76-year-old forgets her granddaughter but knows every Taylor Swift song — concert moment shocked all BB

Who are you? My grandmother asked me for the third time that morning. I’m Emma. I’m 19. I’m her granddaughter. But Alzheimer’s took that memory. It took almost everything except Taylor Swift lyrics. Those she remembered perfectly. So I took her to a concert, hoping music could give me back what disease had stolen.

3 hours with my grandmother who knew my name. My grandmother, Elellanena, was the most brilliant person I’d ever known. She had a PhD in literature, taught college for 30 years, spoke three languages, read two books a week, even after she retired. She could quote Shakespeare from memory, recite entire poems, tell you the plot of every novel she’d ever read.

She remembered everything until she didn’t. The first signs were small. She’d repeat stories we’d heard before. Forget where she’d put her keys. Call my mom by her sister’s name. Normal aging stuff. We thought she was 74. Everyone gets a little forgetful. But it got worse fast. Really fast. Within 6 months, she’d gotten lost.

driving to the grocery store she’d been going to for 20 years. She’d left the stove on three times. She’d called me Rachel, my mom’s name. And when I corrected her, she’d looked at me with this blank confusion, like she had no idea who either of us were. The diagnosis came when she was 75. Early onset Alzheimer’s disease, aggressive progression.

The neurologist was blunt. She’ll decline rapidly. Within a year, she probably won’t recognize family members. Within two, she may not speak. There’s no cure. We can slow it down slightly, but we can’t stop it. My mom, Rachel, took it hard. That’s her mother, the woman who raised her, who was at every school play, who taught her to read, who was her best friend.

And now she was going to forget all of it. I was 18 when Grandma Elellanena was diagnosed. I just graduated high school. I was supposed to go away to college, but I deferred. I couldn’t leave. Not when we were losing her by the day. The decline was brutal to watch. Every week she lost something else. She forgot how to work the TV remote.

Forgot the names of her neighbors. forgot that my grandfather had died 10 years ago and would ask where he was. When we reminded her, she’d grieve him fresh like it just happened, crying for a husband who’d been gone a decade. By the time she was 76, she didn’t know my mom most days. The woman who’d given birth to her, raised her, talked to her every single day for 53 years.

She didn’t recognize her. My mom would say, “Hi, Mom. It’s Rachel.” And Grandma Eleanor would smile politely like she was meeting a stranger. “That’s nice, dear.” She’d say, “Do I know you?” It broke my mom every single time. With me, it was worse somehow. I was her first grandchild. She’d been there when I was born, changed my diapers, babysat me every weekend, taught me to read.

We’d been close my whole life, and now when I walked into a room, she’d look at me with zero recognition. “Who are you?” she’d ask. “I’m Emma, your granddaughter.” “Oh, how nice,” she’d say. But I could see it in her eyes. She had no idea who Emma was. The forgetting got worse. She forgot how to eat sometimes.

Just stared at the fork like she didn’t know what to do with it. forgot how to get dressed, forgot words. She’d try to say something and the word just wouldn’t come, replaced by frustration and confusion. My mom and I tried everything to reach her. Photo albums, she didn’t recognize anyone in them. Her favorite books, she couldn’t follow the plot.

Old family videos, strangers on a screen. She was disappearing. The woman who’d been Eleanor Chen, brilliant professor, loving mother, doting grandmother. That woman was gone. And in her place was someone who didn’t know where she was or who we were. Except for one impossible thing. She could still sing every Taylor Swift song perfectly.

I discovered it by accident. I was sitting with her one afternoon and love story came on the radio in her memory care facility. Grandma Eleanor, who couldn’t remember eating breakfast, who’d asked me my name three times that day, started singing along. Every word, every note, perfect. I stopped breathing. Grandma, how do you know this song? She looked at me confused.

Everyone knows this song, dear, but you don’t remember anything else. Who are you again? She asked. I pulled out my phone and played. You belong with me. She sang every word. Shake it off. Every word, blank space, every word. Song after song. She knew them all. Her face would light up. She’d smile for 3 minutes. She wasn’t confused or lost. She was just singing.

I went home and researched it. Turns out music memory is stored differently in the brain than other memories. It’s in multiple regions, deeply embedded. One of the last things Alzheimer’s takes. Some patients who can’t recognize their own children can still sing songs from their youth. It’s called the music memory phenomenon.

For Grandma Elellanena, those songs were Taylor Swift. She’d become a fan late in life. Started listening when I was a teenager and obsessed. She’d humor me, play the albums while we baked cookies, learned the words while I sang them too loud in her car. Those memories were so strong, so deeply embedded that even Alzheimer’s couldn’t touch them.

Every day after that, I’d visit and play Taylor Swift. For those 3 minutes per song, I had my grandmother back. Not completely. She still didn’t know my name, but she was present. She was happy. She was Elellanena. My mom and I talked about it constantly. She remembers the songs, but not us. Mom said crying. How is that fair? It wasn’t fair, but it was something.

It was more than we had with anything else. The era store was announced a year after grandma’s diagnosis. I didn’t even think about going. I was spending all my time with her, watching her fade. Concerts felt trivial compared to losing her. But one day, I was playing Marjgery in her room. The song Taylor wrote about her grandmother who died.

Grandma Elellanena was singing along. And when it got to the line, what died didn’t stay dead, she started crying. Not confused crying. Real emotional crying. That’s beautiful, she said. Who sings this? Taylor Swift grandma. I love her, she said simply. That’s when I had the idea. It was crazy. She was 76 with advanced Alzheimer’s.

She could barely leave the facility. She needed help with everything. Taking her to a stadium concert with 70,000 people was objectively a terrible idea, but she loved Taylor Swift. It was the only thing she still loved that she could articulate, and I was losing her. The doctors said she’d declined to nonverbal within months.