Dementia doesn’t take everything

I remember where I was when I got the news. It was spring of 2017; my sister Lucy and I were having lunch at the Tomato Pie Café in Lititz, Pennsylvania when she put down her fork and said, “Loretta, I have some sad news to tell you. Glenn has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.” I was devastated to hear this news about my brother-in-law. My relationship with him went back a long way – to 50 years ago when he first started dating my sister. Since then, Glenn had been a loving husband and father as well as a successful businessman in his community.

Over the next eight years after that announcement, Glenn gradually lost motor functions and his speech became incoherent. For the last two and a half years of his life, he was bedridden.

Together with the help of caregivers, my sister took care of him at home. When my husband and I visited from Quebec twice a year, we would try to help out as best we could. 

Over to the piano

On one occasion, Lucy told me she would like to get Glenn out of his bed using a special lift, place him in a wheelchair and bring him into the living room. I would play the piano and we could have a little sing-along. Glenn had always loved music. When he was dating Lucy they would often go to hear Gospel Quartets. Sometimes after they returned to our home from an evening out, he would sit down at the piano and we would sing pop songs from the 60’s together.  

So now, after we got Glenn comfortably seated in the living room, I began to play hymns that I thought he might recognize from his early childhood in the Mennonite Church. He responded enthusiastically, with his own version of the melody and words. After our sing-along, I said to my husband, “This is amazing! The effect on him is so profound. If I had to choose a career again, I think it would be music therapy!”

Language and memory

Music therapists often work alongside other medical professionals who try to help people suffering from memory-related illnesses. Samuel Minevich is a music therapist at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and has worked with Alzheimer patients there. Often the people he works with are waiting until a convalescent or more long-term care facility opens up. 

“It’s the small changes that count,” he says. For example, he might encounter a patient who is confused, distressed or wandering the hallways. He arrives and starts playing his guitar. Sometimes the patient will respond and sing along, or maybe just sit quietly for a few minutes and listen. These small changes are improvements over the confusion the patient had been experiencing.

“The difference between playing music as performance and being a music therapist is that it’s totally client-centred,” says Minevich during a past episode of CIUSSS West-Central Montreal’s Your Health Podcast. He says music therapists often learn to play a wide range of styles in many different languages. Beyond English and French, he can sing in Yiddish, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish. At a large hospital in a multicultural city, sometimes he sings in six different languages all in one day. With a chuckle, he admits he can sing more languages than he can speak.  

How it works

For those who want to learn more about how music impacts memory, I found a user-friendly webpage called “Music and the Brain.” It presents the work of two professors, neuroscientist Kiminobu Sugaya and world-renowned violinist Ayako Yonetani, a husband-and-wife team teaching at the University of Central Florida. 

Using an interactive brain tool, users can click on parts of the brain and read a brief description of how it functions. For example, the frontal lobe, which Sugaya and Yonetani describe as the most important part of the brain to being human, can be enhanced by listening to music. Wernicke’s area, in the posterior superior temporal lobe, comprehends written and spoken language. This is where our brains analyze and enjoy music. The cerebellum, an organ that looks like a folded accordion at the base of your brain, coordinates movement and stores physical memory. It is due to this part of the brain, says Sugaya, that, “if an Alzheimer patient learned the piano when he was young, he could still play the piano, even when he can no longer recognize his wife.”

According to Sugaya and Yonetani, music helps by “reducing stress, pain and symptoms of depression as well as improving cognitive and motor skills, spatial-temporal learning and neurogenesis, which is the brain’s ability to produce neurons.” As I perused this website, I marvelled at the wonder and intricacies of the brain. The words of David in Psalm 139:14 came back to me – “I am fearfully and wonderfully made!”

My brother-in-law is not the only person I know suffering from late-stage dementia: the wife of a couple who were like my second parents when I first arrived in Canada developed Alzheimer’s and, after she could no longer hold conversations, she still sang wherever she went.