Last Sunday, wearing a wild headband of flowers and streamers, I attended the dedication of a memorial bench at Baltimore’s Lake Roland Park to a woman who followed her passion and whose legacy is still growing, with a little help from her son.
Norma Griner was a classically inspired singer and mother of four. I wrote about her two decades ago in a Baltimore Sun piece titled, “Heart and Soul,” when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Chorus disbanded. Every night of the week she sang in a choral arts group or attended a performance. Tuesdays, for 24 years, she rehearsed with the BSO chorus. What would she do now on Tuesday nights? Before bursting into a section of Franz Schubert’s The Trout Quintet, she told me she would keep singing. She couldn’t live without it.
In early 2021 I learned from Norma’s son, Larry, that in place of a packed concert hall accompanied by a 100-piece orchestra, she was singing to strangers from a picnic table accompanied by an iPhone. She had dementia. To brighten her days, her son played classical pieces on his phone, prompting her into song and sometimes singing with her. She beckoned passersby—a bride and groom on their wedding day, walkers, fishers, and families with kids in strollers, some of whom became friends—to her performances of opera arias, Bach solos, pop tunes, Ave Maria, and her attempts to catch the beat of new music say, rap, that her son introduced.
All Norma’s children played music to lift her spirits. But Larry, who quit his manufacturing job in California to help with her care, started posting videos of his mother’s outings in the park on Facebook and YouTube. He bought her three funny headpieces to wear while she sang. Gradually Norma accumulated 300-plus hats and headbands, one more outrageous than the next—bunny ears, shamrocks, a giant turkey—all of them gifts from strangers from 20 countries who discovered her on YouTube. She mouthed the high notes—she was an alto—and orchestrated with her hands swept upward, her eyes darting, and her brows arched. Her music was visceral. Her second act was not solely about lifting souls through music; Norma made people laugh with her conversation and her flirting, (are you married? she asked many a passing man). Here is Norma singing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ya5pYF9eBo&t=2
By now 200,000 people have shared their stories with Larry about caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease, he says. He has 2,500 videos of Norma and 7,000 Facebook followers taking inspiration from Norma’s music, a therapy for dementia patients that is under academic study. Alzheimer’s caregivers from California to Florida have flown to Baltimore to hear Norma sing and share their stories.
At the bench dedication, Norma’s children gave out colorful headbands and passed around a box of rose petals from her garden. Guests tossed handfuls of them into Lake Roland as a final salute to her. I watched the rose petals float away in the direction of the home and gardens of another Baltimore woman I have written about who followed her passion, the pioneering children’s heart doctor, Helen Taussig, subject of my upcoming biography; (A Heart Afire, MIT Press). Their paths very nearly crossed. Helen was a regular at Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concerts until she moved away in 1977, one year before Norma joined the chorus. They were both gardeners. They are also connected by their passion and their refusal to give up. Norma’s passion was music, Helen’s to prevent suffering. While Norma toward the end of her life used music to help herself and others fight Alzheimer’s disease, Helen’s second act, planned a short walk from Norma’s bench but 60 years earlier, was to help protect Americans from unsafe drugs. Her work is not done, either.
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