Vikram's First Reflection

Welcome to Becoming Best Friends! My name is Vikram and I will be posting regularly about my experiences at the Best Friends program at Bridgepointe at Ashgrove Woods. My first visit was Friday, fortunately I got there soon enough to experience all of music time! How music time works is, anyone can play an instrument or perform for everyone if they want and there will always be group participation at some point. For my first music time, we each got a book with the 50+ pages of lyrics to songs and a lady played the piano while everyone else sang along. Personally, I am a little shy and find it hard to sing in front of people I just met but hopefully I get into it with time. I could have been completely blind to the fact that a lot of the residents were struggling with Alzheimer's Disease. The music had therapeutic properties; everyone's stresses and sadness were forgotten. What surprised me when talking with my new friend was that sadness and emotions aren't caused by Alzheimer's, they're expedited by it. I now actually believe the onset of Alzheimer's can be induced by emotional trauma such as the loss of a spouse. That's one of the things we were told to avoid talking about but I found that with my new friend, that's all she wanted to talk about. I tried making small talk about places and food and got little feedback but she seemed to want to talk about the thing that made her the saddest. Maybe we need to vent our emotions and talk about the ones we lost otherwise we'll never find closure in losing them. I am by no means saying forget about them or move on but if they were such an important part of someone's life. It should be important to remember all the good things and times with them and learn to appreciate the time spent with them rather than dread having years that could have been with them stolen.

Going back to the atmosphere of the program, it was like a big family with everyone poking fun at each other and young at heart. Some of the residents were not as energetic but everyone still participated in the activities. I do like the activities, however I think it would be cool to get more one-on-one time with people and be able to sort of mingle and form little groups for discussions where Best Friends could talk about their life stories within each other and find similarities and differences.