The Healing Power of Music

In her small room, my mom is wrapped as tightly as a burrito in her light summer blankets.

I know she likes this. She is swaddled.

I sit on the side of her, while Nick, a music therapist with Moments Hospice sings to her. He sings to us, really, because I make sure I am there to receive this sound with my mom.

"Music therapy is clinical and evidence-base use of music intervention," says Jennifer Hicks, a music therapist, who was part of today's Wellness Wednesday, a Minnesota Public Radio podcast, hosted by Angela Davis.

It connects Mom and I, over years and lifetimes.

The first time Nick played for my mom, I wasn't there and he didn’t know what my mom had once liked, so he played instrumental hymns, a safe guess for many her age. But mom isn't much of a hymn person, I told him. My childhood home was more Dylan, Beatles -- protest and folk rock.

My parents had moved to Berkeley , Calif. in the late 1950s, where they forsook their religious upbringing.

This was a bit sad for me as a kid, because I badly wanted to believe in something.

My mom once tole me that "we believe in people."

As an 8-year-old, this didn’t make much sense, especially because it didn’t seem that Mom really did believe in people. She was rather mistrustful and sometimes paranoid.

But my parents were humanists. Politics was a religion of sorts.

So I was set adrift to find my own spirituality, which I have done solidly. My own spiritual faith has brought me back to her, as promised, to sit with her in her dying days or perhaps weeks or months.

I do not know about death or dying.

I do not know for sure what's next beyond this life, though my Dad did pay me a visit and was so happy to see my mom, who in my dream was beaming happily too.

I also know that I promised my mom long ago that I would not ever let her suffer.

I said this aloud in the parking lot of a clothing store in my home-town of Berkeley, Calif. at least 15 years ago, before my dad died of Parkinson’s and before her dementia was diagnosed.

It was a promise that she didn't ask for, because I don't think she thought she entirely deserved it...Though she herself was not well-mothered and has had some struggles with her mental health throughout my life, she has loved me as best she could.

She brought me into this world and swaddled me as she is now.

She stumbled a bit over my declaration that I would not let her suffer, admitting that she had not been there for her mother. I told her then that I was sorry for her that she had not been there for her mother.

I somehow knew that my mother felt she was not worthy on some level of this commitment to be there for her — long before we could imagine how helpless she would become. But for me, it was and is about showing up in the ways that matter most: in death and birth.

My promise came from a place that has more than anything to do with the kind of daughter I want to be. This is who I want to be. This is how I show up.

I am here with her, making up what it means to not let her suffer each day that I have with her. She is not suffering. Music is paving her way, connecting her to long-ago, to me, and perhaps to where she is going. Maybe now, if she could talk, she would say, “I believe in music.”

Nick is singing Mason Jennings:

Be here now, no other place to be
Or just sit there dreaming of how life would be
If we were somewhere better
Somewhere far away from all all worries
Well, here we are

You are the love of my life

Be here now, no other place to be
All the doubts that linger, just set them free
And let good things happen
And let the future come into each moment
Like a rising sun…