She talked about it constantly. At her daughter’s playdates, her mom-to-mom group and dinners out with one of her best friends.
Rebecca Carpenter was so consumed with her father’s deteriorating health, eventual death and how the post-mortem discovery that he had the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) affected his life that her friend, Sara Dee, said she had to make a film about it.
“One night she said to me, ‘Hey, let’s have dinner just the two of us,’ ” said Carpenter, a Harvard-educated director who had left Hollywood years earlier to become a teacher.