All Rights Reserved © 2022 Thomas W. Day
The music therapist only knew this patient from visits to entertain his wife when she was in hospice the previous year. The man’s wife died, after suffering terribly from cancer, and her last weeks were in a drugged coma to either alleviate her suffering or, at least, make it seem like she was suffering less to the husband, their family and friends, and the caretakers. The therapist sang Christmas songs for the wife and the man abruptly left the room after providing the therapist with a list of songs he thought his wife might enjoy. She died early that year, right after the New Year, and their house was inconspicuously decorated with memorabilia from their lives, pictures of two kids and three grandkids, and some art on the walls and shelves the therapist knew, from earlier visits, had been created by the wife.
The therapist was a retired school music teacher making extra money entertaining, or distracting, hospice patients. She had been at this job, part-time, for almost a decade. It was often draining work, but she felt like she was still making some kind of useful contribution singing and playing piano for people in their last days of life. The therapist looked like a retired public school music teacher, too. She was short, plain which was made more obvious by her black framed glasses, the fact that she was a little overweight, her short bangs were obviously died a dark auburn, and her voice was Midwestern mousy and a little nasal. If you noticed her in a crowd, you would think “middle-aged grade school music teacher from the Midwest.”
When it happened, the stroke hit him like a ton of bricks. One minute he was emptying out an unused room in his house and the next he was paralyzed in the back of an emergency vehicle, sirens blaring and a plastic mask over his mouth and nose. He had been wearing a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) dog tag for several years and had a very specific DNR order in place with his physician. The EMTs ignored it, hit him with their damn defibrillator paddles, after several attempts they shocked his heart back into rhythm, slapped an oxygen mask on him, and jacked some kind of drug into his chest with a long needle that hurt like hell but hurt a lot more when the stimulant hit his system. Now, a month later nothing worked but his sight, hearing, and bits of his brain. He wasn’t breathing on his own, a respirator did that for him on a regular interval. An EEG saw lots of brain activity, but little-to-none of that resulted in physical movement or apparent awareness to outside observers.
That day the husband had become the music therapist’s patient. The patient was in his middle-70s, he had a long grey ponytail and a neatly trimmed beard. His wardrobe appeared to be 80s grunge, or just Midwestern working class, with a closet full of worn-out jeans and plaid flannel shirts. The therapist noticed an electric guitar on the wall in a sun room and assumed it was owned by her current patient. There was no stereo system in the house, no records or CDs in the living room or bedroom, The bedroom clock radio was tuned to NPR. She looked at the man, his home, and that Gibson SG hanging on the wall and was convinced she knew what to play for him.
The therapist set up her electronic keyboard, opened up a music program on her tablet, and selected what she believed would be the perfect setlist for this client. The first chords tentatively rang out and she began to sing, “Michelle, my belle. These are words that go together well. . . “
He couldn’t smell anything but the inside of the damn respirator. For some damn reason, they had him flat on his back so all he could see was the bedroom ceiling. His eyes would focus, but he couldn’t control their movement. If someone closed them, it would take hours for them to autonomically open again. No matter how much he wanted to see what was happening it was not under his control. He could feel his feet and hands, they stung like they’d been severely burned, but he couldn’t move anything. But he heard everything they all said, even when they stepped out of the bedroom to congregate in the living room and talk about his condition and care.
“No, fuck no. Not the goddamn Beatles! Torture me with anything but those simpering British Backstreet Boys and their underdeveloped teenage drivel.” He beamed hate at the music therapist and the song with which she was torturing him, but all that anger was absorbed before it left his head. If you knew him well, you might have been able to decipher the intense hatred he was trying to aim at the source of the music he despised so much. His daughters had been visiting earlier that day, but they had gone back to their homes and families. Everyone who had known him knew how much he hated the Beatles and almost everything that spawned from the 60s and 70s “British Invasion.” No one who had known him was in the house, so there was no rescue forthcoming from any direction.
The dreaded “Michelle” ended and in the blessed silence he heard the therapist humming another Lennon and McCartney dirge. She was obviously cuing up another three minute torture for his listening agony. He scrolled through the possibilities and kept coming back to the obvious follow-up to the first musical abortion, “Yesterday.” And almost the moment he had tried to square himself up for that misbegotten piece of McCartney’s foul mind, it began; “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. . . “ Followed by the nauseating, sappy timbre of a vibes patch from the keyboard and that clichéd descending chord progression.
No good memories were generated by Beatles’ music. His days as a musician, years ago, was occupied with soul or rock or fusion and the soulless, plodding and predictable Beatles were the antithesis of any of that. He couldn’t plug his ears, but he could try to distract himself by cataloging the Beatles’ songs that he hated: #1 on the hate parade was the dreaded “Let It Be,” #2 “Good Day Sunshine,” #3 “Blackbird,” and the list went on almost including every record the British bubblegum band ever made. The mind is a powerful thing and by the time he’d recalled every hated song the Pimps of Pop had recorded, the therapist was packing up her equipment. He had, somehow, managed to block out the noise with distain and bad memories of mediocre music.
As the therapist was about to exit with her equipment, one of his friends arrived to take a turn by the bedside. He asked, “How is he today?”
She replied, “About the same. That angry look never left his face. I played a few Beatles songs and he seemed to relax a bit.”
The friend grimaced, “I doubt that. He hates that shit.” As he spoke, the man sat a small portable speaker on the table next to his friend’s bedside and tapped on his phone for a moment. “I try to put together a playlist for him once a week and leave the speaker here for the hospice folks. Someone knocked the speaker off of the table last week and I had to buy a new one.”
The therapist wasn’t very familiar with jazz, but she recognized “A NIght in Tunisia” when she heard it, although the song was being played on acoustic guitar the introduction was unmistakable.
“Next time, you might try some or some Miles, Brubeck, Adderley, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, or Marvin Gaye, Dr. John, Steely Dan, or even Alicia Keys or Dave Mathews or John Mayer. Anything but 60s Brit crap. You might get a smile out of him, if there’s still one in there.”
She was surprised and a little angry at being told how to do her job. Then she noticed that her patient was, in fact, smiling, his previously angry face was relaxed, and his eyes were closed.
