The Heart of the Great Beyond

How sweet the sound

Mount Rainier, photo by Brian Castillo

I wrote this in 2021 during Covid lockdowns. All activities in elder healthcare facilities were cancelled. I still sang to my elders in those months, but it was on an iPad. Bob Walker was one of my regulars who became a private client. The music was a lifeline for him.

Bob died within a year of this story. He enriched my life deeply and I still miss him. I think of him often, especially when I sing “Amazing Grace.”

“If I could, I’d jump up and down for joy!” Bob tells me from his wheelchair, a wide smile stretched across his face, his sightless eyes dancing. “You’re the Queen, you know, you are Queen Elizabeth!” He is clearly tickled by this idea that I am the Queen. I can tell he has been bursting to say this to me, turning it over in his head since an aide told him I would be singing to him. Maybe he heard the news of Prince Philip’s recent death on TV, and commentators talking about his relationship to Queen Elizabeth and to the UK. “Your husband is not the King,” he tells me, laughing more. “They don’t do it that way in England. He is your servant!” This last word is proclaimed with his index finger stabbing the air emphatically. I can’t help laughing too, because I know that there is a bit of truth to this.

“Fair enough,” says my husband Brian later when I tell him this story about me being the Queen and him being my servant, according to Bob. Sometimes even with advanced dementia, people can see very clearly!

Bob is completely blind so cannot see my face on his iPad screen. Also, he is almost deaf but has hearing aids and another amplifier so he can hear the music. “I don’t know why I am still here,” he often says sadly. At 92, he lives in a nursing home and rarely leaves his room. He lives for these music sessions.

I have been singing to Bob for several years. We have a profound relationship, and the advancing dementia does not affect the feeling of connection and love we share. Like most of the elders I sing for, even those with dementia, Bob has no trouble remembering me.

Music is a constant and secure anchor in a sea of dissolving thought and memory. As Bob often tells me, “Music has always been in my heart.”

Bob Walker, loving the tunes

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Bob’s cognitive decline has noticeably increased. When he hears songs that he used to love and easily remember, he now often says dreamily, “I don’t think I have ever heard that before, but it is beautiful!”

Sometimes with Bob I feel that I am trying to help him save memories before they fade away forever. I always play certain songs that I know he loves, songs I have played since I met him. “Swing Low,” “Home on the Range,” “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” “You Are My Sunshine.” He often says, “that is one of those famous ones!”

If I let too much time go by before playing a song again, he will not keep it as a memory. At some point, he lost “Irene Goodnight” forever.

The earliest memory he often shares is sitting on a piano bench by his mother while she played. Again and again, Bob tells me that his mother died when he was three. At 92, he is still processing this life-changing loss. Some painful experiences remain etched in our hearts, long after pleasant ones have faded.

I tell him his mother would have been so proud of what he did with his life, and of his beautiful family. “She is still with you, Bob. Her love will always be with you!” I say, and he nods through his tears.

Bob listens deeply and with an open soul to every song, always expressing appreciation whether he knows the song or not. His face is often ecstatic, soaking in the music like sunlight. He loves hearing songs that I compose too. “That tickled me down deep in my heart,” he said once after I played my song “Fishes in the Water,” a summery song with a whimsical ending.

Bob used to be a pastor. He often tells me that my music is better than a sermon. “It’s what you do so well,” he says. “You play the music, but you tell a story.” Six or seven times each session, he says, “your music is a story!”

His appreciation is so complete. And incredibly rare.

One of his all-time favorite songs is “Amazing Grace,” or “Number one in the hymnal!” as he sometimes calls it. For years, whenever I would play this song Bob would tell me the story about the slave ship captain who wrote “Amazing Grace.” In Bob’s version of the story, the captain had a revelation from God that slavery was evil. In that moment, with human beings shackled in the hull of his boat, he converted to Christianity and became an abolitionist. This story moved him deeply, usually to tears.

One time he also told me that the parents of his favorite nurse Tina (who is black) were in chains in that captain’s slave ship bound for America. Of course, Tina’s parents were born a century after this event, but he is correct that her ancestors were probably enslaved Africans. Bob is a natural empath, feeling all things deeply. He no longer tells the story of how the song was written, though sometimes I tell it back to him and his eyes shine with a flickering light of recognition.

A few weeks earlier, I had played “Amazing Grace” for Bob as I did almost every time. My heart felt cold when he responded that it was beautiful, but he did not remember it. How could he not remember “Amazing Grace?”

“You named your daughter Carrie Grace, after that song, remember?” I had asked.

Upon thinking back on that session, I realized I had changed the song’s key, just to see how it would sound. I was the same singer, it was the same song sung with the exact same melody, but perhaps his sensitive ears picked up that difference and he no longer recognized it.

So in today’s session, I play it as I had always played it previously: key of C in the G form with the capo on the 5th fret. I hope that now he will recognize it—and he does!

“How sweet the sound!” he says afterwards, a look of rapture on his face. I am so relieved that “Amazing Grace” is still there, like a giant tree deeply rooted in the wellsprings of his mind.

Why is it so important to me that Bob does not forget “Amazing Grace?” Maybe because I cannot imagine Bob living without the knowledge of its beauty. The lyrics have helped me, Bob, and so many people through tough times when it seems we are surrounded by a ceaseless dark night:

Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come
Tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will see me home

Grace is the serendipity that makes life worth living, the unexpected ray of sunlight touching us amidst the darkness and sadness we all encounter. As long as Bob keeps living, I want the last bit of his life to be infused with grace. I want him to feel that gift, to know he is blessed in these moments I am so privileged to share with him.

“Grace means gift of God, you taught me that,” I remind him. “Yes. That’s right…the gift of God…” he says slowly in a faraway voice, a faint smile on his lips. Bob’s eyes are raised up towards the light streaming from his window, sparkling as if they are finding meaning in the shapes dancing in the clouds. As if he sees straight into the heart of the Great Beyond.