Remembering how to forget...

The best documentaries are the ones you stumble upon quite by accident. The title of First Cousin Once Removed didn't reveal much as I meandered through the offerings of HBO--an often disappointing way to look for a good documentary film. What caught my interest was a face, a smile, and the name of an accomplished poet--Edwin Honig.

...I say hello
to myself

and to break
the terror

of nonexistence
I restore my self

to existence whatever
the consequence--
Excerpt from To Infinite Eternity by Edwin Honig
​

Finding Poetry in Memory Loss: Alan Berliner's 'First Cousin Once Removed'

Edwin Honig was many things to many people. A really complex person with a traumatic history of his own revealed through interviews and conversations with his cousin, Alan Berliner, an accomplished filmographer. Although the stories I tell aren't about me, they are written by me--and I am fairly critical of storytellers of Alzheimer's disease. The zombie apocalypse isn't coming and there is humanity in every life experience.

This is a beautiful documentary--even when it becomes painful to watch--the journey remains hopeful and magical.

Since Honig was a poet, Berliner felt it was important to honor his cousin's memory by making the film an exploration into the life of a poet, and his film was conceived in poetic terms. "Poets' lives are not arbitrary," Berliner states. "For poets, it's all or nothing. They are the translators of human experience. They're the people we turn to in order to put words and images to the feelings, emotions and experiences we don't understand or know how to deal with. He even says at one point in the film,

​'What you're doing is like writing a poem. You're changing what people are thinking and making them think what you want them to think.' So I felt challenged to make a work of cinematic poetry because of who Edwin was. And not only do I believe that Edwin was a poet right through his last day of life, but I realized Edwin was experiencing what might otherwise be called 'A Poet's Alzheimer's.'

Trailer

The Poet's Alzheimer's reveals a mind lost to Alzheimer's disease returning to recite a forgotten passage, detail, or clarification. My father was a musician. He played the double bass in symphonies and local orchestras and retained an abiding love for classical and jazz his entire life.

​This documentary highlights the unique journey of a mysterious diagnosis. I have never been a fan of continually interrogating patients with dementia. A barrage of frightening questions, "Do you know who I am?" "What day is it?"-- to what purpose? Perhaps rather than thinking about memory as a construct, they are just living it. Acting out an activity that is limited by its definition.