CAREGIVER • SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2019 • 3
PLAY ME A TUNE
Music can be an effective tool to help caregivers connect with loved ones
Heather DiCicco is a Pittsburgh-based
music therapist and teacher who, countless
times, has witnessed the ways that dementia
and Alzheimer’s patients connect with
music, even when their connections to
loved ones and the world around them are
failing.
The first time, she said, was when she was
working at a nursing home in high school.
“There was one woman who never really
came out of her room,” DiCicco said. “She
was very isolated. I was working in the
activities department and she never came to
any of the activities, but I did some rounds
with my guitar, going to residents’ rooms
and singing songs with them.
“I found out she had played the accordion
and knew all these different songs
and all of a sudden, she was laughing and
singing and we were conversing. There was
a connection she wasn’t getting anywhere
else.”
Another man at the same home, she said,
was in the later stages of dementia and
didn’t talk a whole lot. One day she went
into his roomwith a little keyboard. The
man used to be a church musician and all
of a sudden, she said, his hands were moving
across the keyboard at lightning speed
playing songs from memory that he used to
play in church.
“I didn’t know if he could even still see,”
she said. “He died not long after, but playing
music was like riding a bike for him.”
And on a more personal note, when
DiCicco’s own grandmother got dementia
and began to slip away, DiCicco would sing
songs to her and watch her agitation and
paranoia decrease. After her grandmother
had a stroke, DiCicco said, she couldn’t
speak but she could still sing.
Research into the persistence of musical
MYSTERYOFMUSIC
STOCK.ADOBE.COM
BY KAREN PRICE
FOR TRIB TOTAL MEDIA