Hello everyone, I publish this post to share a story for the Around The World community contest.
It is very difficult to find a single moment in my life that I can say it is the most beautiful, but I certainly remember an anecdote that is really impressed on my mind, and it is related to music and to my grandmother, happened some days before she passed away in 2012.
As you can see on my profile, music has ever had an important role on my life, because it is my favorite way to escape and to express myself, and there are lot of different studies that prove the depth of this antique language and the relevance for the collective culture and individuals themself.
What I am trying to tell through this story is the link between birth, death and music, a relationship that became clear to me after I saw my grandmother called Rita for the last time at the hospital.
At that time I was still a teenager but old enough to understand that there were no much days left for my grandma: she started having memory issues since 4/5 years before the story, caused by what we thought to be Alzheimer’s diseases, but that after some time has been diagnosed as a cancer on her brain. I am sorry for the sad beginning, but I can ensure you that at that time everything was quite calm, because she was on the phase where she cannot even recognize me and my mother (her daughter), but she seemed quite happy and calm and my family had already accepted the situation. This last thing is very important for the story, because with the fact that she wasn’t probably able to fully understand the reality she just didn’t respond to the 99% of the verbal and physical incentives: it was not important what you could say or do to her, she just watched away as she was lost on her mind.
But that day I was with her and my mother on a beautiful garden of the hospital, and I just finished my last hour of school some minute before, obliviously it was music lesson, where the teacher made us learn some classic Italian songs from the 60’s.
I was pushing the wheelchair where my grandma was sitting, trying to tell her something to see if I could say her maybe the last goodbye, but with no success. My mother tried to comunicate too, or at least say something, but same result. So I resigned and I settle for a simple walk, when all of a sudden I started singing one of the songs I learned so far, “Il ragazzo della via Gluck” by the songwriter Adriano Celentano. After some time, I can remember that I watched to my grandmother and she was smiling, and so I started singing louder and changing the song to something she could have listened when she was younger, and it worked! I mean, she really reacted to what I was singing, and my mother, that tried many times to have an interaction with her, watched my like “is she really understanding?” and than she started to crying because she was touched.
It was the last time I saw Rita, and sometimes I still think about that story: is the music so deep for our mind that we can recognize music even if we don’t recognize our family members, or we don’t remember how to eat and drink?
The answer is yes, and I already knew it.
Music, and sounds in general, is one of the first thing we experience when we born, and even before, when we are into our mother’s womb.
For example, there are several studies about the relationship between lullabies and the mother’s breath, the sense of the rhythm and the hearth beat, the ambience of the discotheques (dark room with some light flashes and a repetitive kick) and the inner of the womb.
And as music is one of the first thing we experience, it is also one of the last thing we lose: this relationship is even stronger than the family, the automatisms of life and the words, and it is a language so basic that even my sick grandmother could understand.
I hope you enjoyed, thank you for reading
Comment below what you think and pleas correct my English if you find any mistakes, I will be grateful to you for improving my writing!