Music Heals Minds

My mother, Evelyn Gustafson Eggebroten, age 88

Music can help people connect to their memory when they have been unable to recognize family members or to remember who or where they are.

My mother discovered this when she volunteered at a nursing home in the 1970s in Boulder, Colorado.  She made audiotapes of favorite songs and took a boom box on her visits to work with patients.  Having been a public health nurse and professor of nursing at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, she continued to use her gifts in retirement.

Twenty years later, when she herself was suffering from Alzheimer's, I played for her CDs and VHS tapes of music from the Lawrence Welk Show and from church.  The music cheered her and connected her to old memories.

Has Alzheimer's or another form of dementia made it difficult for you to communicate with your mother, father, or other family member?

Listen to a presentation on Music Heals Minds founded by Nandani Sinha in 2019 to help stimulate cognitive function and brain activity in seniors and others facing Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and traumatic brain injury.

Nandani is a mezzo-soprano at Westwood Presbyterian Church, the church I used to attend before the Covid-19 pandemic began.  She performs regularly with the LA Opera, other southern California opera companies, and the LA Philharmonic.  Westwood Pres is a few blocks from UCLA and has had a long history of connection to the music department of the university.  

Nandani's father suffered from vascular dementia in his last twenty years, and she learned that she was able to reach him through music.

On Jan. 15, Music Heals Minds officially launched a world-wide ministry using an online Zoom platform. 

 The CDC lists Alzheimer's disease and other dementias as the sixth leading cause of cause of death and disease among persons 65 years and older.  

"Alzheimer's robs people of their place in time," explains Nandani.  "Through music, they are able to find their place in time again."

Professional musicians lead the therapy sessions and use therapeutic techniques such as mirroring, eye contact, and prompting both verbally and with gestures to engage the participants.  Gradually they encourage memory-care persons to join in the singing, clapping, dancing, and conversation. 

Music Heals Minds is based in Pasadena, California, and has served communities in southern California for two years prior to launching this more widely accessible platform.

If you know someone who needs this help, visit the Facebook page of Music Heals Minds or follow MHM on Instagram.  You can also contact Music Heals Minds through Twitter @healsminds.  

David Sedaris in the Reminiscence Neighborhood

 

My daughter Ellen with her grandmother in 2005

Would you like to laugh, for a change?

Read this little story by David Sedaris on The New Yorker website about his last visit to the assisted-living place in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his 98-year-old father was living.

It's subtitled with a quote from the essay: “Who are you?” I want to ask the gentle gnome in front of me. “And what have you done with Lou Sedaris?”

It's about memory loss and the Trump years and the police officer killed by a car ramming a barricade on Capitol Hill, April 2, 2021.

In a wacky conversation, his father asserts, “One of the things I like about us as a family is that we laugh,” he says. “Always! As far back as I can remember. It’s what we’re known for!”

Yes, both David and his sister Amy publish and read aloud hilarious personal stories, often about family life.  But that's probably not what his father was referring to.

Here are my favorite lines, toward the end of the piece:

"For our natures, I have just recently learned from my father, can change. Or maybe they’re simply revealed, and the dear, cheerful man I saw that afternoon at Springmoor was there all along, smothered in layers of rage and impatience that burned away as he blazed into the homestretch."

My mother, too, mellowed as she lived her last eight or nine years.  That hard edge she needed to get through family crises and her years as a working mother just melted away.  

I used to call it fierce determination, her pursuit of an immediate goal, whether driving from our door a Fuller Brush salesman or making sure my father took the civil service exam and regained steady employment.

But part of dementia can be an occasional flash of rage.

One evening I arrived in the Reminiscence Neighborhood about 5 pm, as usual, and began chatting with the caregivers, who were serving meals to forty people sitting at several tables.  

"How are things going today?" I asked.  Every day was different, and anything could have happened.

"We're all good," smiled Marnie Reid, the gentle Filipina leading the evening shift of caregivers.  

I greeted my mother and sat down at a table to talk with her, Marnie, and the other residents and caregivers before pushing Mom in her wheelchair to her room.  

An hour later I returned to the dining area to get a glass of ice water.  Marnie was still cleaning up the kitchen and gave me the real scoop.

"Your mom got upset at the table tonight while they were waiting for dinner," she told me. "She smashed her glass of ice water down on the table."

"Oh no!" I gasped.  "She smashed the glass?  I'm so sorry.  And you cleaned it all up?  Why didn't you tell me?"  I couldn't help giggling as I imagined the scene.

"You don't need to worry about that," laughed Marnie, one of the kindest people I know.  

A visit of a few hours doesn't begin to capture the complexity of life on a floor that is indeed a neighborhood but one where reminiscence is scarce.

End-of-Life Choices

Should someone who has Alzheimer's--especially the early-onset kind--have the right to end his or her life before it gets to the point of being placed in a Memory Care floor with assistance for daily life tasks such as bathing and dressing or even eating?

The prospect of wearing Depends and needing personal assistance is humiliating.

How can we respond when a friend or loved one expresses a wish to die before this point?  

No one wants a long period of wasting away.  On the other hand, no one wants to die in a car accident or plane crash.  Ordinarily we don't get a lot of choice in how or when our life ends.

Nevertheless, I want to affirm someone who expresses the wish to avoid long-term care, possibly when unable to recognize friends and family.  It's important to share our feelings with friends and family and to cry out to God.

In a post on December 6, 2014, I rather flippantly said "Why bother to make such wishes?  The bottom line is that we don't get to choose when to clock out... unless we oppose both law and custom."

I'd like to say now that I respect the decision to end life through physician-assisted suicide in a case of terminal illness, even Alzheimer's.

There needs to be a way to express this wish on paper, legally, before one gets to the point where one's decisions are impaired by dementia and one is seen as not competent to make this choice.

On the other hand, treatments to halt and even reverse impairment with Alzheimer's are already being tested.  See the February 11, 2016, issue of Time Magazine with this cover story by Alice Park:

http://time.com/4217067/alzheimers-from-a-new-angle/

I have a friend who has said he would shoot himself first if he were on the verge of being put on an Alzheimer's care.  Is it a blessing that he has since had two strokes and one ablation surgery for atrial fibrillation?  Despite having one parent who died of Alzheimer's, it looks as if he is not headed for a Memory Care floor--unless by stroke.  

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Diane Steelsmith

 

 

9:05 AM

 

 EEWC Friends

To: aeggebroten@msn.com

Hi Anne.

Your Dec 6, 2014 post ends by saying:

As for Ekekiel Emanuel's essay about preferring to die at 75 yrs. rather than waste away later, why bother to make such wishes?   
The bottom line is that we don't get to choose when to clock out... unless we oppose both law and custom. 

 

 

As a Biblical Feminists do we not both oppose law (in the past) and custom (always)???

So why do you say "why bother" re:  Ekekiel's preference to die at 75 and let custom and law prevail in his case?

This is too personal for me.  It is entirely possible that I will not know you at 75. Or maybe I will have the good fortune re: my cognitive impairment and it will level off at some point before it gets too bad.