“Well, I didn’t know that!”

Author: Emma Lin

87-year-old “Charlotte”* is full of quick, cutting one-liners that will often catch us off guard during our service. “Shake it, but don’t break it,” she’ll muse while gently waving her egg shaker to a Fats Domino tune. Like many other members of our group at the Williams Adult Day Center (WADC), Charlotte’s short-term memory suffers greatly from her fairly advanced dementia diagnosis. In fact, it won’t be more than a few minutes into a song that we’re singing together before she slowly lowers her head as if deep in thought. A moment later she’ll raise it again, look at the egg shaker she was just using with a puzzled expression and say, “What am I supposed to do with this?” After someone directs her to shake the egg to the beat of the song, her response, without fail, will be, “Well, I didn’t know that!”

The staff at the WADC say that she is often anxious and full of questions, as is expected when one can only remember a few minutes at a time. “What a mess!”, she’ll exclaim when she doesn’t particularly like or recognize a song in our session. This kind of outburst isn’t unusual. When we first started our services at the WADC, we came to expect it very frequently. It was, and still is, a bit discouraging to hear it, but we’re beginning to hear her say it less and less. Over time, we’ve discovered that although she can’t remember the present moment very well, she remembers every word to Hank Williams’ “Hey Good Lookin’” and Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender”. As a former pianist, presumably in the church, she can rattle off most hymns and spirituals that we bring in by heart. Learning more about her taste in music has helped us curate the sessions into more moments of joy. Nowadays she’ll even look up after a song is finished and say, “Well, that’s great isn’t it?” Some staff members at the WADC have noticed that since we’ve started our program, Charlotte has been less anxious and asking fewer questions throughout the day. The effect our services seem to have had on her are both inspiring and wildly unexpected. Although I wasn’t completely sure what to expect before I started at the WADC, I wouldn’t have been able to guess just how powerful music can be on a memory-impaired mind. Every time I serve, I learn something new or am greeted with some sort of surprise that has me echoing Charlotte: “Well, I didn’t know that!”

*the name is changed to protect the individual’s identity