What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [48]
About the same time, as part of her continuing effort to heal herself emotionally, spiritually, and physically from her decade of trauma, she joined a group that was spending a year following Stephen Levine’s book A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last. The book, based on Levine’s own experiment with doing just that, was inspired by a comment the Dalai Lama made about living fully by preparing for death. In his book, Levine also drew on his twenty years of work with the terminally ill. He had often heard the dying express regret about how they had left so many parts of their life for “later.” As a result, he concluded, the dying often felt “fragmented about unsatisfying work, unfinished business, and compromised lifestyles.” He proposed to his readers that they spend a year living as consciously as possible, to catch up with their lives, to investigate death, and to cultivate joy. As Alidra worked with the book, her mind-set began to change. There may not be a next life. I’m going to be a filmmaker in this life, she told herself. “Once I faced my mortality, I was driven to do something.”
When I caught up with Alidra in Portland, Oregon, where she moved in 2008, I was taken slightly aback by her youthful appearance when she greeted me at the door of the rented house where she was living temporarily. She was slim and wearing tight jeans and a blue cable-knit sweater. Her movements were supple, like a dancer’s. Her face was virtually unlined, her brown hair’s bob carefree, her voice alternately gentle and inflected with something of her affluent upbringing in Princeton, New Jersey, and theatrically high-pitched. At sixty-seven, she had recently relocated to Portland to train and work in a clinic that specializes in dialectical behavioral therapy, a treatment that has proved effective for people suffering from borderline personality disorders.
Sitting at a table in the middle of the small, vintage, salmon-colored kitchen, surrounded by blue-green cabinets, Alidra talked animatedly about her first conscious step toward a commitment to filmmaking. In May 2000, she bought a professional-grade camcorder, a Sony VX2000. She paid $2,600 for it, a bargain at the time. “It started my love affair with equipment. As soon as I had my camera in my hands, I needed to go out and use it. I had had other cameras, but they were not this camera. This was my most professional camera.”
She began to consider doing a documentary about passionate elders in their eighties and nineties with vital careers and consuming interests. Filmmaker Stoney was eighty-four, and his continuing commitment to social documentary had inspired her. She also contemplated focusing on Angeles Arrien, a cultural anthropologist with whom she took a six-day workshop on transition and change in Arizona’s high desert. Alidra’s interest in the subject was bound up with the complex tides of her family history.
“In the end, I think my own parents felt pretty disappointed with their lives,” she said. Her father, Charles H. Brown, was a self-made man who worked as a patent lawyer for RCA until he was sixty-five. But he had wanted to be a doctor. He even applied to medical school in his seventies but was rejected. “He had put a lot into my brother,