The regular musical jam sessions that take place at the Morden Activity Centre are about much more than just entertainment.
The twice-a-month Healing Power of Music sessions make a real difference for people like Jim Stow and Bill Watson.
For Stow, music has been integral to his recovery from a stroke, and it provides a strong connection for Watson as he continues to deal with increasing dementia.
“It makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something and that I’m worth something. The applause helps,” Watson said after the jam session held last Wednesday afternoon.
“And he really gets joy out of it,” said Sally Marsolais, a Morden resident whose family Watson lives with. “This is his favorite thing … this is what he looks forward to the most.”
Stow had been spending winters in Arizona, and it was while he was there that he had a stroke.
“After I had my stroke, I couldn’t talk. I had to learn from the beginning by trying a few new words every day,” Stow said in an email interview. “I was reading at Kindergarten level—one word at a time but no sentences. “
They flew home about six weeks after it happened, and that was when a revelatory moment occured.
“Our son picked us up at the airport to drive us back to Carman. He had his three year old daughter Emily with him. Conversation was still near impossible, so part way home our son said, ‘Dad, why don’t you sing Emily that song you used to sing to us when we were kids?’
“I cautiously started to sing, and every word came out perfectly for all three verses,” he recalled. “Our son looked at my wife and said ‘where did that come from?’ It was at that moment that I realized that I would be able to talk again.
“For this reason, I wanted to start a jam session in the Morden Activity Centre because I believe that music can help heal the brain,” said Stow.
A fire in Portage la Prairie left Watson homeless, and he eventually ended up at Boundary Trails Health Centre. It was there about a year ago when he was diagnosed with dementia, and he then came to live in Morden with Marsolais.
“We picked him up on a Thursday, and by the following Monday, I recognized that the Bill that we knew, this was not him,” she recalled.
“Bill has stabilized in the last year. His health has significantly improved, and he is doing really well,” Marsolais noted, adding that about a month and a half ago another doctor confirmed the dementia.
Watson lamented that he lost almost everything aside from a guitar.
“You’ve got no freedom anymore. That was a big thing,” he said of the loss of his driver’s license as well, admitting that he had contemplated suicide at one point “not because I lost anything, but because I felt useless.”
He touched on his day-to-day reality at the moment.
“I may have dementia, but I’m not as deep into it yet as I will be … but I do notice that my memory isn’t what it used to be,” he said. “It’s like I stopped in a middle of a song there because I couldn’t remember anything … it was a blank.”
Watson then reflected on what music does for him.
“It tests my memory. I find memory coming back when I play music,” he said. “I’ve always played music. I’ve got 60 years of performing in public.”
Marsolais related how they might occasionally do karaoke and try to think of songs.
“I’ll pick a song, and he say, oh, I know that song, and then he just sings along. He knows the words, and they just come like that,” she said.
She also recalled how he got a song book at Christmas and thought he wouldn’t know the songs.
“I said, Bill, you probably know most if not all of them. I don’t know any of them, so we went through the whole song book. There were a few old school English ones that he didn’t know, but he knew them … just looking at it, he didn’t recognize it, but as soon as hears the music, the words, it takes him back and the words just flow out of him.”
Marsolais sees how music stirs emotions for Watson and still sees him occasionally start writing.
“He’ll get his book, and he’ll be writing down words, and that’s one of the ways that he expresses his emotions as well and his thoughts and his history … he writes about things that he knows,” she said.
“I used to have a repertoire of over a thousand songs without a book. Now, I’m down to about 30,” Watson said. “It’s in there, but it’s hard to get them out.”
As a lead musician for the jam sessions, Dave Stobbe noted how they also benefit him as well.
“If I play, I keep my skills up, but more importantly, I get to mix with people, and I think it keeps me sharp,” he said. “We often think that it’s for the audience to have some healing, but I think us musicians on stage are experiencing some of those similar things as well.
“We don’t know the back stories of people and what they have gone through, but when they share things, it’s a pretty impressive experience, and I think it’s similar for the audience.”
