Back in 2021, we visited Riverview Lodge Care Home in West London. Musicians Louise Messenger and Laurence Corns played for Resident Nonie and her daughter Maeve. Since Nonie’s death in 2022, Maeve has kindly reflected on what a visit from The Spitz meant to her and her family…
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Maeve Cohen
My mam, Nonie, passed away from Alzheimer’s disease in 2022. If you knew Nonie, you knew she loved to sing. She had a gift for singing and her beautiful singing was her gift to all of us. Many years into her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, after she had become unable to do simple domestic tasks like cleaning and getting dressed, she could still sing songs in Spanish and Hebrew! A few years later, when she had lost the ability to speak, she could still hum along to Paul Simon or any of the hundreds of Irish Folk songs she was raised on.
When Covid came in 2020 and her care home was locked down. My mam, being the infinitely sociable woman she was, declined rapidly. She became unable to lift her head, unable to interact with the carers she loved so dearly. Her incredible care home, recognising how much the isolation was affecting her, allowed me and my siblings to come and see mam through a glass door very early on. She could no longer speak and standing on either side of a glass door in the cold lobby of a care home is not the most conducive to long and fruitful conversation at the best of times! Luckily for us though, and thanks to our beautiful mam, we had a secret weapon. We could sing. I spent countless hours during those dark days of Covid singing with my mam through the glass door of her home, watching her smile and dance and connect with me in a way that would have been impossible otherwise. The music was literally magic for us.
People are not fixed. We form our identities in relation to who we are interacting with. The Maeve I am in front of my school friends is different to the Maeve I am at work, or the Maeve I am with my partner’s family. Everyone we know knows a slightly different version of us and this helps us to understand who we are. A loved one may know one Maeve and, when I am interacting with them, I also better understand and remember that part of myself. This is how we understand who we are, why we love those who bring out the best sides of ourselves, the ones who make us like ourselves more.
When someone has Alzheimer’s, their world becomes smaller. It is difficult for old friends and family to come and spend time with them. Towards the end of her life, the main people my mam interacted with were her children, her sister, and her carers. Whenever I went to see her, she was the Nonie she is with me, she was my mam. The songs I sang with her were the songs we loved together, from the time of our lives that we spent together. The same was true of my siblings and aunty. Her carers sang entirely new songs.
When The Spitz came to my mam’s care home, about 3 months before she died, what they were able to do for my mam had a profound effect on us both. Firstly, just her having the opportunity to watch live music was an incredible gift. She lived for live music and to watch her enjoy it, humming along in harmony, dancing with the musicians was a memory that I truly cherish.
But it was more than that. My mam, as a true child of the 60s, absolutely loved the Beatles. I was raised on the Beatles. Many of the songs we had been singing with my mam all through her illness were Beatles songs. We told the Spitz musicians this and they were happy to sing some Beatles songs for us. The magic for us happened when they started to sing ‘And I Love Her’. This is not a song me or my siblings ever sang with our mam, it wasn’t one of the soundtrack to my childhood. By Beatles standards, it’s not a famous song at all. But my mam loved it. She closed her eyes and hummed along. For the time those musicians played and sang that song so beautifully to my mam, she became a Nonie I didn’t know. A Nonie she hadn’t been for years. She was so happy and peaceful. Maybe she was young again doing things I’ll never hear about with people I’ll never meet. She was transported, completely absorbed in that beautiful music. It was a truly transformative moment for both of us.
Two months later the same musicians came back. Unfortunately, in the days before, my mam had had a seizure and was no longer able to interact with them. She passed away about a month later, surrounded by her children, singing to her day and night as she passed.
Sharing that moment with my mam, listening to a song I barely knew sang by some truly world-class musicians, and watching my mam become herself in a way I could never have helped her to do, is one of the most beautiful moments of my life. I will never forget it. I am so grateful to Spitz for giving that to me and my mam. They not only change the lives of the vulnerable people they perform for, they change their families lives as well. They help people remember who they are and help their families to understand them better, to get a glimpse into sides of them that we never knew. Music is magic, and they give that magic to the people who need it most.
