I woke up this morning from a dream. The dream was sending me a message about First Man. “It’s about your father.” ‘
I knew I was dreaming about First Man. I didn’t know I was dreaming about my dad.
My dad died sometime last year. I don’t remember when. I don’t remember much about it at all except that I was the first person to find him after he took his last breath, his skin yellow from liver disease, his face tilted forward, his blank eyes staring straight ahead. He looked strangely like a puppet, just hanging there waiting for someone to pull the strings and bring him to life, “Dad?” I stepped forward, put a hand on his chest, which was still slightly warm to the touch. I already knew he was gone but I went through the ritual of checking anyway. I missed his death by five minutes.
You might say my dad’s death hit me hard, but the truth is – it didn’t. Grief is like a fast moving wave that you know is behind you. You don’t know how far behind, just that it’s coming and you’d better run fast. My dad was Jewish. Part of the burial ritual was burning a series of blue candles. My sister told me, you have to burn your candle so we can close the circle. But I couldn’t. It is still sitting on my shelf, unburned. I thought if I didn’t burn it I could somehow stay ahead of the wave, ahead of the sadness I knew I would carry with me for the rest of my life.
That same sister was in a car accident the other day. She called me to say that the first thing she thought of doing was calling Dad. My dad wasn’t a lot of things. He wasn’t so successful or good with money. He died alone. He battled depression and addiction and by the end, hard core dementia. But the one thing he was – was kind. He was the one person you count on to lend a sympathetic ear, without judgment.
I really did think I’d stayed ahead of the wave. I was going about my life as planned. Attending film festivals, watching movies, attempting to cover the Oscar race. I went to Telluride and found, as usual, the offerings very good. Then I saw First Man. Clearly, it isn’t a film for everybody. Now we know for sure it isn’t. So then Oscar pundits will dutifully downgrade it on their lists, chalking it up as another movie that was overhyped in Telluride.
No movie this year has moved me in quite the same way and now I know for sure why. It’s personal. It is a film about Neil Armstrong and the space program, of course it is. It is also a film about grief, specifically, letting go of the person you can’t let go of. It’s about getting to that place where you can at last give yourself permission to let go. Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma is also about grief, albeit through Cuaron’s own eyes trying to come terms with what must have happened to the woman who cared for him. That film, like First Man, is about letting go. So is Jason Reitman’s Tully. So is Tamara Jenkins’ Private Life. When I look for it, and I’m not running from it, grief is all around me, and the kind of catharsis that must follow.
I didn’t have the words then to adequately explain why I loved the movie so much. But I do now. I do because, oddly enough, it was told to me in a dream. After reading reviews where people were “underwhelmed” and “left cold” and “bored.” Some hated it because “nothing happens.” The hive mind wants you to agree. People who read you want your recommendations of movies to be trustworthy. But mostly, let’s face it, everybody just wants to be right. Right that it was a good movie after all. How do we know that? Oh, its box office, of course. Its Rotten Tomatoes score, of course. It’s Cinemascore, of course. How people react on Twitter, of course. That’s how you know and if you loved a movie that all of these elements snap back to tell you that you’re wrong – you have to ask yourself, wrong about what, exactly? Wrong that the majority of opinions would not match yours? Yes, believe it or not, that is how it works in the job I do. No one wants to be wrong because those who are “wrong” are shamed. If you put all of your chips on A Star is Born, by contrast, you are getting high fives from the hive mind right about now: Twitter, check. Box office, check. Cinemascore, check. Oscars coming down the pike? Check, check, check.
I don’t know how Chazelle, a young filmmaker just starting out in life and in art, could have made a movie that gets that feeling of trying to stay ahead of grief so right. Maybe it’s the writer, Josh Singer. What I do know is that watching this movie and then watching how other people watched this movie exposed a kind of sickness in what I do, in what we all do, in how we judge cinema. It is hard to fight against the hive mind when it comes to having broader conversations. You will get push back at every turn. I push back too. I am no better. But there is something weird about it.
It makes me wonder how this industry can survive, and what it’s future will look like at the hands of the hive mind.
Worst of all, a few critics have questioned the whiteness of the film, as though, coming off the heels of La La Land our purity village should be seeking out potential racism where it might lurk. The Apollo missions were comprised of white astronauts. Just like the reporters in the newsroom at the Washington Post in 1972 were all white. Chazelle highlights the juxtaposition of the black power movement at the time with the whiteness of the astronauts – he examines this in the film and still, it’s all about what the film doesn’t do instead of what it does do. And of course, on the right it isn’t American enough, it isn’t patriotic enough.
