I need to tread carefully here, because I am about to share someone else’s story without their permission- and I know that I have a small handful Facebook friends who will know exactly who I am talking about. I will not use her name and will obscure some details in the story.
This is the story of how memories can vanish- seemingly without a trace- and seemingly without any means of restoring or retrieving them. And not just memories of an isolated moment or incident- but something experienced over the course of more than twenty years. In this case, I am talking about someone to whom I’ve given voice lessons almost every week for the last twenty-plus years.
So what were the first signs that something was amiss with her mind and memory? I’m sure in her day to day life there were all kinds of things, but in church choir rehearsal it was her confusion over what song we were rehearsing at any given moment- and her deteriorating ability just to find the sheet music for a given song in her choir folder- which often would have only had maybe five different songs. I realize now that what was probably going wrong there was her ability to hear the title of a piece and connect that with reading that title on a piece sheet music and recognizing it. (I’ve been told that one hallmark of most dementia is an inability to do even the simplest of tasks in sequence.) Thank goodness that she could rely on the patient kindness of other sopranos in the section, who would quietly help her figure out what piece we were rehearsing at any point, or what part of the song we were next rehearsing. Coupled with that difficulty was her escalating trouble with being able to read the words to our songs- even when those words should have been familiar (like the 23rd Psalm.) For that kind of difficulty, no one could really help her – but I know that she had to go home and practice on her own because on most Sunday mornings she would be able to deliver the lyrics without too much trouble. One thing she would do, especially with pieces composed by me, was that she would take her copy home and painstakingly highlight (in yellow) the words- which seemed to help her read them more easily.
People who saw her outside of church would mention their concerns to me that she was growing seriously confused and forgetful about all kinds of different things- but I could only speak from what I saw in her voice lessons, where she seems to have summoned up her highest level of mental acuity. A couple of different people who know something about dementia have said that persons with dementia will be incredibly grateful for – and in a sense dependent on – those arenas where they can still feel good about themselves and their abilities. And for this woman, voice lessons was just such an arena where she could still be successful and where at least a lot of her abilities were largely untouched by whatever forces were making so many other parts of her life more and more difficult.
Of course, I began to see signs of her decline even in our lessons. She began struggling to come up with all sorts of commonplace nouns like “cassette tape” or “boom box” – and at some point, she began referring to Bobbi and Ellie as our “cats.” (She may have gotten confused about what kind of animal they were, but she almost always remembered to bring them a little baggie filled with Beggin’ Strips, one of their favorite treats.) She also started referring to Kathy as my mother rather than my wife- and a good friend of hers from choir who would pick her up every Tuesday was no longer referred to by name but rather as “that girl.” In some ways most alarming was how difficult it would be for her to process some of the written words in her sheet music – including simple three and four-letter words – and at some point it became clear to me that she was singing with almost no comprehension whatsoever of what the words of her songs meant.
But there were strange and unexpected blessings tied up in this sad story. For instance, she used to badger me (in a nice way) to find her new songs to sing – but at some point last year all songs became new songs to her. I would pull out something that I knew full well she had sung many many times before just in our twenty-some years of lessons. . . and I’m sure many times before that. . . (like “O Rest in the Lord” from Mendelssohn’s Elijah or “He Shall Feed His Flock” from Handel’s Messiah) and she would have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of having ever sung or seen or heard the song before. But she would sing through it almost perfectly, as though we’d been working on it for the last three lessons. So one part of her mind remembered the song extremely well (she was never good at reading music, so it’s not that she was sight reading) – even as the rest of her mind didn’t remember ever knowing the song before. I suppose that’s one more sad thing about this story, and yet I had to chuckle over this new scenario in which everything I handed her to sing was like another newly uncovered treasure which she was encountering for the very first time.
Eventually, the decline became more serious and as much as I was inclined to accentuate the positive, which is what tended to see in her lessons, even I became alarmed. There was the night last May when we came home about midnight to find a car we didn’t recognize sitting in our driveway- and fearing a burglar might be in the house, we called the police. You can guess where this is going: it was my student, sitting in her car. She had shown up at our door at 10:00 p.m. for the voice lesson which was actually scheduled for 10:00 the next morning. But she thought it was 10 in the morning, despite it being pitch black outside, and I don’t know if anything I or the police said was ever able to clarify for her just what kind of a mistake she had inadvertently made. As she drove off with the police following close behind to make sure she got there safe and sound, I knew we had turned a corner and in a very bad way. But the next morning she showed up at 10, mumbling an apology for the previous night without demonstrating what had been wrong – and for awhile she seemed to be a bit better. But then came the evening of the Fourth of July, when she began phoning me to schedule a voice lesson and left message after message at ten to fifteen minute intervals, failing to remember the phone call she had just made. And when she finally called her friend later that night, in great exasperation, “that girl” tried to explain that it was the Fourth of July and I probably just wasn’t at home. “The Fourth of July? What’s that?” She had no idea. These episodes of more serious mental disarray all occurred in the evening, for whatever reason- and in each case, she would seem to rebound with greater clarity.
Then in late December came the dreaded phone call that I knew was all but inevitable- a tearful phone call saying that she couldn’t remember how to get my house and begging me to explain the directions to her. I started to do that, only to discover that she had no idea what the mall was – or Burger King – nor any other landmarks – and no sense of street names, either. Knowing she was frantic to have a lesson that day because she was singing for church the next day, I said I would drive to her house and lead her from there to church to have the lesson there. Halfway there, my cell phone rang- and it was her, calling to say that she would meet me at the credit union. “No no, we’re having the lesson at church.” And once we were safely at church having the lesson, she could not summon the clarity that she had managed to find for every lesson before that. Most alarming was that at several points in the lesson, she would take out a song which we had just sung – and want to sing it, with absolutely no recollection of having just done so. As we completed the lesson, I felt fairly certain that this was the last lesson we were ever going to have. And as we walked out of church, she said a couple of things that made it very clear that she had no memories of Holy Communion or of having ever been a member of the choir there and singing under my direction. All gone.
And then came her hospitalization- and the moment when I walked into her room to be greeted with a smile and a question: “who are you?”
As I walked out of the dementia unit, I explained to the nurses that I had been her voice teacher for the last twenty years or so. And they said “Oh, she loves to sing! She sings to us every day!” I asked what sort of songs. “Oh, nothing with words- just a happy melody.” And it made me realize that over the last year she had begun singing more and more to herself exactly that way- as she walked up our sidewalk, as she waited in my studio for me to begin the lesson, and as she walked back to her car. No words, and no recognizable tune- just simple singing that I suspect was soothing to her. This is such a sad story on so many levels. But I can’t help but smile at the notion that this woman is facing down the bewilderment of dementia the best way she knows how- by singing. And my fervent wish is that she will be able to keep on singing for as long as she lives.