Dear Audrey

Makes me cry.

It's... good.

I'm going to, uh...

find other things to do besides making films.

So I'm trying to get back into the piano.

This is what I try to put Audrey to sleep with at night.

But she didn't want to stand.

She doesn't want to sleep, she wants to stand by me.

And whistle as I play.

I am determined to do a lot more book-reading and piano-playing.

And caressing my wife.

And being caressed by her.

My love for Audrey intensified during her illness.

It's deeper and deeper as every day goes by.

And it comes from the realization

that now that she's going through Alzheimer's,

that I've become aware of what a great...

companion she was in everything I did.

Even though I was absent half the time,

travelling around the world shooting films.

I still consider her my... my lover.

My big romance.

We were very close from the very beginning.

It's 44 years now.

And, uh, we're getting closer as time goes by. Yeah?

Yeah.

: I was born on March the 8th,

1933:

International Women's Day.

My mother turned out to be quite an active pacifist feminist.

And she wanted to remind me where I came from.

I came from a feminist womb on International Women's Day.

It was in Montreal in the midst of the Depression,

in a huge snowstorm,

which made it very difficult to get to the hospital.

My father had to walk through fields of snow...

...to get to the hospital.

So he plowed his way across several fields to get to me.

Just to see his first new baby.

For the rest of my life I was always reminded that I was born in a stormy night.

And that therefore, I was headed for a stormy life.

Yeah, I've been through a lot of storms.

I've been through a lot of storms.

My life is mainly focused on... on Audrey...

...trying to make her life

as meaningful and creative as possible.

It's, uh, not-not...

it's not at all difficult, uh,

as long as I have time to be with her,

because I love her and she loves me, and...

we're enjoying each other's company.

It's cold outside.

I think that these, uh, strawberries are ready.

Mm-hmm.

I think she's passed the middle stage now of Alzheimer's.

She gradually lost her vocabulary.

She has a hard time finding the words

to say what she wants to say.

Has a hard time getting her pyjamas on

and getting herself into bed and getting up in the morning.

Yeah.

Yeah. Put that... put that here.

Put this here.

But it doesn't seem to bother her.

She retains her good spirits.

But she seems to be, uh, accepting her...

her fate.

Am I supposed to...

Her mother had Alzheimer's also,

so she's probably very conscious

of following her mother's example.

She comments a lot on clouds,

and trees... and flowers...

...funny ways in which people dress and walk on the street.

So she's very much still alive.

Thirteen, fourteen...

Fifteen.

This way, Aud. Come this way. Come this way.

Okay.

We're on land that was...

first settled by my ancestor Nicholas Austin in 1783.

The first European settler in the Eastern Townships.

A lot of great memories.

I've made two films here to record some of those memories.

The first one with my eight- year-old twin daughters.

That was my first experience of fatherhood.

One of the best things to ever happen to me.

I've been married three times in my life.

It's funny. My first two marriages both ended...

...in very dramatic ways, sad ways.

And yet, children came out of both marriages that...

...are great people and very close to me.

My first wife had just given birth to twin babies in 1959.

The trouble was that she was a fresh immigrant

from the big city of Helsinki trying to adjust to life

in a small rural town of New Brunswick.

Feeling totally alienated.

It was too much for her.

The kids were about a year old,

and, uh...

I came home one night and found Satu...

...lying in a flood

of her bl-blood in the bathroom...

...in the bathroom tub.

Oh.

It was a total surprise.

I didn't realize things were that hard for her.

She survived and became very creative in Toronto.

A very talented writer, very active in education.

Met another guy, a very good guy.

And I became their mother and their father

for the next two-and-a-half years.

That's why they're very, very special...

...people for me.

They were three and half when they moved

to live with their mother in Toronto.

So I wanted to make a film

that expressed my love for those children,

even though they were not living with me.

Eleven.

We have to share that.

: I know, I know, we'll have turns.

That there was a mother missing...

...and that I was missing the mother as well... as them.

The film was called The Wish.

Grandpa caught a fish!

I can't feed many people on that.

- ...that a shape of? - D.

D?

: So it was an attempt to express the hope

that those children would...

remain part of my cycle of life.

That was my wish in making that film.

I never found out what their wish was.

I've had five other children since then.

I love them all equally.

: Jacqueline lives in a wonderful home

for handicapped young people.

And she comes home one weekend every month.

Uh, during which time she spends most of her time on the computer

listening to her favourite rock'n'roll musicians.

-Bingo! - It's usually Michael Jackson,

but for some reason she says she hasn't gotten to him yet...

...today.

Oh, boy.

She's quite a wild creature,

but you should've seen her 20 years ago.

She was 10 times wilder than she is now.

Jacqueline was born in 1976.

We were happy to have a second child.

But it turned out that she had serious behaviour problems.

One of them was that she started disappearing from her room

at the age of two.

So we'd wake up in the morning,

realize she was no longer in her room.

We had to phone the police

and ask the police to help us find her.

She did so for the next 35 years or so,

disappearing all the time.

We'd always find her downtown.

She'd end up with other young people running away.

She'd get into trouble. You know,

she was always picked up by guys who submitted her to sex.

So we always had to have her...

checked out for sexual disease every time she was found.

Now, maybe I should get back to my music.

So she was quite a strain on the marriage, Audrey and me.

Very hard on our sex life too,

because, uh,

Jacqueline would open her door and disappear at night.

So I slept every night on the, uh,

floor outside her bedroom door.

Didn't sleep with Audrey for years.

Exactly! Exactly.

I behaved very badly with Jacqueline,

not knowing what was wrong.

Oh, sugar plum-a-num-ma-na.

I would raise my voice at her, I'd shout at her,

and sometimes slap her.

Oh, which I hate to admit.

You know, very ashamed of myself.

Audrey's stuck with me. My God,

I'm so... lucky to have had such a...

faithful partner.

It wasn't until she was in her early teens

where it became evident to our medical advisors

that she might have something called autism.

Well, we'd never heard of autism.

Audrey never knew what was wrong with her,

but she never failed

to make her feel that she was a loved child,

a much-loved child, whereas I did fail.

I've lived to regret

that short-sightedness on my part ever since.

Dad, I have an idea.

But I've tried more to make up for it.

We're now very close. We love each other very much.

We have a good time together.

Oh, God, I love this one.

"There's just no hiding a good man's heart."