Music as therapy — singing through tears

It’s Sunday and I arrive in the middle of hymn sing. Mom and her roommate are dozing on the couch in the lobby as the songs swell around them, the recorded music supplemented by a choir of earnest voices.

The diminutive lady with the horn-rimmed glasses who had vigorously belted out Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ at last week’s singalong is more subdued today, her voice soft and plaintive during Why Me Lord?

Indeed, there is an air of sadness to this gathering, the musical selections steeped in nostalgia. It feels more like group therapy than joyful noise.

But then the residents here are grieving. They have lost two of their number in recent weeks, both wonderful women whose company I enjoyed on many previous visits, and today’s music session has been dedicated to their memories.

I touch Mom’s arm and her eyes flutter awake. Immediately I see that something is off. She does not greet me with her usual radiant smile. Her brown eyes are lifeless, devoid of light; her mouth downturned.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

No answer.

“It takes so long for them to get anything done around here,” she mutters to herself.

Hearing the singing all around her, she starts The Alphabet Song but trails off halfway through, struggling to find the words.

“What’s your name?” she asks, but can’t hear me because of the ambient noise.

I write my name is big letters using the Notes app on my phone and show it to her. She shrugs. “I can’t read that,” she says.

I take her hand and she holds mine for a moment before letting it drop. I try to engage her interest with the stuffed bunny we brought her on Mother’s Day, which is on her lap. We call him Reg the Rabbit after my late dad, whose first name seems lost to her now. She refers to him only as her former teacher, Mr. Frampton. We hope that if we say his name often enough it might act like a key to the locked door of recall.

This new loss is difficult to bear. With dad now hovering only at the periphery of her memory, she — and we — are deprived of her loving recollections of him after their 62-year marriage. It is another painful development along Alzheimer’s cruel path.

In the months immediately following his death she would ask us repeatedly if we had gotten him a headstone, which we had, and we took her to visit his grave. But those memories have disappeared. If she knows he is gone, it doesn’t seem to register. When I showed her a photo of him recently, there was no flicker of recognition.

“I think I only saw him once,” she says.

“What do you remember about him?” I say, anxious for any crumb of acknowledgment of the wonderful life they had together.

“He was a good man,” she says.

The lady in the horn-rimmed glasses gestures to a page in the songbook, snapping me back into the present.

“This is a sad one,” she says.

“Yes,” I say, even though I am unfamiliar with the song.

The room fills with sound as Kitty Wells launches into How Far is Heaven:

How far is Heaven? When can I go?

To see my daddy, he’s there, I know

How far is Heaven? Let’s go tonight

I want my daddy to hold me tight

A couple of the residents are moved to tears; one man is sobbing and wiping his eyes. The music co-ordinator distributes Kleenex. It’s enough to break your heart.

The bespectacled lady next to me is crying and I touch her on the shoulder and ask if she’s all right. She nods yes through her tears.

I look around the room and think about how much loss these people must have already borne — not just the recent passing of their friends, but spouses, siblings, parents, even children. A lifetime of loss must be a heavy load to bear.

I think of my mother and her own father, lost at sea 70 years ago. Like the dad in Kitty Wells’ sad song, “He was called so suddenly and could not say goodbye.”

Mom cried for years after that, but today she seems almost to have been called away herself; unreachable.

The music has changed now, with songbook pages turned to The Stanley Brothers’ Angel Band, a banjo prettily picking out the twangy melody:

My latest sun is sinking fast

My race is nearly run

My strongest trials now are past

My triumph has begun

I hope the singing and the tears are cathartic. I hope that for the residents, coming together to give voice to the hurt and loss eases their burden for a little while.

I hope Mom’s strongest trials are now past, that today is just an anomaly, and that she will be there to greet me when I come again.

Pam Frampton lives in St. John’s.