“Many areas of the brain are active in processing music because there’s so many dimensions to [it],” music therapist Meghan Callaghan said. “There’s the melody, there’s the harmony, there’s the rhythm in music, there’s the historical context, there’s the emotional connection to the music and then there’s the specific memory that somebody might have with that music and then there’s also the language.”
Understanding all those dimensions and how they can be used to help people who are approaching the end of their lives is exactly Callaghan’s job. The music therapist works with Hospice Compassus, helping patients address their emotional, psychological, physical and cognitive needs.
“Through involvement in music — whether that is singing, playing instruments, improvising music, composition, songwriting, moving to music — the music therapist is helping the person reach these therapeutic goals, which then generalizes to other areas of their lives,” Callaghan said.
She mentioned not all hospices offer music therapy, but Compassus understands how it can benefit some patients,
especially ones who have had a close connection with music throughout their lives — something Callaghan understands really well.
Callaghan has been working with Compassus and seeing patients in Sedona, Flagstaff and Prescott for three years. Although she worked as a music therapist in other settings, such as in special education, one could say end-of-life care is really her calling. That is because of the way it all started for her.
Her grandfather was in hospice care when she was a teenager, living with her and her parents.
“I think what happened is he had a stroke. I was caring for him that day and he deteriorated really fast and I didn’t know what to do, I was pretty anxious, and I ended up singing for him and he responded,” she said, adding he even clapped along to the song.
Although her grandfather was unable to communicate, Callaghan said she saw his eyes change and his aspect shift, which dissolved the accumulated stress in the two of them. Not having heard of music therapy before that moment, she called the idea of breaking into a song an inspiration.
“I knew he loved hearing me sing. I didn’t know what else to do then, but this intuition rose up within me and it was the right thing to do because I could just feel it dissolve, this stress of ‘I don’t know what to do, he’s suffering,’” she said. “Maybe it was divine inspiration, I like to think that it was something helping guide me through that experience, which then affected the rest of my life. That was an important life lesson to have early on, to trust that intuition.”
Now, Callaghan gets to help patients and families in Sedona that are going through similar situations. Callaghan explained that she needs to get a referral to see a patient. Often, a nurse will notice something in the patient that makes music therapy a good option. The needs can be physical — the patient is experiencing anxiety, anticipatory grief, shortness of breath or pain, for example — or emotional. People who are isolated and don’t get many visitors or patients who had a close identification with music throughout their lives.
In some cases, music can help patients get in touch with their feelings or express their emotions, even if it is not verbally. For people with Alzheimer’s, dementia or traumatic brain injury, whose brains are deteriorated, music therapy can also be helpful, she said.
“Something that we see — I mean, I see it all the time — with people who have dementia is that they may not be able to communicate very much anymore but they remember lyrics to entire songs,” Callaghan said. “It’s eudemonic, it’s a different kind of memory, but it helps them connect to this part of who they are because there’s an emotional connection to it, too.”
In other situations, it can help soothe their pain.
“I had a patient who was really short of breath … and, as he listened to the music he really liked, he became more and more relaxed. He actually had an oxygen saturation monitor on him and you could see the numbers increasing, so he became more and more relaxed and then eventually he actually fell asleep and he was having sleeping through the night that was the big deal with him,” she recalled. “So, the music helped him to eventually fall asleep and increase his oxygen levels and be able to breathe more deeply.”
As someone who uses music as a therapy for others, Callaghan has to find a way to keep connected to it too. A singer since childhood, she practices her singing outside of her patients’ rooms by directing a women’s choir.
“Singing is one of my spiritual practices because I did it when I was young and it is important as a music therapist to reconnect to music that is important to me, to be an inspired musician you have to keep feeling that,” she said. “So, that’s the way I nourish myself with music. For me, it’s more about relating to other people through music.”
