Nobody likes memory care facilities.
They are, by their very nature, depressing places. There’s a certain smell to them. Many residents are either asleep or muttering nonsensical words. Tempers flare—in residents and their distraught, stressed family members. They feel, in many ways, like a harbinger of death.
I know because we recently moved Dad into one.
We knew it was coming.
His doctor declared him “non-decisional” and strongly urged us to make the move.
Dad wasn’t always making it to the toilet in time.
Mom wasn’t sleeping well at night, scared dad would wander out in the middle of the night and get lost.
And still, we waited, wondering,
Was it really time?
Don't Dad's good days outnumber the bad?
Isn't Dad more coherent than the people in memory care places?
Have we failed him?
Are we letting him down?
Then Mom broke her leg and the decision was taken out of our hands. With her at our house, Dad had to go somewhere.
So we filled out the most heartbreaking paperwork—a list of five things we wanted his new caregivers to know about him that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to articulate himself—and made arrangements to move him in.
By all the regular standards, it’s a “nice” place. It’s clean. The caregivers are well-trained. There are activities for residents to do. It’s well-rated and reviewed.
And yet, it’s awful.
Dad’s convinced they’re trying to kill him and spends his days asking people for bus money and plotting his escape.
And yet, he’s also showered (which was becoming an increasingly awful battle at home) and well-fed.
After the first few weeks of running ourselves into the ground trying to get there on a daily basis to check to make sure he was okay, we’ve settled into a more sustainable routine. Mom goes to see him during the week with her caregiver. We bring the girls to see him on the weekends—it was too much for them to go more than that and we want their memories of Papa to be as good as possible, which is tricky because conversations with Dad often feel fraught. He doesn’t track well any longer. And because he doesn’t understand where he is or why he’s there, conversations often end with him yelling at us to take him home or me in tears.
So, the last few times we’ve gone, we’ve played the piano.
Shortly after moving Dad in, one of the caregivers identified me as “the daughter who plays piano” and asked when I’d play the beautiful baby grand in their front lobby, the one that more coherent residents are quick to tell you, “never gets played.”
I asked Doug if he had said something to the caregivers about my playing.
He had not.
Amidst all the changes and his fading memory, it’s something Dad still knows: I play the piano.
I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. It’s always been the thing about me Dad’s been proudest of. For years, I think he harbored dreams that I’d be a concert pianist.
Of course, that never came to fruition. But I still play—mostly for my own sanity and relaxation, but occasionally at church.
Dad has rarely come to church to hear me preach but up until recently, he’d show up if I was playing piano.
So, a few weeks ago, when we visited him, we brought him to the lobby and Kendall and Hope played their recital songs. A crowd quickly gathered. After they played their songs several times, they were done. So I dug in the piano bench hoping to unearth a hymnal. Instead, we found a book of songs from the 40s, 50s, and 60s…not songs we knew but that didn’t matter.
I played through several of them, noting that occasionally the growing crowd of residents would lock in, humming or singing along to a tune they recognized.
Last week, we came more prepared.
Kendall played her recital song. Then Hope sat down and played every song she’s learned over the course of the last year. (Piano is becoming her happy place, too.) When she tired, I sat down with a hymnal and began playing through a variety of hymns, repeating the ones that the residents knew. Through it all, Dad sat there, smiling proudly, relaxed and content.
Eventually, I played Shall We Gather At the River. When we got to the chorus, a resident belted out,
Yes, we'll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
I looped back to the verse and she dropped out, except for the occasional word she remembered. But the next time I got to the chorus, she got out of her seat and stood singing.
The third time I played the refrain, she started dancing…twirling around the great room in a way that seemed impossible on her frail legs.
When I got back to the verse, she just kept twirling, as she did when we got to the chorus for the fourth and final time and she belted out,
Yes, we'll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river;
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
For a few minutes, this woman danced and sang, as though she was fully cognizant, as though maybe just maybe, she was dancing with Jesus himself.
In the week since this, I’ve found myself thinking about this moment often.
Yes, memory care units are still depressing. But if they’re harbingers of death, maybe they’re also places of liminality, where occasionally heaven breaks in and we can see what it will be like when one day, all the saints are indeed gathered at the river that flows from the throne of God.