You never really want to say it, but one finds oneself compelled to say: it’s just a movie. When you think about it, when you think about what we do, how we do it, all so that we can somehow be right about evaluating how successful a film will be? It’s all a little silly.
I know you’re probably thinking, great, just what the world needs – another post about First Man from Yours, Truly. I figure, if I write about here, I won’t have to read about it out there.
Right before my dad died, long before I ever saw First Man, the song that reminded me of him and where he was going, after his mind had mostly vacated his body, was David Bowie’s Space Oddity. In his last days, his jazz buddies came into the hospital room with him so he could play one last time. The only thing he ever lived for was drumming.
I guess, when you put it all together, Space Oddity, bebop drumming, Damien Chazelle, Neil Armstrong you can understand why my subconscious woke me up with a message to remind me why I loved this movie so much. And why it’s such a drag to hear that other people don’t as much. In a week or so, the hive mind will be onto another movie, having crossed First Man off their “most promising for Oscar” list, as we all decide by committee whether a film is worth our time. Or not.
I will have to burn that final candle and watch it flicker into black and smoke in an empty glass case. That will have to be the real end. Thanks to First Man, and the dream I had about it, I know for sure that I will have to find a way to say goodbye to my dear sweet Pops. I hope his spaceship knows which way to go.
Sasha, I love reading your posts. For the last few years, I’ve been telling myself – you’re not going through this Oscar spin cycle again for another six months. Just enjoy the movies. But I come back to read your take on them and remind myself to not care what the hive mind thinks or need to have your favourites “validated”. I mean your first essay on First Man was beautiful which took awhile for you to write on a movie that took years of artistry and technical achievement to make so that the comments sections could be whittled down to quick hot takes – ok so is Chazelle in, out. It’s him vs. this one, etc. It’s a habit I’ve been doing for over 20 years myself so not easy to get out of it. But I’m kinda getting tired of it. Enjoy what I enjoy. No one knows what is going to be written on a card inside an envelope six months from now. It sucks the life out of the movies themselves. Thank you for celebrating the movies.
Not sure what to say about the survivability of cinema, but that change is inevitable, and already new delivery platforms are are making their critical and artistic marks, in the so called mainstream. For me, one of the most interesting filmmakers in the world is Nina Danino, and her films have occasionally entered my dreams in powerful ways. But who has even seen them?
One thing about First Man is that for our generation, the memory of the core event it depicts colours our response to the film in ways those who came later cannot share. The event was extraordinary, peculiar and particular. Once in a lifetime. Assassinations and deaths, public spectacle of grief, that’s ordinary, compared to something that was absolutely about hope and progress instead.
This is probably why the racist white supremacist asshats are “triggered” by the film – at the back of the event and the film was the belief in human progress. Nowadays, that is seen as dangerous by the pricks of incel and the trolls who manipulate them.
Beautiful, Sasha. Those moments where we realize why, personally, a film connects with us so much are powerful. And at heart, they’re a big part of the reason we watch movies. There’s a Northern Exposure episode where Ed is telling Joel about his tribe’s “healing stories,” the native oral traditions that shape the culture and provide wisdom and comfort for generations that follow. Joel laments that our culture doesn’t have these. But by the end of the episode, as he’s coincidentally introducing Ed to his favorite films, Ed says, “Oh, I understand now. Movies are your healing stories.” I’ve thought of them that way ever since.
My husband had an unexpectedly similar reaction to A Star is Born, which he only grudgingly went to go see. (He was firmly in the camp of “Why do we need yet another A Star is Born? Tell an original story, dammit.”) He enjoyed the entire film, but by the end he was outright sobbing. He knew the ending, of course, so was expecting it, but it hit him in a way the other versions hadn’t. His father had committed suicide when he was a tot, and his mother only went on one date after his death 50+ years ago, then announced she was done with that, that she never wanted to be kissed by anyone else, never wanted to share herself with anyone else that way. The final song, almost in her exact words, just slayed him. He broke down in the car again and we had to pause before he was safe to drive.
