What I Wish I'd Known: Tamara Jenkins

Tamara Jenkins wrote and directed The Savages, a film about two adult siblings who must forge a relationship with their estranged father when they discover that he's suffering from dementia -- and doesn't have much longer to live. In the film, the Savage siblings put their father in a nursing home and are with him when he dies.

In her own life, says Jenkins -- whose father also suffered from dementia before his death in a nursing home -- it didn't happen quite like that: "There was a period of time when my father was sick when I wasn't around a lot. So in real life, when my father died, I wasn't there.

"When people are in a nursing home, they always go back and forth to the hospital for various things. I wish it had been clearer to me that it wasn't just, 'Oh yeah, he's going back to the hospital.' That makes me sad. I wasn't there at the end. There wasn't any forewarning. He died at a time when none of us were in the town where his nursing home was."

Read the full interview with Tamara Jenkins.