When the documentary filmmaker Banker White began turning his camera on his family in 2009, his mother had undertaken a project of great personal importance: She wanted to compile material for a book about her own mother, a Massachusetts painter named Marian Williams Steele, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2001.
“She was an amazing artist,” Pam White says on camera, showing her son the many paintings stashed in a storage locker in Dedham. “We thought it would be nice to keep her alive.”
Probably a similar impulse kept Mr. White shooting for three years, at first helping his mother with her project but then recording her waning abilities and the family’s responses. At 61, Mrs. White had been found to have early-onset Alzheimer’s, though she initially wanted to keep that secret and referred only to her “memory problems.”
When public television’s “POV” series airs this family saga, “The Genius of Marian,” on Monday, viewers will see dementia take its inexorable toll on a vibrant woman, an actress turned social worker, and on her husband, children and friends.
Mrs. White puts her head in her hands when she can no longer concentrate on her project. Her son and his producer, co-director and wife, Anna Fitch, follow along as Mrs. White becomes unable to figure out how to put on a jacket and can’t tell her neurologist what year it is.
In one segment, she resists paid help with the familiar don’t-want-a-stranger-in-my-house objection. “Daddy and I do really well, and I don’t want anything to mess with it,” she says. But her careworn husband, Ed White –- confessing to his son that “I sometimes feel like I’m caged” –- later breaks into sobs.
But Mrs. White can also still joke and laugh and sing, even as daily life grows more frustrating and difficult.
“There’s so much fear,” Banker White told me in an interview. “I’ve had people say, ‘If I’m like that, shoot me in the head.’ ” Through his work, he hopes, “they can see what it actually looks like inside the house — the effects on my dad but also periods of lightness and humor.”
A lot of adult children have produced dementia memoirs between book covers. Mr. White and Ms. Fitch have put their memoir (produced with the family’s cooperation, of course, including Mrs. White’s) on film and video.
Their ability to weave past and present together reflects the way people with dementia live simultaneously in the now and the then: That child being lifted over the waves on a beach might be Mrs. White herself in an old home movie with her own mother, it might be one of her children decades later, or it might be one of her grandchildren.
“I’ve experienced moments of incredible sadness over the past five years, but moments of incredible connection, too,” Mr. White said. “You grieve the loss of your mother while you are holding her hand, and then that might be interrupted by some of the silliness of dementia, and you just laugh.”
He has also created a website supported by the National Endowment for the Arts called The Genius of Caring, with portraits of caregivers, starting with his father, now 70, and an educational curriculum for students. In a community gallery, others can post their own stories, videos and photographs.
Pam White is 67 now. She and her husband, still her primary caregiver, sold the big house and moved into a more manageable condo in Brookline, Mass., where she attends a wonderful adult day program three days a week. Hired caregivers assist at home.
Mrs. White’s vision and her physical functions have declined further and “she seems aloof unless you engage her,” her son said. “But when you do, she is communicative and she still has that smile.”
I can understand why people burdened by caregiving might decline to spend their rare recreational hours watching other people face similar trials. Maybe ancient Andy Griffith episodes on TV Land will feel more restorative.
But I found “The Genius of Marian” truthful, cleareyed and not overdramatic, yet very moving.
“It’s about telling your mom that you love her,” Mr. White says, off camera, when Pam asks why he is making this movie. Yes, exactly.