When my grandma was a child, she wanted to be a star. She would hide behind the kitchen door when her parents had friends over and do her best opera singer impression, hoping to be discovered. In her last years, when she was living with dementia, singing to her was one of the few guarantees of hearing her laugh, the words to the songs often still as clear as they had ever been in her mind.
Music has long been known to help rustle up the joys and memories that make a life, which dementia can obscure. “When I’m singing,” says one participant of Our Time, a drama group at Leeds Playhouse for people living with dementia, “I don’t feel that I’m on my own.” These sessions are led by Nicky Taylor, a researcher and practitioner who radiates enthusiasm for changing the stories we tell about a condition that affects more than 900,000 people in the UK. “People with dementia are often written off,” says Taylor, “but our participants are sometimes contributing right up until the last days or weeks of their life. That, to me, is remarkable.”
