PLAY IT AGAIN: Music brings Aurora Alzheimer patients to life

For Beulah Foelsch, life is circular. At 88 years old, the former Wisconsin dairy farmer spends her days moving her wheelchair through the never-ending hall of the main building at Juniper Village in Aurora.

Barbershop, gym, health care office. Barbershop, gym, health care office. Barbershop, gym, health care office.

Those are the places she passes every day. They never change, but they’re always new.

Like all the residents at Juniper’s Aurora location, Foelsch’s memory is hazy, filled with distant tidbits and foggy factoids that whimsically arrive and sadistically disappear, coming and going as they please.

Some days are good. Others aren’t. That’s the cryptic, devastating way in which Alzheimer’s disease works, as the families of the some 5 million Americans who live with the disease know painfully well.

“I’m too old for shocks,” Foelsch says after seeing a group of strangers approaching.

Her face is distraught and her brow stuck in an upward furrow. Clearly confused, her eyes are worried, scared and glassy.

“Where’s my daughter?” she asks as Valerie Valdez, executive director of Juniper’s Aurora location, approaches and gently slips a pair of headphones over her ears.

“Let me know if it’s too loud,” Valdez whispers before hitting the button on a lime green iPod with a small triangle on it. As soon as she does, something changes in Foelsch’s demeanor. Something profound.

Immediately, Foelsch begins bobbing, swaying and clapping to the playlist of “Big Band hits of the 1940s” Valdez provided her. The glassiness in her eyes vanishes and her tired lips curl upward to form a smile. After a moment, she closes her eyes to revel in the bouncy brass sounds, and it’s clear that at that moment, she’s no longer an 88-year-old woman in a memory-care home. At that moment she’s somewhere far away, the years separating her youth and reality temporarily erased.

When the first song ends, she ferociously, respectfully applauds before gracefully bowing her head in rhythm with the next number. A moment later she opens her eyes, blinking back tears.

“I’m going to cry,” she says. “It’s beautiful. Thank you.”

Foelsch then closes her eyes, and once again is whisked off to a time and a place far removed from the circular hallways of Juniper Village. A place where not every day is the same scratched role of film that only depicts barbershop, gym, health care office.

Creating that miraculous transition, from empty-eyed octogenarian to vivacious, dancing woman is the goal and result of Music and Memory, a program currently being rolled out in memory-care facilities across the country designed to jog the memories of dementia and Alzheimer’s sufferers with the help of the music of their youth.

“Music and Memory is just kind of an evolution of what we’ve been doing and now we’re doing it in a little bit of a different way,” said Cindy Longfellow, national director of sales and marketing of Juniper Village. “It really has benefits for folks with different diagnoses, whether they’re physical or psychiatric. It’s been amazing.”

Longfellow and Valdez have been working to roll out the Music and Memory program at Juniper’s Aurora location since mid-December, steadily collecting iPods and creating personalized playlists for the all of the facility’s 52 residents.

“It’s not just throwing music on an iPod and putting it on someone’s ears,” Valdez said. “It’s really about what touches their soul, what is important to them and what’s going to trigger their memories.”

That hyper-personalization is the cornerstone of the program’s success, according to Longfellow, who said that with residents ranging in age from 52 to 98 years old, paying close attention to someone’s likes, dislikes and era of youth is critical. To discover resident’s musical tastes, staff rely heavily on surveys filled out by family who specify if a resident would prefer sounds more like Benny Goodman, or the Beatles.

“In this community, our youngest resident is not going to be listening to the same thing as our oldest. That 53-year-old is going to be listening to R.E.M., not Frank Sinatra,” Longfellow said.

Juniper is one of nearly 1,000 long-term care facilities nationwide currently participating in Music and Memory, with all 20 of Juniper’s locations expected to be enrolled in the program by the end of the year and all 52 Aurora residents outfitted with an individual iPod by March.

“We realized quickly that it made sense to not just do this in our memory-care communities, but in all of your senior living communities,” Longfellow said. “It just made good sense.”

Now entering its fifth year as a nonprofit, Music and Memory was founded in 2008 by New York City social worker Dan Cohen, who decided to bring 200 iPods to long-term care facilities in New York City after hearing about the proliferation of the technology on public radio. The program took off in 2012 following the release of “Alive Inside,” a documentary that depicted over three years of Cohen’s work. The film won an Audience Award for best U.S. documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and one particular clip, featuring a catatonic New York City man “waking up” after hearing one of his favorite songs, helped catapult the project and the program when it went viral after being posted on the websites Reddit and YouTube.

Juniper Village had a screening of the film at its Aurora location Jan. 19.

Both Longfellow and Valdez said that their music programs, such as sing-alongs or small concerts, have always helped improve the moods of their residents, though the personalization of Music and Memory has helped create an unprecedented turnaround.

“I’ve always noticed that music is one of the best things for residents,” Valdez said. “But with the personal iPod and the headphones, some people have hearing loss and can’t hear well, so they’re really getting all of the tones the way they need in order to feed that to the brain.”

Valdez added that feedback from residents’ families has been all positive.

“We’ve had phenomenal feedback,” she said. “I mean we put some music on one resident, and her daughter spoke to how she was so amazed to see the change in her mother. She was very tearful about how she saw her mom back.”