Music, Memories, and the Stories Out of Order

The stories shared here may not always arrive in chronological order.

Much like memory itself, they may move through different seasons, relationships, emotions, and moments in time.

At times they may feel fragmented or out of sequence — shifting between years, personalities, grief, joy, caregiving, and love.

In many ways, that feels fitting.

Because walking beside my mother through dementia often felt the same way.

Time no longer moved in a straight line for her.

Some days she was almost my mother as I had always known her.

Some days she spoke about high school friends or her first boyfriend as though she were living inside that season of life again.

Other times she searched the halls of her senior living home looking for nursing school friends she believed should still be nearby.

And then there were the moments when she asked where my father was.

Sometimes she seemed to believe he was simply somewhere else and would return.

Other times, she became quiet and thoughtful before saying something to the effect of:

“He must be gone… because he isn’t here with me.”

Those moments were especially difficult because they revealed something we did not anticipate with dementia:

flashes of awareness still existed inside the confusion.

It was as though different versions of time moved in and out around her constantly, overlapping one another without warning.

It was also incredibly painful to speak about my father with her.

The first couple of times she asked where he was, I tried gently explaining that he had passed away.

But I quickly realized something deeply sad:

She did not remember losing him or anything that led up to it.

Each time she heard it, the grief and shock arrived all over again as though it were happening for the very first time.

After the second time, I understood that kindness sometimes looked less like honesty and more like gently redirecting her away from pain she could no longer fully process or carry.

And there were times she became almost childlike — stubborn in the way children can be when they are confused, frightened, or trying to maintain control over their wishes.

There were moments she resisted simple things the way a child might resist too such as bedtime or a bath.

Moments when reasoning no longer worked because the confusion underneath it was simply too great.

At times it was heartbreaking.

At times strangely tender.

And at times, if I allow myself to say it, very frustrating in the exhausted way caregiving sometimes becomes.

But looking back now, I understand something I could not always fully see then:

much of that stubbornness was fear.

Fear of losing understanding.

Fear of losing independence.

Fear of living in a world that no longer behaved predictably inside her mind.

There were times she became frightened because she believed she had been abandoned at a hotel after moving into her senior living apartment.

Times she called me terrified because she thought she had lost her children — who were actually my own children, safely at home with me after a visit.

And there were moments that broke my heart in quieter ways.

Moments when she looked down at her body and realized her breasts were gone after her double mastectomy.

She understood enough to know something had changed.

But she no longer remembered why.

Imagine waking up inside a body that no longer makes sense to you.

Knowing something important is missing but not understanding what happened or why.

Dementia does not only steal memory.

Sometimes it steals context.

And without context, the world can become frightening very quickly.

There was also the cat that lived at my brother’s house — at least in my mother’s mind.

She mentioned it in passing as she saw it around the house.

Only there was no cat.

Not anymore.

My brother had a beloved cat many years earlier, but it had long since passed away.

Still, in my mother’s mind, a cat remained.

And I often found myself wondering about that.

Where had that cat come from?

Was she remembering my brother’s old cat from years before and somehow pulling it into the present?

Was the cat simply imagined, created by a mind trying to fill empty spaces with something familiar and comforting?

Or was she somehow seeing something the rest of us could not?

A memory?

A dream?

A ghost?

I honestly do not know.

And perhaps none of us can ever be completely certain where the mind, memory, and soul separate from one another in moments like those.

There was the day we were watching a tv show with a polar bear, and somehow, in her mind, it became part of her own past. She believed she had once cared for a polar bear when she was younger.

And then there were the moments that were harder to explain.

When she lived with my brother and sister-in-law, there were nights when she became upset because my brother went into his wife’s room instead of hers.

At first, it seemed confusing and difficult to understand.

But over time I realized something.

The men in our family — my brothers, my son, my nephews — all strongly resemble my father at different stages of his life.

And I began to wonder if, in my mother’s mind, she was not truly confusing roles as much as she was seeing echoes of my father in the faces around her.

Perhaps some part of her recognized familiarity, love, and connection before it could correctly place identity or time.

Dementia seemed to blur generations together that way.

The past and present no longer stayed neatly separated.

That is one of the hardest things about dementia.

It does not only take memory.

It rearranges the world.

Dementia often affects the brain’s ability to properly store new memories, which means a person may continue living more fully inside older ones.

Over time, those older memories can begin to feel more real than the present.

People become different people.

Rooms become different rooms.

Old emotions attach themselves to new situations.

A show on television can become something that happened long ago.

A song can open a door no one knew was still there.

I noticed this in the way my mother saw me too.

There came a point where she no longer fully recognized me as her daughter.

And yet, strangely, I think she still recognized pieces of me.

