Originally Posted By: Don Gaynor
By far the most rewarding and gratifying experience that I've had with music and the elderly was with Patricia (last name withheld), an 80 year old former concert pianist. She was catatonic and could only blink her eyes voluntarily. My first priority was to teach her eye blink communications. Something the SLP (Speech Language Pathologist) hadn't even thought of. Now, after years trapped in a broken body. Her entire being came alert and very much alive when she realized that she could communicate, however primitively, with staff and I.

I have Pandora on my Dynavox and she now could tell me what she wanted to her. I know that her final months were happier with music. The reward? I had made a wonderful lady's last days more pleasant. Her Dr. said that my music may have prolonged Pat's life.


Way to go, Don! One of the reasons I took the Jazz Improv class was to help my ear hear standard song chord structure/melody development with more sensitivity and to get my hands to follow suit. I can't say that I've made great strides, but I can detect more classic harmony development now just a little bit better. End result, I hope, is that I can do a better job showing up with a fake book of classic songs at elder care facilities and do a decent rendition of these songs. (I have a few volumes of those Readers Digest songbooks that I got from my deceased grandmother's stash - she had Alzheimer's the last couple years of her life and singing hymns with her was one of the only things to pull out her true personality). I tried playing these at home, and some of the chordal movement was so foreign to my hands and brain, I didn't feel comfortable at all in going in to 'be of service'. I also didn't fulfill a vow I made here about this time last year, that I would try to get to an elder care facility in 2013 to play some of these songs. I'm not going to beat myself up about it, but I hope to do this in 2014. Music therapy probably has much more behind it than we can ever imagine. Music moves us in inexplicable ways, why should that stop completely when some of our neurological function gets jumbled? A movie to get on Netflix that I can recommend which is partially related to this topic is: Young@Heart - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1047007/ Not related to Alzheimer's but absolutely related to music as a reason for living.

Last edited by rockstar_not; 01/02/14 04:18 PM.
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