At their best, for whatever popular of personal reasons, movies MOVE us. It’s in the word itself. Beyond all the nonsense of this industry, the drama of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of all these shameless Oscar campaigns, the films you cover are the ones I see as having the best chance of connecting to us on a deep, often intimate level. That’s what “prestige pictures” are for me. The pedigree is only important to the extent it pulls together players who have been proven to make those connections with audiences. So remember in all its silliness and superficialness, the whose-the-most-popular-kid-in-the-school-today-ness of the Oscar race, what your business is really about, to me, is showcasing art where talent and vision combine to have something to say, something that deep inside, will resonate with some of us.
I’m really glad you had that connection with First Man. And yes, burn that candle when you are ready. Maybe under a big full moon.
Great stuff! (As was Sasha’s article.)
Lovely piece, Sasha.
I too loved First Man. It’s depiction of grief and of a man who holds his feelings in so tightly is brilliant, as is its depiction of space flight. My heart was grabbed from the first to the end within the intimate and the epic.
The filmmakers had a whale of a task to create empathy and take you inside the soul of a man so contained and undemonstrative, dealing with grief. Even harder than with, say, Manchester by the Sea (another film of grief and a tightly contained lead male), because Casey Affleck at least had moments of violent outburst and drama, which is mostly denied Ryan Gosling here. Nonetheless I felt deeply attuned to the Neil Armstrong character depicted in First Man, a testament to how beautiful Chazelle’s, Singer’s and Gosling’s work are here. I’ll say again I would give Gosling the Oscar for this (and Cooper is great in ASIB and I have yet to see Green Book and At Eternity’s Gate).
I too lost my father, two year’s ago, and am still processing. Perhaps that too contributes to how immediately this film took hold of me right from those first shots of Armstrong with his daughter. It was a beautiful, sad, exciting, awesome journey from there to the end.
never expected to be here but here i am
#teamfirstman
Sasha’s wonderfully personal and moving post about “First Man” made me think about why my favorite movie so far this year – “Leave no trace” – left such an indelible impression upon me.
I must confess that in recent years, or more accurately in the past few decades, I have cared deeply about very few films. I wondered to myself if I had just fallen out of love with the medium in favor of wonderfully rich and complex tv series such as “The Sopranos”, “Mad Men” and more recently, “Mindhunter”. But occasionally, just when I thought I was out, a great movie would pull me back in. And then there would usually be a gap of several years before another movie hit me in that deep way that had seemed common in my youth.
Early this year my mom died. It was not a surprise. She had been ill for a long time. I visited her for the last time about a month before she died. For the past twenty years, I’ve lived in the U.S. while she continued to live in England, but we stayed close. During this final trip, I interviewed her about her life on film, mostly for the sake of my children who are too young to really know her. Most of the questions I asked I already knew the answers to, but she genuinely surprised me with some of her responses. I felt like this process was therapeutic for both of us. She got to relive some of the highlights of her life, and I got to know her more deeply and also record her stories for my new family. When I said goodbye to her as I left for the airport, it didn’t seem to occur to me that this was a final goodbye. I hugged her, told her that I loved her, and waved goodbye.
It was about 8 months later that I saw “Leave no trace”. I knew little about it going in and while I found it consistently interesting throughout, it didn’t hit me on a deep, emotional level until the last reel. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know that the last scene (spoiler alert) shows the PTSD-stricken father saying goodbye, perhaps for the final time, to his teenage daughter as he heads off to live alone in the forests of the Pacific northwest. That heart-rending, near-silent goodbye scene was what brought home to me that I would never be able to speak to my mother again. I sobbed throughout the end credits, much to the surprise of those around me in the half-empty theater.
Being a fairly typical, stoical Brit, I don’t think that any old movie could have elicited this response from me, even though I was particularly vulnerable to such emotions this year. I like to think that it had to be something special, something subtle and well-crafted. I’ve seen “Leave no trace” a second time now and I can say unequivocally, it is a very special film. It creeps up on you and then, if you let it, it will overwhelm you.
It seems a little small somehow to talk about awards for this film, as if the cynicism that tends to go along with all such conversations would wipe away its magic. If forced to offer a prediction, I’d say that I’m 99.9% sure that “Leave no trace” will live up to its title and not appear in more than one or two Oscar categories,(adapted screenplay perhaps?) if it’s lucky. But then most of my (and I’m sure your) favorite movies do not win Oscars. That’s not why we go to the movies. We go to the movies for magic, and for me, this film had magic in spades.
