My dad said he didn’t sleep well his first night in the assisted-living facility. It was because of the music.
This was in October. After some eight years in an associated independent living facility down the street, he’d had two hospitalizations in six months, each followed by a short stint in a rehab facility. The first time, he left rehab and went back to his old apartment. The second time, over his mild protests, we knew it was time for the move to assisted living. There, they would provide all of his meals, and give assistance when needed getting into and out of bed, and give him his medications, so he wouldn’t have to keep track of them himself any more.
But the music.
After that first night, he reported to us the next day that he was kept awake by the sound of two men singing. One tenor and one bass. It wasn’t a song, not even a verse, but just several bars, repeated over and over again, all night long. He speculated it was piped-in music, background noise to help the residents relax and sleep. Or perhaps it was sound from the staff break room, which was right next door to his room.
In any case, Dad couldn’t really make out the words, but he could hear the men singing throughout the night. At least, he said, they had good voices.
I didn’t think much of it; another possibility, I thought, was that some other resident had left their TV on overnight. But a few days later, I was visiting again and Dad asked me, “can you hear that music?” I could not. But he described it for me, the same men with the good voices, singing the same melody, repeating it over and over again.
And this went on. Maybe three or four times out of those first two months, when I would visit him, he would pause, and then ask if I could hear the music. Sometimes it was the two men, sometimes just one man. Always with good voices.
Now, there are two things you need to know about my father.
One, he was always musical. His mother in Akron, Iowa, was a piano teacher, so he had music theory drilled into his consciousness from birth. She almost certainly made him practice the piano from a very young age. Later on, he tried to teach my brothers and me how to play. (With them, he was successful, but I refused to put in the necessary time to practice, and it’s the single biggest regret of my life that I didn’t learn how to play music when I was young). In any case, Dad was always playing the piano in our house in Webster Groves, either reading music or playing by ear from the vast library of standards that he knew. And yes, he was certainly qualified to judge whether someone had a “good voice.”
The second thing you need to know about my dad was that he was almost completely deaf. He turned 99 last July, but his hearing had started failing him maybe a decade earlier, and it was nearly all gone by the time he went to assisted living. And sadly, the hearing ability he retained was somewhat scrambled in his head, at least when it came to music; he talked about how he would hear a note in one year, but in the other ear the same note would sound half a tone higher. Thus, for the last few years of his life, the joy of piano playing was completely lost for him, because whatever piano he was playing would sound, to him, grossly out of tune, even as it sounded perfect to everyone else.
So it was obvious that whatever music he was hearing in his new home was all inside his head.
We took him a whiteboard and some erasable markers so we could converse with him, since he often couldn’t make out what we were saying. One night when i was visiting, he was telling me about the singers, and he took the white board, drew out a treble clef, and wrote out the notes the man was singing. (Actually, by this time, i think it was a chorus of singers that he was hearing). I can’t read music, unfortunately, but I reached for my phone to take a picture of what he’d drawn, thinking I might be able to figure out the music later. But, maybe seeing me pull out my phone, he thought I was bored, and he quickly erased what he’d drawn before I was able to get a picture of it.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking the old guy lost his marbles along with his hearing. But I will tell you that in all other respects, he was sharp as a tack, right up until the day he died. He read the newspaper regularly. He followed the NBA and college football closely, even if he couldn’t hear the announcers describing the game.
And his memory was astounding; once, when I was visiting, he described a plaque that was on his brother’s bedroom wall growing up in Akron, some kind of inspirational saying; Dad recited it for me, word for word. I can’t verify its accuracy, of course, but I have no doubt he was right. Another time, we were watching an NFL game—the Baltimore Ravens against somebody—and he recited for me several verses of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.”
If it was dementia that was playing that music for him in his head, it was a very acute form of dementia that only manifested itself in that one small area. Physically, he had an ever-increasing list of problems as his body was giving out. But mentally, he never lost a thing.
The last time we spoke of the singers was on a Saturday afternoon, less than a week before he died. He didn’t have his hearing aids in, but he asked if I could hear the music. I replied, using the whiteboard, that I couldn’t, and he started describing it for me. One man was singing with a “pretty good voice,” he said. I asked if it was just the one man or was it a group of singers. He said there was a chorus, “but the one man predominates.”
I asked if it was the same music that he’d heard before. “No, they change it. Now it’s ‘Singing in the Rain.’” And a few minutes later, he told me that he’d just heard a verse that he’d never known about before. He seemed to be enjoying it.
As I said, that was the last time we talked about the singers. His physical condition—which had been deteriorating steadily for months—was getting worse, faster, by that point. Two days later, on Monday, we signed up for hospice care, and on Thursday morning, the day after Christmas, he died in his sleep.
I’ve never been much for spirituality; I’m more of a “when you’re gone, you’re gone,” kind of guy. But I honestly cannot think of any explanation for my dad’s experience of these singers, other than to say they were his angels, coming to take him home.
