Memories of my Texas mother, Mama Jean, singing, dancing, and grooving to music are some of my first and last fond memories of her. When I was a little boy I used to watch her sew. I’d gaze up at her from the floor as she cut, threaded and then drove her Singer with her gold slipper on the pedal while singing and humming to the music of Burt Bacharach albums—“The Look of Love,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Walk on By”—that wafted through the gold threads of the Hi-Fi speaker. When I was twelve we spent a road trip in her black Cadillac singing along to the original Broadway cast album of Evita. “Don’t you just love that music!” she’d say swaying to “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” as her high heel floor boarded the gas pedal. And she and Dad danced to their song, “More,” at weddings, in the living room, and at the fortieth wedding anniversary I threw for them, three years before Lewy body dementia hijacked her.
Two months after she went haywire and had to be hospitalized and then put in a nursing home, she slipped into partial shutdown. Gone were the wild hallucinations, convictions that her worst nightmares were true, and the acute agitation. Good riddance. However, also gone was any thread of normal conversation. This new faze meant her eyes were closed most of the time. When they were open, she’d respond with sparks of childlike giddiness, a pure joy that recalled the way I saw her involuntarily react to music my whole life.
That inspired me to create a playlist, “Mama Jean’s Music” that was a mix of her favorite pop tunes from the sixties and seventies, show tunes, and opera. I didn’t know that I was practicing music therapy; that music therapy is a thing. I was merely desperate to find any avenue to connect with the person who had once been my mother.
According to the American Music Therapy Association, “Music Therapy is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program.” When I embarked upon my music therapy experiment I certainly wasn’t accredited professionally, but I had a lifetime of hands-on experience.
My amateur music therapy sessions worked. The music brought her back in flashes. After feeding her as she sat in a wheelchair with her eyes closed, I placed the portable speaker on her nightstand, spun the dial on my iPod to “Mama Jean’s Music” playlist and hit play.
Mama Jean started to come alive.
As “More,” her and Dad’s song, played, she didn’t open her eyes, but she began to sway and hum along. Then she pointed in the direction of the speaker and said, “Listen to that beat. I’m telling you, that’s good music.” Puccini’s La Bohème: “Mimi’s aria has to be my favorite.”
When “High Flying Adored” from Evita began to play she sat up straight and her eyes flipped open like a Baby Alive doll. The LBD demon left her body and she was Mama Jean talking about the time she saw Evita on Broadway with Dad when she lived in New York while she was training to be a stockbroker. When her heart throb Hugh Jackman started singing “I Go to Rio” from The Boy from Oz she almost danced out of her wheel chair. During each visit the music would not only awaken her dormant self, but take her to place of joy.
Here’s are the basics of how music therapy works, according to the American Music Therapy Association: “After assessing the strengths and needs of each client, the qualified music therapist provides the indicated treatment including creating, singing, moving to, and/or listening to music. . . Music therapy also provides avenues for communication that can be helpful to those who find it difficult to express themselves in words. Research in music therapy supports its effectiveness in many areas such as: overall physical rehabilitation and facilitating movement, increasing people’s motivation to become engaged in their treatment, providing emotional support for clients and their families, and providing an outlet for expression of feelings.”
Some of the songs on the playlist were songs I associated growing up with her, such as the Burt Bacharach songs she used to play on the Hi-Fi when she still sewed, and Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,” which always seemed to be playing on the radio of her giant white Mercury Marquis as we ran errands during my early childhood. Some of the songs like “My Best Girl” from the musical Mame were just for me, but then I quickly discovered that my music therapy experiment was as palliative for this untrained professional, as it was for the patient.
Her communication and movement skills improved briefly during our music moments. Unfortunately, all of this didn’t last for long. Within two months her eyes remained closed, her hands were balled in arthritic fists, and the music fell on deaf ears. However, had that music playlist worked only one time, it would have been successful in my opinion.
One of the last times that the music worked was on a drive to see her neurologist. My iPod was hooked up to her Cadillac’s stereo and “Mama Jean’s Music” was playing. She slept most of the way, but just as we were approaching the doctor’s office the song “Jean” (from the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) filled the car.
Jean, Jean, you’re young and alive
Come out of your half-dreamed dream…
She suddenly awoke and brightened as if a spotlight shone on her. “Jean!” She pointed to herself. “That’s me!”
Music therapy may not have slowed the fatal progression of LBD, but it gave us that moment. That may have been the last time she knew who she was, the last time she was Mama Jean.
Contributor: Jamie Brickhouse (Board Member and writer whose mother had LBD)
Jamie Brickhouse is the author of Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother, and has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and Salon. Mama Jean died from complications due to Lewy Body Dementia December 14, 2009.