Thanks for sharing your story, It’s very moving. I still haven’t seen Leave No Trace, but it’s one of my bestie’s favourites and I’m looking forward to seeing it.
I actually love this article and don’t mind one bit hearing your opinions of First Man again, Sasha. Having seen First Man today, although it didn’t IGNITE me in the way I hoped it would, I think it’s wonderful that this film has touched you and many others.
And I love this quote from you: “It is also a film about grief, specifically, letting go of the person you can’t let go of. It’s about getting to that place where you can at last give yourself permission to let go”.
I believe that this is the most important, moving component of a film that didn’t quite move me in the same way. But I do respect it quite a bit. Thanks again for your story and offering what the movie means to you.
I’m a sucker for dad movies and you kinda hit the nail on the head as to why I connected with this piece more sincerely and viscerally than with any other of Chazelle’s attempts. This is not nothing. Still very disappointed by many other aspects of the film. Interesting.
Now going back to Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City. Umberto whom the revolting Academy left out of the In Memoriam segment.
Sasha The way you felt about First Man is the way I felt about The Immigrant . Harvey Weinstein killed a great movie and no one cared . As for First Man I liked it but it made me want to watch The Right Stuff again . A movie that should never have lost to a soap opera like Terms of Endearment and Philip Kaufman wasn’t even nominated for screenplay and director . I am glad you loved Phantom Thread . It was far and away the best picture of last year .
I can see just why Sasha doesn’t much like Star ; it’s a bit populist and she is a bit of a movie snob (nothing wrong with that) and there’s nothing wrong with recognising and then promoting a fine work of Art , but she should add a ”PS” to her columns stating that as good as the movie is it’s unlikely to appeal to the average voter in the Academy ; then she can have the best of both worlds by critiquing a fine movie and accurately predicting the eventual BP winner ..I haven’t seen any of these movies except the trailers , but after reading the critics reviews i’m confident of picking the winner
Wow! This makes me want to see it a lot more than before. The film being great is more important than the film being Oscar winner. I appreciate things on their own. If a film I love is appreciated by others, especially the Academy, that’s a bonus but it won’t change the way I feel about it. For example, I still believe the best film last year was “The Florida Project” despite it being not well liked by the Academy and some people on here who didn’t like it.
Films are personal. I sometimes wonder I am or was attached to certain films. For example, my favourite animated film ever is “The Iron Giant”. I’ve always loved it since I first saw it. I don’t really know why I love it so much. It’s just the way the characters talk; it’s just so natural and real to me. I don’t know how to explain, but it’s a bit like language of “The Simpsons” golden era, which Brad Bird worked on. The language is so simple and so spot on.
Many years later, I realised the similarities between “The Iron Giant” and one of my favourite film ever and my absolute favourite Spielberg film, “ET: The Extra-terrestrial”. To me, it almost looks like a remake by how close they are. But why do I love them so? I don’t know, but I seem to connect with films of kids without parents, especially a father. Maybe I identify with Eliot and Hogarth too much, whatever, but I really finding them enchanting. ET is the most magical film I have seen and Spielberg is the chilid-ish director ever. I had a lot if imagination when I was young and you used to watch many of his films and used think he is the most imaginative director because he had childlike imagination. Also, I have never seen a kid have as much fun as Hogarth Hughes so the kid who voiced his character did a great job.
One of the scenes which kind of sum up what I mean is the scene where the Iron Giant jumps into the lake and creates a huge tsunami which sends Hog hug up in the trees and dean in the middle of the street. As the water receeds, a truck is passing and the truck tells Dean does he know he is the middle of the street. It’s very hard explain; just look their exchange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKJOugkhtUY
This clip of “The Simpsons” illustrates my point about the simple and yet so spot on and perfect language. A simple “yeah” by Homer says it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y5Ozq56Yc0
All I’ll add is that The Iron Giant was written by a bona fide fantastic poet, who excelled at making ordinary language resonant. Just read one of his Crow poems.
I’ve seen people say the fact that Star is a remake is its biggest fault but people are forgetting that all the previous incarnations have never won much. Sure if one of the previous Stars already won Best Pic and Best Actress, I’d say it does hurt the new one, but seeing how each one was nominated for 6-7 Oscars and only the first one won for Writing and the last one won for Song (the 50s one went 0-6 on Oscar wins), I think it poises this one to do what all three others couldn’t. It would be a great element to the Star Is Born story/saga. After 40 years since the last one, the new one actually wins Pic and Actress etc. Sounds like a fairytale to me.
