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![]() ![]() ![]() The only (half) smile we ever got after the stroke was when my dad serenaded her with “Moon River” while we were at the hospital. When she suffered a stroke, we surrounded her with music as much as possible knowing it ministered to her soul even if she didn’t seem to be “awake” and intellectually aware of it. Though Mom couldn’t recall how to do some of the most basic daily functions like how to use a toothbrush or go to the bathroom, she was able to play the piano-some by heart and some reading sheet music-for several months while in the later stage of the disease. Grief with Alzheimer’s comes before your loved one dies, so when you find moments of grace and joy you cherish them and try to make as many as you can. So many things her brain wouldn’t recall, including many normal physical functions that many people don’t think about, and yet somehow the music stayed with her the longest. Music provided us some of the best moments in her last year battling Alzheimer’s disease. My mom and music have gone together since my very first memories of her. My hope is that at the very least you will someday feel this melancholy fondness (if you don't already) and as the song goes, until then you'll, "… have to muddle through somehow." but catch me on a wrong day and they still have the potential to grip my heart and bring me to tears. Except, years later the tears are a mix of happy and sad emotion they are happy with a twist. In the 8 years since my mother's death, these songs have recovered many of their positive qualities. Actually, a lot of people get it. You aren't alone. I see you looking sullen at the office holiday party because 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree' is playing. I see you crying in the church because you've just turned to this morning's hymns and realized it's ' O Little Town of Bethlehem'. I see you paralyzed in the middle of your shopping because ' O Holy Night' has begun playing over the stereo. and sadly I don't have anything constructive to offer about this other than to say, I understand. As if death hasn't stolen enough from you already, it greedily takes your ability to enjoy a song you've loved for years. When you're grieving, small yet tender reminders like I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas and Hanukkah Oh Hanukkah can shock you and rub you where you're already raw. Where we're used to being filled up with the love and warmth of the holidays, we're now filled with a well of sadness that bubbles over and erupts into tears at the most unexpected and inconvenient of times. Sometimes the only way I can conceptualize the holidays in a year or two after the death of a loved one is to think of it like a film negative: Everything is opposite. A few notes of Judy Garland's Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas or Bing Crosby's Silent Night and I was done a grief side-effect that hardly seemed fair because these were the songs closest to my heart. I had a hard time with Christmas songs in the year or two after my mother died. Fast forward a year and I'm singing with my family in a dim room around a brightly lit Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, each of us wondering how the absence of someone could be felt so fully. ‘ Silent night, holy night.,' and I’m choking my way through the song's familiar words at our church candlelight service the year we found out my mother was sick. I’m unsure of the words or why my aunts and uncles are sad, but I know the moment is important. ‘There’s a song in the air! There’s a star in the sky!’ and I’m surrounded by my mother and her teary-eyed siblings as they sing their deceased mother’s favorite Christmas song. My mother, the director of the children's choir, is sitting in front of the singers mouthing the words as a sea of charmed parents sit behind her smiling lovingly. ‘Away in a manger no crib for a bed.,’ and I’m listening to the timid and slightly off-pitch crooning of a child’s Christmas pageant. My overly concerned and self-aware family is cautious to never do anything that might be considered showy or obnoxious, except where a harmony line is involved. My family is spread out over two pews, singing the hymn's harmonies just a bit too loud. ‘The first Noel the angels did say.,’ and I’m standing in our church one December morning.
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