Drumming In Dementiaville, Part Deux

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear.

-- Layne Redmond,

in When the Drummers Were Women:

a Spiritual History of Drumming

And so Romeo took an unexpected, forced hiatus from drumming after he fell at home and after his hospital stay and after the transfer to the nursing home. (See The Fall and What Happened After, or Dementia Unleashed and A Caregiver Alone At Home.)

That hiatus, however, was brief. In the morning of Romeo's fourth day at the nursing home, I wheeled him into the second floor lounge for a -- you guessed it -- for a drum circle. Among the scheduled activities for residents that day, in addition to bingo and a review of news headlines and an ice cream social, was a drum circle. And Romeo wanted to be there. He wanted to beat on a drum. He wanted to feel the beat of drums.

It would be an understatement to say that this drum circle, which is held twice a month, is a popular event. Every session Romeo and I have gone to (which is all of them so far) has been packed. On this particular day, like all the others, residents filled the lounge and spilled out into the hallway. There were drums and sticks and shakers enough to go around, and no one was afraid to use them, and use them well. Passersby paused, watched through the hall windows, and either lingered for a time or continued moving down the hall as the beat punctuated their every step and swing of their arms and hips.

And the residents themselves...well, it was no secret that they love it. Rhythm. My goodness, it's huge. Think about it. It's the cyclical pattern of creation, increase, power, dissolution, death, incubation, and creation again. Rhythm is the passage of time -- not clock time but rhythmic cycle time. Each person who ever lived on the earth felt rhythm every moment of their lives, as we do, in the pulse of our own heartbeats, in our blood, and in our own breath. The beat of the drums, rhythm, hits you in the guts. The beat of the drums, rhythm, is the deep, unconscious echo of the universe, of existence. The beat of the drums is what we are, who we are.

For many of the residents of nursing homes, in the last stages of their lives, their existence, whether they are conscious of it or not, is about reframing all they've learned. It's a time of re-youthanization, of finding big meaning in the small, about understanding each thread in their personal life weaving. It's about saying less and spending more time simply being. It's a time for breathing. And it's about timelessness. Rhythm was always there. Rhythm will remain after we're gone.

The beat of the drums -- do you sense it? Very faint and far away? The beat -- do you feel it? The rhythm -- can you feel it pulsing through every cell in your body? Can you? Can you feel it? The rhythm. Isn't it a cosmic miracle?