Client Story:
How Music Therapy Helped Mary
Stay Connected Through Alzheimer’s
Mary died from Alzheimer’s at Agrace Hospice Care a year and a half ago. She had lived at home after her diagnosis for nearly three years and then spent the next three on a memory care unit before spending her last six months in this comforting place surrounded by care.
Mary had been a middle school teacher for 34 years, a world traveler, and a singer and songwriter. The songs and music she wrote and performed three decades earlier were now the stuff of her memory, retrievable from the past to serve her in the present. That was my hope; that music might help preserve her past in her present?
Overall, my hope for her new life was to keep her connected to the things that had connected her to her life before Alzheimer’s. Family, friends, her history and life stories. And music, I hoped, could be a path into and out of her emotions. So, I asked if there was a Dr. Music to prescribe a Bach cantata or one of Mary’s own songs. Medicine for the soul in the present.
I found Ingrid at Middleton Music Therapy Services, a professional, board-certified music therapist (and other healing arts and sciences) who immediately “found” Mary and a way into her heart. Together they made music twice a week in our living room. They sang. They played piano together, and Mary herself sang some of her favorites. They played on the piano, they talked, they sang, they laughed, and they were in the present. Mary smiled! And I smiled. (And wanted to cry).
Mary moved into memory care and then into Agrace for her last months. Still twice a week Ingrid came, Mary smiled, and music was in the room. The oxygen there changed whenever Ingrid visited. And Mary was richer for it. And so was I. And as were the nurses who happened by and often lingered to hear living music
As Mary faded from us Ingrid kept their music coming. Sometimes Mary tapped along or sang fragments of her own songs. Sometimes she would beat her drum slowly. Was she making meaning out of her confused mind by following the rhythm? Did her inner harmony grow stronger with the music? Was her world a happier place? I don’t know. But I do know that she remembered!