01/13/2026
The Blake Memory Care Unit and the New Piano
It has been a whirlwind of a topic on the piano in the past 48 hours so here is a full update. A simple “it’s free” post that turned into something of its own event. The good news is that the piano has a bright future and purpose ahead. It will be in the memory care center at the Blake playing music for those who have lost just enough of their brain function to no longer being able to be left alone, to those that have full on dementia… mostly the latter I expect.
There was a lot of interest in the piano and Roxie Bruno actually got to me second… sorry to the lady I skipped to do this. I’ll figure out how to make it up to you but you couldn’t have offered me enough money to not do this.
For those of you that have not experienced seeing dementia or Alzheimer’s up close, it’s one of the ugliest things you can witness happen to someone, and short of about a 20% chance, they will drift away by what seems like one brain cell at a time. You never know how much of them is still in there, but most of the time they have lost very little motor function other than the typical age / atrophy changes that come with aging.
The variations of the diseases differ so greatly that it’s sometimes difficult to see at first. Imagine losing just your sense of humor or just the inability to process bad news correctly… it can start so small for a year or two, nobody notices till you are down a path nobody is ready for. It’s exhausting for those around them as someone starts with a family type roommate that stays as long as they can be left alone safely… hopefully they don’t try to cook. I better not go this way because I’ll never stop cooking. Well it’s just a slow process through a vastly changing maze of memory loss maze of mazes. A new memory lost weekly. A lifelong skill suddenly lost… till they look like a healthy shell of what they were. In a lot of ways it’s the exact opposite of ALS.
A big thanks to Ian Roche for kicking off rounding up labor and the overall charitable nature of saying, “we can get this done with the three of us. Well more came to the plate too! Roxie, so glad you reached out and got this going. Claudia - can’t thank you enough for getting the muscle and equipment committed to this. Hopefully, soon this small group of mini-hero’s that have all pitched in with either genuine offers of equipment, or labor, or just encouragement, to those that are getting it done, we all get maybe a glimpse of what this does for those that have maybe one last smile or emotion left in them.
