Unlocking Spiritual Memories

Alzheimer’s disease has stolen the holidays from many residents of the Walnut Manor retirement community in Anaheim. But for a few moments Friday, the patients snatched back Christmas from the grip of the disease.

In a special church service, more than 60 elderly men and women--some of whom couldn’t say their own names--somehow found the words to sing “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World,” songs buried so deep in their memory that the disease had not found them yet.

“It taps people at the deepest places in their soul,” Chaplain Patrice Nordstrand said. “I think it also gives families a sense of hope again. Patients who don’t talk are suddenly praying along with you. Catholics remember the sign of the cross.”

The holiday event is part of a religious outreach by the Alzheimer’s Assn. of Orange County, whose officials have scheduled monthly services at local churches and temples through next year.

The idea is to give the county’s estimated 50,000 Alzheimer’s patients a small dose of the religion they grew up with. Because Scripture and prayer are so familiar, so ingrained, the hope is that they might pierce the darkness the disease has draped around its victims, so that, if only for a few moments, the light may shine through.

“Some of the patients didn’t know who they were anymore,” said Jacque Schweppe, chairwoman of the association’s religious outreach committee, which set up a visit earlier this year to Fountain Valley’s Congregation B’nai Tzedek. “But they knew what to do with the Torah.”

The program started two years ago when Denise Rupp, an Orange resident, read about a church service for Alzheimer’s patients in the eastern part of the country. She decided to try it. She brought her mother, who had the disease, along with a handful of other patients to a local church.

When she was wheeled to the foot of the large wooden cross in the sanctuary, Mildred Still, 82, became agitated. Rupp tried to comfort her, but she didn’t know how. Her mother’s words were indecipherable--a symptom of the disease.

When the pastor started the Lord’s Prayer, the older woman suddenly became peaceful and began to recite the words perfectly: “. . . hallowed be thy name.”

“I just held her and cried,” Rupp said. “It was a wonderful, wonderful gift for me and for her. I knew she was still there.”

Dr. Stephanie Moore, a Tustin neuro-psychologist and memory expert, cautions that the religious services, while beneficial to many, are not for all Alzheimer’s patients. If a person is of a different faith or gets rattled by too much stimuli, she said, the service may be upsetting.

“What we’re giving, those people may or may not want,” Moore said. But Moore believes strong faith can help people with the disease.

“People who have spirituality adapt to the disease and its deficits much better than those who don’t,” said Moore, whose mother has Alzheimer’s. “They knew where they were going [when they die] before they got the disease. That’s a part of them.”

The association’s officials schedule services on weekdays so operators of adult day-care centers can plan outings for their clients. The services are limited to about 30 minutes to suit the patients’ limited attention spans.

At Friday’s service, many of the congregants joined in singing the Christmas carols. Others stared blankly from their wheelchairs, wrapped in knitted blankets to fend off the church’s draft. Still others fell asleep.

“You never know,” Nordstrand said. “Their mind may still be active. It’s important that we don’t forget about people because we are uncomfortable with their spiritual needs.”

Rupp, whose mother died this summer, believes “spirituality doesn’t stop just because the brain is not functioning properly.”

“It’s very hard to tell what they are thinking or feeling,” she said. “But there is some sense of peace they get from the services.”

Every so often she witnesses a breakthrough like the time a former pastor who had Alzheimer’s sat in a church, mesmerized by the music: “He said that he heard angels singing.”