Singing with my grandmother

On Tuesday my dad and I did quite the road trip. We started up in Uppsala, about an hour's drive north of Stockholm. Then we went down to see my grandmother, about three hours' south of Stockholm, and then to see my friend in a performance about one hour south of my grandmother. And then all the way back again.

This post is going to be about the visiting my grandmother part. She's living in a town/city called Jönköping, and she's done so all my life. When I was a kid, she and my grandfather lived in a little house that I used to love. We celebrated many Christmases there, and coming there always meant being splurged. It always smelled of my grandmother's rolls, or meat balls. And in the morning my grandfather would always have oat meal with raisins, and coffee with some sort of sweetener that wasn't sugar. My sister and I would play with my aunts' old dolls, with the big chairs in the living room. This was also the house where I encountered my favorite movie of all times "The Sound of Music" for the first time. My grandparents' house was also always filled with music. My grandmother loved when we sang or played for her, and every summer, she and I would go down to the swings by there cottage to swing and sing for hours.

After my grandfather passed, my grandmother moved away from the house to an apartment, and here's when she started getting old. Now she's had to move again since she's no longer capable of maintaining an every day life. The aging has accelerated accompanied with a very pronounced Altzheimer's disease. She no longer recognizes any of us and her speech is incomprehensible. The words come out correctly, she doesn't stutter or hesitate. But the sentences just don't make sense. She's still in perfect shape physically as opposed to many of the other people on her floor, but her head just isn't there.

While my dad and I were driving down to see her, he filled me in on some updates on her current health status. I hadn't been down there for a long time, since I can't go myself, and my dad's and my schedule never co-operate. He told me she's refused to eat and drink for a while, and that she might have to be hospitalized because of this. No wonder I was nervous as we entered the elderly home.

When we walked through the doors of her floor, she stood up. I went over to her, hugged her and made sure I said "Hi Grandma". She looked at me, so pleased, but I don't think she'd any clue of who I was. But I guess she felt that this was somebody who cared for her. Then she looked at my dad, whose picture is on her night stand. She evidently recognized him but it came out as "Oh, my brother!".

The three of us walked in to her room. She guided me around and we looked at all the pictures. I pointed at some and said "That's me" and she looked and me and said something that didn't make sense back. But I think I knew what she meant, if that's possible. Then we tricked her into eating ice-cream and drinking lemonade. I guess her refusal to eat only had to do with hating to eat alone. Her favorite nurses had been on vacation, and my grandmother's always had a great integrity and a bit of a hard time letting other people in.

So there we sat, my dad, my grandmother and I. When we'd finished our ice-cream cones, my dad tuned grandma's guitar and started to sing and play an old song. I joined in, and here's the reason why I'm telling you all this, so did my grandmother. The little lady beside me, who hadn't said one thing that made sense in an hour, started singing. And it turns out she still knows the lyrics and the melodies of all the songs she and I sung on the swings when I was only a couple years old. All the songs my dad sung in church when he was little. She knows them better than we do. How is this possible?

It just really shows what I've suspected for a long long time. That music, is much more powerful than we think. I hope I'll have time to come down and sing with her again, just as we did on the swings every summer. For me, this was really a precious day.