Singing into the empty spaces

Of all that dementia has stolen, I grieve especially the loss of music that once so uplifted my mother. In the silence of her vanishing memories I hope that somewhere her favorite songs are playing.

My mother and father heard Frank Sinatra perform live seven times. On the night they met in Greenwich Village in 1959 they went to hear Nina Simone perform live. Listening to jazz at the Village Vanguard was a favorite date night the years they lived in New York City. Mom’s extensive and varied CD collection—Frank, Tony Bennett, James Taylor, Jim Croce, Carly Simon, Broadway musicals—was a balm to her spirit when she was widowed at 73. Music was the rhythm of her days. Now, at 87, when dementia has taken so much from her, it seems the coda of this musical love affair is frozen in silence.

Her CD player sits in her room at the memory care facility gathering dust. When I am with her, I play her favorites—Frank, Tony—but her smiles are brief when I ask her if she recognizes the song or the singer or I share memories of her dancing to this song with my father. I suspect she wants to please me when she nods her head in assent.

“What is your favorite song, Mom?” I ask.

She is silent. She stares into the distance. After a couple of minutes, she shakes her head. “I don’t remember.”

I try to help her remember. A few days ago on our way to enjoy a pancake breakfast at a local restaurant, I select Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” on my Spotify playlist on the car speakers. I turn to look at her. She has a mild smile on her face. Is it conjuring a memory? I don’t know. But the song is making tears come to my eyes.

If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day
'Til eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you

This week’s essay is inspired by

Sarah Fay

and

Substack Writers at Work

Friday Office Party thread this week, “Find Readers For Your Next Post,” where Sarah came up with yet another brilliant idea for building community: list a topic you want to read about and then choose to write about one of the suggested topics from someone else, knowing there is already someone out there who wants to read it. For me, that was Victoria Chin who writes the generous and helpful

Carer Mentor: Empathy & Inspiration

where she asked for writers to share “the most uplifting memory that’s stimulated by a song.”

Why? Victoria writes:

“Dementia patients may forget words; they don't forget how something made them feel. Caregivers need uplifting stories.EVERYONE needs to be lifted by meaningful moments.”

I have so many uplifting memories of songs in my life, just as I know has been true for my mother. But as her caregiver in the advanced stages of dementia, I see the absence of the joy that music once gave her. At the very moment that she and I both need to be uplifted, it is difficult to reclaim that joy. I even feel guilty at times when music makes me feel happy and carefree when it can no longer do that for her.

I know that music can elicit emotions and memories from a person's past, connecting a caregiver and a loved one with dementia. Her memory care facility has music playing for residents all day in the living room. Research suggests that that musical training delays cognitive decline and promotes brain plasticity in the elderly brain. Yet I am also recognizing that at some point in the long goodbye of dementia, even music is no longer a connector. At a recent musical entertainment at her facility, Mom kept nodding off to the lively music and belly dancing performance. When I gently nudged her awake again, she would look at the performers and smile before disappearing again to that country she now inhabits—the one where I have no passport to gain entry.

I comfort myself by choosing music for her and for me each week on my Substack in the Dementia: Fifi’s Songs playlist: music that speaks to memories and loss and grief and most of all, to love.

My mother gave me the gift of music (her all-time favorite song is Kermit’s “The Rainbow Connection”). She and my father prized their record collection, their regular outings to watch live musical theatre and their favorite artists perform. I passed on that love of music to my daughters, giving them their first taste of music as toddlers, encouraging them to dance around their rooms, to get lost in the stories and the entire range of human emotion that music can evoke.

And because I know my mother would want me to, I reminded myself this past week about how much music can uplift me. I took myself out on a solo Galentine’s Day on February 15 for the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra’s 75th anniversary gala concert featuring the world-renowned pianist Garrick Ohlsson play the incredibly difficult, utterly entrancing Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 30 by Sergei Rachmaninoff. (Listen to Ohlsson describe “youthful excitement and forgetting to breathe” when he first learned to play it).

This piano concerto takes the listener on a wild ride, much as it does the pianist who has to keep up with it. The shifts from quiet and restless to ethereal and romantic to fierce and poignant had me literally on the edge of my seat and captured everything I find uplifting about the journey a wonderful piece of classical music can take us on.

It had been years since I had treated myself to a classical music performance, and I won’t wait that long again. And so I thank my daughter Marielle and her boyfriend Esteban, an accomplished pianist, who tipped me off to the concert. Esteban—you are not wrong when you compare the “Rach 3” to reading a great Russian novel.

I remained uplifted even in my solitude, as I sat between two couples who at times held hands and who could share together in the experience. As readers know, I am trying to get comfortable with this new solitude in my life. In her Friday Thread, “The Praxis of Solitude”

Anne Helen Petersen

at

Culture Study

invited readers to share “how they’ve changed or deepened their relationship with hanging out with themselves: this reciprocal relationship between the comfort of being alone and the ability to show up for others.” I wrote in the comments: “I want to ease into the solitude, revel in it, find closure in it, be grateful for the grace and time to figure out what comes next for me. I want to learn to sit in the silence of my solitude and truly understand it and my complicated feelings around it.”

And so, these many months post-divorce, last Thursday evening at the concert I surprised myself by not feeling lonely. On this solo date, I felt uplifted. This is what music can do for us—whether we are listening to a great pianist spin magic from his fingers or listening to a song somewhere in the recesses of our mind.

The music plays on.

Questions for the comments: What song(s) do you find most uplifting? And if you are a caregiver for someone with dementia, what songs break through the silence of their world?

Three Songs for 3D

Divorce

“Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30 in D Minor,” Rachmaninoff

With its pathos and tenderness and its tides of fierce feeling there’s a divorce story somewhere in this concerto.

Dementia

“Fly Me To The Moon,” Frank Sinatra

A favorite performance of this song for my mother was her granddaughter Marielle singing it for her in 2011, in the days following the death of my father when we were all gathered at a local restaurant, celebrating his memory and my mother’s birthday.

Destiny

“Happy,” Pharrell Williams

For uplifting, there’s nothing better than this now classic tune from Pharrell.