Sometimes she would look at me with familiarity, warmth, or trust, almost as though she knew I belonged to her somehow even if she could no longer place exactly how.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if part of the reason was that I had continued aging while the version of me she remembered had remained younger.

Perhaps somewhere inside her mind, her daughter still existed at an earlier age — and the woman standing in front of her no longer fully matched that memory.

That realization stayed with me for a long time.

Because it made me understand that dementia is not always simple forgetting.

Sometimes it is living between different versions of time at once.

And music was one of the doors that stayed open the longest.

My mother could still read for a long time.

She read signs when we drove.

And she could still read music too.

Even on the days when I could tell she was no longer truly reading the notes, she still played.

By memory.

By feeling.

By something deeper than thought.

Her fingers knew songs her mind could no longer fully explain.

Those songs had lived in her for years.

Some for decades.

They had become part of her.

And sometimes, when she played, I felt like the music was reaching a place inside her that dementia had not yet touched.

There were also days when she would wake more lucid.

Never completely back.

Not the way she had been before.

But clearer.

Present enough that I could feel pieces of her returning for a little while.

Those were the moments I treasured most.

Usually, I spent them telling her I loved her.

I would reminisce a little too, because that was one of the things I missed the most.

Telling stories with her.

Before dementia, that had been part of our relationship.

We told stories.

We remembered things together.

We laughed over old moments and filled in details for one another.

When she stopped being able to do that, I missed the exchange.

I missed the way memory used to move between us.

But music still created little openings.

One day in the car, Like a Virgin came on the radio.

My mother started singing along.

And I laughed immediately.

Not because the song itself was funny, but because it pulled me straight back to Market Basket when I was about thirteen years old.

I could see her walking through the store, pushing her cart, singing along with the loudspeaker like she didn’t have a care in the world.

And I remembered being so embarrassed.

I tried not to let her know, but I think she knew.

That memory has always made me feel a little bad.

Because now, looking back, I see it differently.

She was playful.

She was alive.

She was unapologetically herself.

And years later, there we were in the car, that same song playing again.

My mother singing along joyfully.

Only this time, dementia had changed everything.

My laugh came from memory.

My daughter laughed too, probably because I was laughing. She was about three, and at that age she often wanted to do whatever I was doing.

And my mother laughed with us.

But her laughter may have come from somewhere else entirely.

By then, mirroring had become part of how she moved through the world. Sometimes she copied the emotions around her because she could sense the feeling, even if she did not fully understand the reason.

So, the three of us were laughing together.

But all for different reasons.

I was remembering.

My daughter was joining me.

My mother was responding to us.

And somehow, even though we were not all holding the same memory, we were still sharing the same moment.

That is what music can do.

It can bring one fragment from one person and another fragment from someone else.

My mother remembered the song.

I remembered the story.

And for a brief moment, those pieces met again.

The memory became whole between us.

I think that is what family does, especially when memory begins to fade.

One person carries the melody.

Another carries the setting.

Another carries the laughter.

Another carries the ache of what it all meant later.

And together, the story survives.

Maybe that is why these stories do not need to unfold perfectly in order.

Because our lives are not remembered that way.

We remember through songs.

Through places.

Through laughter in a car.

Through grocery store aisles.

Through tiny moments we did not know would matter one day.

At the time, they seem ordinary.

A song on the radio.

A mother singing in public.

A daughter trying not to be embarrassed.

A little girl laughing because her mother is laughing.

An older woman joining in without fully knowing why.

But later, those moments become sacred.

They become the pieces we hold onto.

The fragments that still shine.

The proof that love was there.

Even when memory changed.

Even when stories scattered.

Even when time no longer moved in a straight line.

Music remained.

And somehow, through it, so did she.

Reflection

Memory is rarely as linear as we imagine it to be.

A song, a scent, a familiar road, or a simple phrase can suddenly carry us backward through time — reconnecting us to people, places, and versions of ourselves we thought were far away.

Sometimes the people we love remember us clearly.

And sometimes they remember us only in fragments.

Yet even fragmented memories can still carry love.

Take a quiet moment to reflect:

• Is there a song that instantly brings you back to a specific season of your life?

  
  

• Have you ever experienced a memory returning unexpectedly through music, place, scent, or routine?

  
  

• Have you ever felt connected to someone through a shared memory, even when the details were incomplete?

  
  

Often the moments we remember most deeply are not the grand events of life.

They are the ordinary moments that became meaningful because of who we shared them with.

A Gentle Invitation

Today, choose one song connected to a meaningful memory in your life.

Sit quietly while you listen.

Notice what rises naturally:

a person,

a place,

a feeling,

a version of yourself you had not visited in a while.

Allow yourself to remember without rushing.

You might even write down a few small fragments that return to you.

Not a perfect story.

Just pieces.

Sometimes memory arrives softly,

one note at a time.

You are always welcome here.

WGG