“If you put all of your chips on A Star is Born, by contrast, you are getting high fives from the hive mind right about now: Twitter, check.”
Sasha’s Twitter must look very different than mine. Agreed that ASIB is doing well in terms of critics, Cinemascore, and box office. But it’s being pretty well shredded on Twitter (and among the general internet hive mind) from what I’m seeing.
Well it seems audiences haven’t really taken to First Man, so I think I’m pulling it from most of my predictions. Take these for what they are worth:
IMDB rating – 7.6 vs 8.4 for Star
RT audience rating – 63% vs 84% for Star
Opening Weekend BO – 16 mil vs 40 mil for Star
Cinemascore – B+ vs A for Star
And Star still has the critical edge too with a 90 % RT rating vs 88 for First Man and a 88 MC score vs 84 for First Man.
Meanwhile Star is about to cross the 100 million dollar mark after less than two weeks in release.
First Man has an IMDb rating of 7.6 so that’s your rationale to throw it under the bus and discount its Oscar chances?
*(IMDb scores of a few random titles)
7.4 – The Shape of Water
7.4 – Moonlight
7.4 – The Hurt Locker
Those 3 movies are politically Left , while First Man clearly isn’t ; the Hurt Locker also had the first female Director …First Man is simply not going to win BP ; its not in tune with the spirit of the times , and from what I’ve read it’s just not that good
That’s like your opinion, man! Don’t confuse your opinion with the facts. And what isn’t politically left about “First Man”? I mean, Sasha loves and they don’t come more political left than her. A lot of confusing about this is you’re just certain one film will win when we are only in October. I don’t think either FM or ASIB will win BP but it doesn’t mean that’s it’ll turn out. It’s too early and they play stronger than we think. A lot is still to happen.
lol well shit
A lot of us still like to base how we feel about movies on what we see when we see them, and not what we read other people say about them.
But if you want to rely on critics, a half dozen Best Picture winners from the past dozen years have metacritic scores lower than 88.
Crowd-pleaser rah-rah USA USA USA! populist blockbuster fave Argo has a metascore of 87 and astronomical IMDb rating of 7.7
But go ahead and hang all your calculations on ASIB’s overwhelming 2-point RT advantage if that’s your system.
And all those are years removed from release. All films on IMDB start out high upon release and then drop over time as more people see them. ASIB won’t stay at 8.4 either, but I doubt it will get down to 7.6 meanwhile First Man might end up at 7.2 in a years time. But by all means, put your chips on it. We will know soon enough who was right.
Think what First Man’s IMDb score would be without the thousands of 1 ratings it got from Trump’s zombie MAGAt brigade who shit their pants because the movie didn’t include a 20-minute flag fetish ceremony.
But you go ahead and stick numbers all over the movie screen if that helps you see better.
First Man is doing just fine. If you compare any movie with A Star is Born they’ll look bad (right now).
First Man was at a 6.8 or something before it even opened, so it’s rising at this point.
Critics are, more often than not, trapped in a bubble.
First Man is a true and great filmmaking achievement.
Its values stretch far above awards season’s rambling conversation, the stupid controversy (started by someone with a festival accreditation not some random MAGA hat in the middle of nowhere), and the first-weekend box-office rhetoric that kills excellent movies every other week. Original film-making is not supported enough nowadays. For sure it is not supported in America.
We are all in our own little bubble. Critics see lots of films and are less likely to be impress than the casual film goers. Whatever it is, everyone has their personal perspective and not everyone is going to connect to a film in the same.level.
First Man is superior to ASIB in every single way. I, too, am haunted by this film. The images, the editing, the use of music and sound and silence. This is true filmmaking. The older I get, the more I realize how little the Oscars mean. Looking back at the BP winners, so many are mediocre, forgettable films. Some classic films were never even nominated.
