Stone Phillips Documentary Chronicles Care For His Parents

Stone Phillips, the Parkway West graduate and former NBC News anchor, is used to turning the cameras on other subjects. But his latest project hitting television screens this week focuses attention on an issue facing his own family.

"Moving With Grace," a documentary airing Tuesday night on KETC and re-airing Sunday, tells the story of his own parents, and the decision to move them out of St. Louis and to North Carolina, where they can be better cared for by Phillips' sister Minta.

In this accompanying preview posted on YouTube, Phillips says the move is prompted by his father's hospitalization and his mother's dementia. Grace Phillips is a retired Parkway School district teacher.

The documentary includes a visit to St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, where Vic and Grace Phillips were founding members and Stone served as an acolyte when he was a youngster. 

He talked about the project with The St. Louis Beacon:

"It was a very difficult decision to leave the home they built. They picked the lot in 1965 and built the home in Claymont in Ballwin and lived there from 1965 until 2007. It was difficult.

My father, who is a retired chemical engineer from Monsanto, is the practical, forward-looking thinker in that couple. I think he appreciated that a move needed to be made.

We were concerned about my dad going up and down the stairs to the basement, where the washer and dryer were. We were concerned about the couple of steps going from the house to the garage. We were in the process of age-proofing the home, thinking about where we were going to relocate the washer and dryer upstairs, all of those very practical kind of considerations that we all have when our parents are aging and we’re thinking about their health and safety, so it was difficult.

My mom did not want to leave. She resisted it for a long time. That process was about starting the discussions very early, starting to think about it, talk about it, starting to visit some of the retirement communities in the St. Louis area. And with time, we eventually were able to do it."

Read the entire interview

"Moving With Grace" airs Tuesday, May 7th at 7 p.m. and Sunday, May 12th (Mother's Day), at 6 p.m on KETC.