grandmother has shown her appreciation by clapping and the two have had a genial, though overtly one-sided, conversation in which the granddaughter mentions a friend well known by the family, notices that her grandmother doesn't remember the friend, then tries to prompt her grandmother's memory.  The tongue lashing provokes the granddaughter to tears.  Afterward the child's mother comforts her on their stoop.  The mother offers what sounds like the agreed upon family story, placing the grandmother's presence in their home, however disturbing, into their family's context of caring.  The child repeats, in her own words, a part of the story as her eyes scan the horizon.  It is obvious that the child has been caught by the camera in a moment of hard work:  Reviewing the meaning of the words of the story and puzzling out the process of fitting them into her singular experience of her grandmother.  It's a well chosen snippet of video.  Shriver's voice over suggests:  "If you were in a room and didn't know where you were and didn't know who the people were, you'd probably get angry or scared, as well."  An important, double-edged reminder for all who seek to love their Demented Ones.

     This may be one of the harder episodes for many to watch, although it has the potential to be cathartic, despite its brevity.  The children do not hold back their confusion or frustration, nor their curiosity, compassion and understanding.  Parents try to explain bewildering behaviors to their children but I got the sense that the children, while considering their parents' explanations, were busy creating explanations of their own.  One teenager decides to video tape her grandparents.  Her grandfather is not demented.  Her grandmother is demented beyond speech but not, as the segment reveals, beyond understanding.  As two cameras roll, the granddaughter serendipitously captures the couple's love story of which the rest of the family had been unaware.

     Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am? contains a subtle sub-text that I, personally appreciate.  It presents families in which everyone is involved in caregiving.  In this country this is tantamount to establishing a new paradigm for caregiving.  I'm not completely satisfied, though.  I'd like the paradigm stretched to include active involvement of extended family.  It is, still, in this country, a rare parent who has only one adult child.

     The ambiguity of living with someone with progressive dementia is this:  It's relatively easy to adjust to and incorporate the expected flux in the stories we create and repeat throughout our lives when those lives appear to be "normal"; it's not so easy to have to weave into our stories the flux of the unexpected and the unwished for, especially when similar stories were buried in the past, leaving us with little or no reference.   The shock of the unexpected and unwished for, though, leaves us vulnerable to discovering more about our loved ones than we imagined of them.

     Our stories, in one way or another, rely on facts.  The facts we've accepted about aging and dementia are changing.  Abnormal is becoming normal.  We are all, children and adults, finding it necessary to recreate our stories.  I think Maria Shriver is right in suggesting, through this film, that children are an important resource because they are fresh, their expectations of normality are not cemented by years of experience.  As we watch them create their stories, we may very well discover the inventiveness and the courage to recreate our own.