Yes its my kind of movie but like the WW2 movies such as Saving Private Ryan it’s now politically out of date and socially anachronistic ..most of the WW2 era Oscar voters have passed on to the Great movie house in the Sky , replaced by younger more liberal folks …I’m not remotely interested in Star but the average Oscar voter will be ..they’ll go for it, especially with the Pref Ballot
But I thought Hollywood was always liberal? Am my dreaming or what? What gibberish are talking about? You can say the latter generation is more liberal than those before but that’s always been the case. THL isn’t even ten years yet. “Argo” is what how on ago? If you see everything through the prism of politics then that’s what you’ll see. Try to get a different perspective than that’s too left or too right so it will win or it will lose. The defining element to BP winners and Oscars is that they are stories which have universal appeal at the core. And yes, that mean sometimes they did reward which were glorifying American and male heroism. But that’s a bad thing as long as the stories have universal appeal. Or rather what I mean is it still the same element that Hollywood has used for years. Down side is that they have overlooked films which went deep in the find the answers. They are still doing that today. I give you exhibit A: “The Florida Project”. Hollywood has improved a lot but they are still rejecting this kind of film.
This is a beautiful article Sasha. It definitely can be annoying when you walk out of a film transformed and suddenly realize that barely anyone is going to see it and the people who do don’t seem to get it. I was and still am baffled by your support of Phantom Thread last year. Then again I remember walking out of Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford thinking I had just seen one of the best films I had ever seen and then became deeply annoyed and almost hurt as it was largely dismissed.
Beautiful, haunting piece, Sasha. So sad about your Dad’s passing. And yes, that IS what’s happening with “First Man.” And Damien Chazelle for all his technical expertise has done it again. He’s left African-Americans out of his movie. And will AGAIN have to pay the price for it. Historically inaccurate though it may be…I thought this was Ryan Gosling’s Oscar, but no. It seems all Hwood and beyond have gone Gaga for Bradley Cooper…I just saw “At Eternity’s Gate” which is a mess. Dafoe will get nominated, perhaps, but the film is shot half out of focus, deliberately. Annette Innesdorf asked a question at the press conference about this. She thought she, too, was losing her sight. The Best Actor Winner has to be in a film that everybody loves. Sorry Willem. Sorry Ryan. Bradley’s got it. AT THIS MOMENT BEFORE HALLOWE”EN even…
But Bradley isn’t even all that great in ASIB…they’re just going Gaga for his abs, that smile and those eyes…
The way you felt about First Man was the way I felt about Steve Jobs. I remember being hit so hard by Jobs, and maybe it’s because I didn’t expect it to be about his relationship with his daughter. But regardless, I remember just sitting still in the darkness, crying as the credits rolled to Bob Dylan’s Shelter From the Storm after just seeing Fassbender as Jobs hand his daughter a copy of the first drawing she did on the computer when she was 5. Now 19, she didn’t even think her dad noticed her from the week before and yet here he is with a picture she made on the fly almost 15 years ago. I was that film’s biggest champion that year and of course it went on to win nothing and was barely nominated at that. Same thing happened with the film Into the Wild. That film too hit me like a ton of bricks and did nothing at the Oscars. Sometimes, things just don’t work out the way you think they should.
As much as I love the Oscars and awards, there is NOTHING like the experience of being affected and impacted indelibly by a piece of cinema. So many of my favourites over the years have been ignored by awards. Alan Parker’s Birdy, Gillian Armstrong’s ‘High Tide’, Kimberley Pierce’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, 2015’s ‘Holding The Man’ by Neil Armfield and last year’s Katell Quillivere’s ‘Heal The Living’. Profound impact.
This is why we go to the movies. If we’re lucky, we have an experience like yours. I believe Chazelle is a truly gifted filmmaker but I’ll always be wondering how he knows what he knows and that he knows we will gain so much by also knowing. I lost my mom several years ago but the scenario (minus the drumming) is nearly identical to your experience with your dad. The caring place called me at work to tell me I was needed…I arrived and was opening the door when I remembered I had left a copy of her favorite book in my car – Gone With The Wind (she was from the South and it never left her though she did leave it) and I was planning to read a bit each visit with her. So I rushed back to the parking lot, retrieved the book and arrived at the elevator heading up to her floor. When I arrived a nurse stopped me to tell me she had just passed a few minutes before I arrived. She also had hard core dementia but I still talked to her, visited her even though she no longer knew who I was. Thanks so much for sharing your story. It helped me quite a bit and I hope I love The First Man. I know I will, actually. It can’t miss. PS – I follow you on FB but also post at HE.