Alive Inside: Grief, Music and Memory
Last week I drove to the other side of town determined to catch something of this year’s International Film Festival. Scanning the programme earlier that morning I’d already decided to watch the mid-morning picture, regardless of theme. I’ve yet to see a film festival movie I didn’t enjoy - living in small town New Zealand makes these windows on the world a coveted commodity.
I went to see Alive Inside, a movie about the power of music for people suffering from dementia. Because Martin Seligman, the professor leading my Masters programme at Penn had told us in our final lecture that “man is music”, and having a personal connection with dementia, I knew the film would interest me. I had no idea, however, how much it would resonate with my grieving for Abi, Ella and Sally.
I have always loved music; my childhood was full of it. Not oboes, drums or clarinets, but Elton John, Neil Diamond, Genesis, Dire Straits and the Stones. Later my husband expanded that playlist to include Talking Heads, the Stone Roses, EMF, the Prodigy, and a whole load of dance tracks, all of which are integrated with our memories, my life, my soul.
Alive Inside is a remarkable documentary about the power of music to re-ignite memories and spark joy in people who have lost both. It shows the power of music to transport us back in time, unlocking memories and opening up communication channels with loved ones lost to dementia. It shows how music changes us physically - prompting residents of nursing homes that have hardly moved or responded in years to physically open up - and emotionally, enabling us to reconnect. Music is elemental to the human spirit: we are hard wired for music and neuroscience shows how it enables us to code memories and that musical practice actually grows the brain.
Watching the movie, on a Saturday morning far from home, sitting on my own, allowed me to process some of my recent experience. I wept silent tears and laughed out loud. I recalled that, in the first few days after arriving home from identifying Abi’s body in the hospital, our house was without music for the first time since we moved in 12 years ago with her as a baby. I remembered on day three or four after her death observing, “We haven’t played any music… I just don’t know what I want to listen to”. I also remember being baffled by this at the time: never before had we gone four days without music; never before did we not know what we wanted to listen to - it’s usually a fight to select the next song in our house. I guess that numbness accompanies the shock of sudden death.
Once we’d brought Abi home (it’s traditional to bring the dead home in New Zealand giving the family, friends and community the time and place to mourn), music returned to our lives. Paddy and Ed sang the songs they loved for Abi. I sat in her room each night, playing her favourites to her: One Direction, Ed Sheeran, Adele, and Glee. Trevor and one of the local musicians, Nolan, met daily to work out who was going to be singing and playing at her funeral and, under my brother Andrew’s supervision, the stereo came back on.
In the weeks and months since I have found great solace in music. On those sunny winter days that Christchurch does so well, I have flung open the sliding doors, cranked up the stereo and belted Titanium out, over the sea to the mountains beyond. It’s her song, the one we played as we carried her body in for her funeral.
I felt better. I have cried and smiled, sung to Abi in the car, sung out loud while running in the hills with my headphones, we’ve danced together and I’ve matched my mood with music day in day out. Old songs, new songs, the songs Abi sung weekly at the local Mexican diner, old power ballads that have given me strength in the past, haunting piano mixes I discovered on Spotify, and “Abi’s favourites” playlist on my phone. Kodaline, Of Monsters and Men, Pink Floyd, Mazzy Star, Fleetwood Mac and Imagine Dragons saw me through the bleakest winter. Melancholy and uplifting music, fit for the time.
Music has the power to shift our darkest mood, to bring back memories, to create and solidify new ones, and the capacity to heal. Four days in my life without it was enough for me.