SURRENDER | A State of Being looks directly at the end of life with grace and openness. It follows an elder as he explores what it means to surrender to a chronic disease through the lens of a contemplative practice and a curious mind. The film doesn’t shy away from the realities of aging or even death but rather considers it an opportunity for deepening our own awareness of living life well and finding love and belonging amidst letting go.

“We can recover a faith in grief that recognizes that grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude. In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world. It is an act of soul activisim.”

Francis Weller

“Grief dares us to love once more.”

-Terry Tempest Williams

“Is sorrow the true wild? And if so it is - and if we join them - your wild and mine - what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, Im saying. Im saying: What if that is joy?”

Ross Gay, Book of Delights

the making of surrender film…

Nine years ago I made my first documentary, Present Moment, with my Reel Witness co-founder, Noah Dasssel. We decided to take a break from our client-based advocacy film work and lean into a more creative project. Over two weekends in 2015, we made Present Moment, which documented my father Gary’s experience living with Parkinson’s. That love letter to Gary turned out to have a bigger impact than we could have imagined and was received with an appreciation for showing a story of resilience while living with a chronic disease like Parkinson’s.

Fast forward nine years and a lot has changed. More documentaries were made with that same joy but also many more conversations with Gary about his life navigating Parkinson’s. In 2023, fifteen years into his diagnosis, Gary approached me about telling this later part of his story, where loss and disability had started to creep in. I gently said I wasn’t able to make another film because honestly, it felt too close and too painful, about where we now were. I had been in the river of anticipatory grief through the years of his disease, and seeing the many ways it had changed him was not always easy for me. But as I sat longer with his inquiry, I also sat with the awareness that the opportunity to tell one’s story as well as be witnessed in your own telling, can often be a powerful act of healing. So after six months of pondering Gary’s request, I knew the time was now. I also realized I wanted this to be a family creation. I leaned into the two people in my life I trust the most and asked for their help. My husband Bill stepped in to shoot, and with his 35 years of experience in the film industry, it felt like an extraordinary opportunity to have his exquisite eye on the lens. In addition to Bill, our son Talin, with his own successful history of making and editing films, offered to weave the story together as our editor.

Sitting here now with the many family hands that created this story feels like the offering we all long for; a time to be with a beloved and lean in to listen to what sits in their heart, and our own. What are they holding as they explore the last part of their life? How does the reality of dying live inside all those in a family? What does surrender really mean?

All of these questions and all of this love for family, lie at the heart of this story. And in the course of making this film, I began my own deep dive into understanding how dying, loss and anticipatory grief are sitting in the center. How do I grapple with letting go of my beloved father? What am I learning about watching a parent contemplate their life experiences? What can I learn about being more alive while I also learn about death? I dove even more deeply into this inquiry while making the film and trained as an End of Life Death Doula. I began to allow this curiosity of death and dying to be an opportunity to sit closely with the loss that will inevitably come, for all of us. I began to allow the edges of that grief to sit next to my own inner joy. I turned towards it with curiosity and was met with an abundance of love, and an honesty that surprised and delighted me. I invite you to share this journey with us.

RESOURCES

Parkinsons

• Northwest Parkinsons Foundation

• Michael J Fox Foundation

Living with Loss & Grief | Death & Dying

• Healing Circles Langley

• Mettle Health

• Living Dying Project

Books | Podcasts

• The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller

• A Year to Live by Stephen Levine

• Walking Each Other Home; Conversations on Loving & Dying by Ram Dass & Mirabai Bush

• The Caregivers Tao Te Ching by William & Nancy Martin

• Ten Thousand Sorrows, Ten Thousand Joys by Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle

• All There Is with Anderson Cooper Podcast

AUDIO JOURNAL

I made a series of audio recordings to explore why I decided to make this film.

“The Medicine of Surrender

comes with no spoonful of sugar.
No promises, no back up plans,
no returns, no insurance.
The medicine of surrender
never tastes the way you expect,
never tastes the same next time,
seldom has the hoped for effect.
And if there were some part of you
that thought it might not be affected,
that thought it might hold back,
that part is most likely the first part
to be flooded with the relentless
truth of what is. Oh surrender.
The surest medicine that exists.
There are infinite side effects.
Wonder. Freedom. Rawness.
It’s like opening the dictionary
to the word heaven. Or obliteration.
And knowing it’s the same thing.
It’s like playing spin the bottle with life,
and you French kiss whatever you get.
It’s the only remedy that can help you
be whole. The only real medicine there is.”

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer