Amour, Part II

One other thing that struck us about Amour: that caring for an aging spouse is remarkably like caring for an infant or a toddler, with perhaps an added dose of mortification, and an accompanying sense of loss. It's a truism, I suppose, that old age is a second childhood. But we'd rarely seen the point made so obviously, so visually. Leaning over, to support someone who can barely walk? Hey, we've been there, and not too long ago. Changing a diaper? Hundreds of times. Trying to prod a spoonful of food into an unwilling mouth? Yes, yes again. Of course, one parents with an eye towards an expanding future, and one nurses an aging patient, I presume, with a sense of contraction. But the gestures, the liturgy, are superficially identical.

Might one say something similar about our relationships with music? We teach our children largely through music: through rhymes, through melodies, and through ditties. Cleo, today, surprised me by singing a version of The Ants Go Marching; this evening she gestures vigorously as she participated in a round of The Wheels on the Bus. And now music is being used with elderly patients suffering from dementia, as well; Oliver Sacks and others have argued that it has a unique ability to spark recall, or to evoke buried emotions. Familiar and popular songs seem to stir, in young and old, warm reactions. It's only that those reactions gain in intensity, depth, and even pathos when they are backed by decades of active memories, rather than hopes for years to come.

On a rote level, children eat, and listen, like the elderly. But the same basic actions are colored by different valences.