A Life

A Life is the story of Eunice, a feisty Jamaican woman, who refuses to go gently into her twilight years. Eunice is 74 years old and recuperating from a heart attack—two factors that cause her daughter Pat, a media celebrity, to close down her mother's house and transfer her to a nursing home. Now Pat wants to take her mother to Connecticut to live with her, and Eunice will have none of it. Shifting between her longing for the past and the reality of the present, Eunice protects her dignity and asserts her "right to choose" with humor and poignancy. However, the harsh realities of old age and dependency, most clearly personified by the cool, young doctor who attends her, are forces to be reckoned with. And not even her 45-year-old friendship with Berta, a stubborn Southern woman, and her new friendship with a boy who needs her, can ultimately protect Eunice from these forces.