Marco Schreyl can remember a time when he was almost crushed by worries about his mother, but had no choice but to keep on going and to smile at the camera anyway.
By the summer of 2015, it was clear: Marco’s mother had Chorea Huntington’s disease, a hereditary brain disorder that causes dementia and, inevitably, death. Even before the diagnosis, it was apparent that something was wrong, that, for some time already, his mother had no longer been the person he loved and who had always played such a big role in his life. Over the course of the following years, the attempt to maintain that closeness, to be there for his mother, would push him to his limits.
Little by little, the disease makes taking care of and communicating with his mother impossible – and, like his father before him, Marco is forced to accept that all he can do is lose. That he needs to protect himself in an uncompromising and brutal way: by withdrawing. When his mother dies in 2021, Marco begins to grapple with the years of her illness. And with the years before that.
