Easing Memory Loss with Yolo Hospice

I recently had the opportunity to partner up with Yolo Hospice, the Davis Senior Center and Comfort Keepers to have a showing of the documentary, "Alive Inside." The story of the film centers around how the Music & Memory program can help people with advanced dementia access memories long dormant. Yolo Hospice is a certified Music & Memory program facilitator.

Two attendees to the Easing Memory Loss event at the Davis Senior Center on June 23, 2017, practice dance steps taught by Barbara Nicholas.

Later Barbara Nicholas, a dance teacher, showed participants how to do the basics of ballroom dancing. A recent 21 year long study of the relationship between leisure activities and risk of dementia published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that dancing had the strongest impact on decreasing subjects' likelihood of developing dementia. It reduced dementia risk by 76 percent, the highest of the activities studied.

My Grandfather's American Dream

I recently had the opportunity to participate in the Atlantic magazine's American Dream collaboration with EchoSight. Below is a paragraph I was able to include about my grandfather:

“Growing up in Puerto Rico, my grandfather didn’t have many options for work. After being drafted during the Korean War and serving at a Chicago hospital, mi abuelo worked many blue-collar jobs to support his wife and four children. Taxi driver, factory worker, and medical technician are just a few of the titles he held. Now he is forgetting his American Dream because of the dementia he suffers.”