Alive Inside

To pay for her nursing school my wife worked as a CNA in the alzheimer's unit of an assisted living facility. She worked with people whose former lives were shrouded in darkness. They were often angry, lashing out at her with biting words they never would have said in another context. They were often sad, dissolving into panicked tears randomly. Perhaps most often they were lonely. About one half of nursing home residents receive visitors; the rest pine away in front of daytime TV, watching The Price is Right, Matlock and Murder, She Wrote reruns while commercials for class-action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and used car dealerships play in an infinite loop.

One of the obsessions of my thought life is memory, specifically related to time and its effects. After reading the famous madeleine scene in Proust's Swann's Way I was reminded of a segment I had heard on NPR years ago about the power of music to awaken the memories of patients with Alzheimer's. A few seconds of Googling yielded me the story and the name of the documentary that was being profiled: Alive Inside, a profile of a man, Dan Cohen, who has made it his mission to put music into the ears of the forgotten elderly. 

While the movie traded in the scientific for the saccharine all too often, the effect was nonetheless moving and beautiful. There are no other words to describe the feeling of watching someone locked out of her memory come alive and start singing and dancing (relatively speaking) and smiling and telling stories. I am sure there were painful periods of therapy and buildup to the epiphanies catalogued in the film that were less camera-worthy, but the central point--that music has the power to unlock our degraded and obscured memories--is vital. 

I encourage you to watch the following clip which went viral and gave Cohen's work a higher profile:

Isn't that beautiful? That moment when this nearly unresponsive old man perks up and starts moaning and scatting and remembering who he once was. Music restored his humanity, his dignity. I cried, often profusely, through this film.  

A philosopher I really enjoy, Michael Polanyi, wrote about what he called "tacit knowledge," the stuff that we pick up on implicitly, that we can't be directly taught in the manner of the multiplication table or Latin declensions. It can be argued that most of the important things we "know" we know tacitly. So much of the formation of our children, of ourselves as moral beings, of citizens for a state, depends on tacit knowledge development.

Music shapes us without our being aware of how we are shaped. It teaches us how to feel and validates emotion. It teaches us how to move and how to respond in synch with another human. It is so powerful that it can overcome the degradation of the mind that comes with dementia. There is a reason that for centuries peoples of various faiths have sung their prayers. For in so doing songs, too, can shape our theology, our metaphysics. 

And what this film taps into is the importance of what we listen to and what we love. For if music has this great power--and it certainly does--it can also be wielded without care and shape us badly. I don't mean to sound more conservative on this topic than I actually am--I'm not listening to Christian music right now, after all, but Neutral Milk Hotel--but it should at least give us pause.

But what this film points to just as profoundly is our startling lack of reverence for our elders, for any conception of elderhood at all. The film argues that we privilege adulthood as the pinnacle of existence, an assertion that a generation that has turned the word "adult" into a verb, as in "I don't want to adult today", would surely contest. We don't privilege adulthood because we have a sad lack of adults. And, as my recent posts on Neal Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood note, we don't really have childhood either. We privilege ease and luxury and the notion of perpetual youth and a pain free dotage (which we steadfastly refuse to think about). 

Old people remind us that we'll get old; old people have pill dispensers for their daily intake and remind us of the eventual breakdown of our bodies; old people die and remind us that we will die; and, perhaps most pertinently, old people retain belief systems discredited by our enlightened peers and therefore have nothing to teach us. 

All of this is, to quote Donald Trump, "Sad." And what this film shows is that there is life after adulthood, there is richness to be mined from the last years of life. It shows us that we're wrong. It is a lesson I pray that I heed in my own life.