GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Roz Oates
(Roz is a Ph.D. candidate with Durham University’s ‘Hearing the Voice’ research team. She presented this project at the This Is My Body conference, featured in an earlier post.)

Exploring the Power of Reminiscence Poetry to Assist those with Cognitive Decline

Recent research shows that poetry provides a medium for those with dementia to speak out about their experiences of living with the disease. Those with medium-state dementia, such as my grandmother, who can no longer write poetry alone, can however be assisted to do so. After going to a talk given by , a poet who has made ‘poems out of the world of people with dementia for the past fifteen years’, I decided that I would try to co-facilitate poetry with my grandmother.

*

She was keen to write poems with me. The wider context of our being together and having a cup of tea was crucial to creating and sharing the poems. I therefore made a point of starting the session each time in this way. I then suggested to my grandmother a theme such as ‘going to the seaside when a child’, and we explored this memory together. After that, we started the poem. If my grandmother had difficulty thinking of a first line, I asked leading questions: Why did you like going to the seaside? Did you take a bucket to the seaside? What colour was it? After a short time, my grandmother usually got into a flow, and she did not need me to ask leading questions as often. I read the poem aloud back to her as it grew, so that she would be reminded of what she had said. Afterwards I gave my grandmother a printed copy of the poem. These poems offer helpful benefits by enabling my grandmother to convey the subjective reality of dementia and by restoring personhood and dignity.
      Below is a poem that I wrote with my grandmother about her bedroom in her present nursing home.

My Room is my Castle

My room is my castle.
It has three solid walls,
and a fourth, with a big window.
It’s very warm and comforting
and sometimes I’m alone in it
and sometimes I have friends with me.
It’s a very good way of living
when you’re old and getting tired,
because always the situation can fit
your present needs. It has moveable walls
and a very high ceiling
and if you wish you can reach for the stars.
With the stars come many, many memories
of a life that was young and not so young
and very old.

My grandmother’s description of her room as ‘my castle’ suggests a level of contentment, where she feels protected. Although it ‘can fit her present needs’ as she says, she also seeks a fantastical dimension. The room has ‘moveable walls’ and ‘a very high ceiling’ that allows her to reach for the stars. This seems to give her comfort, while enabling her to bridge together the different phases of her life from the young to the very old.

*

Poetry particularly lends itself to facilitating communication with someone with dementia. As poetry is often learnt in infancy, its rhythms and sounds make it the most memorable language. The free verse form which my grandmother uses allows her to use short phrases, without feeling the pressure to provide cohesive sentences that prose demands. Poetry also brings vivid images into my grandmother’s mind, such as the castle, which is associated with security, and then comfort. At the point where my grandmother struggled to think of a new line, using a cat puppet to act out the next sentence helped with creating a flow. This also added to the enjoyment that she found in creating the poem. Overall, the process seems to have helped my grandmother, who is unable to accept her present life with dementia, to reflect on positive memories of past lives, and this encourages her to communicate more.
      Creating these poems also provided a focus for the time I spent with my grandmother, and she felt encouraged that we were doing something productive together. In her own words, ‘writing poems is like playing bat and ball’, as we engage in this collaboration. Even though her memory is now very compromised, the poetry stays in her mind to some point, as she can remember that we write poetry together.

*

This process has triggered my interest in beginning a research project, where I will co-facilitate poetry with several patients who have early to medium stage dementia, using the same method that I did with my grandmother. By showing what qualities poetry has to convey the sense of loss for the dementia sufferer, I will investigate how metaphor is a primary agent in gaining the dementia sufferer some self-assurance and sense of identity. In the ‘now-orientated existence’ of dementia, argues that the metaphors the dementia patient uses to describe the past may provide insight into their current experience of the disease.
      However, I am also interested in whether it is the case that these poems, by bringing together true and false memories – for they may well not all be true – can lead to an overall gain in true memories. So to establish the reliability and accuracy of a person’s recollections, I will compare the content of the memory before writing a poem, with that presented during the process, then after. I also plan to revisit the same recollection on a separate occasion, when I will ask the dementia sufferer about the same theme, such as visiting the seaside, so as to produce a second poem, and see if similar images and connections are generated.