What the Music Remembers: Inside Park Place's Memory Care Unit
On the second floor of Park Place, there is a woman in memory care whose mobility is limited and whose memory, both short-term and long-term, is significantly affected. And yet, the moment a familiar song starts, she sings right along without looking at the words. When the visiting pastor delivers a sermon she recognizes, she prays and recites alongside him.
"As soon as they start with the song that she knows," says Cindy Gutierrez, the life enrichment worker for the Memory Care Unit, "she just goes right to singing."
It is, as Cindy puts it, a window into what the disease cannot take.
Cindy came to this work early, and not by choice. She was 13 years old when both of her great-grandparents developed dementia at the same time. Her great-grandfather was also diagnosed with brain cancer and eventually passed away. After his death, her great-grandmother's condition began to worsen. The family leaned in together.
"I've been very comfortable helping people with dementia," she says. "I learned a few tricks from there."
She went on to work as a nanny for several years before reaching a fork in the road: recertify as a nanny or pursue certification as a CNA. She chose the CNA route and was placed almost immediately on a memory care unit. The staff noticed quickly that she had something they couldn't train for, an instinct for approaching residents in distress, for reading moods, for helping people feel oriented and calm.
They asked her to stay on the memory care floor. When an activities position through Life Enrichment came open, they asked her to take it. She's been in that lane ever since.
"I really do truly love life enrichment," she says. "That's where I’d like to stay."
At Park Place, the second floor is home to what staff call the Memory Care Unit. When the position opened for a life enrichment specialist there, Cindy raised her hand without hesitation. Her supervisor Emily interviewed her on a Friday and asked if she could start right away. It wasn't a hard question.
Her days run from 9:30 to 5:30, and they are full. She leads sing-alongs, team balloon ball, ring toss, Bozo buckets, and mind jogger games. She runs "Finish the Phrase" rounds (the apple never falls far from the tree) and watches residents complete the sentences without missing a beat.
The team games are among her favorites to run because of what happens when everyone is in the room together doing something at the same time. "It just expounds on everyone," she says. "Everyone's laughing, everyone's enjoying it, everyone's having fun." The joy multiplies. That is the point.
But it is the music that does the most remarkable things. Residents who struggle with memory, with speech, with knowing where they are, they hear a song they have known since childhood, and something unlocks. The music goes somewhere that the disease cannot reach.
Cindy speaks about the families with particular tenderness. They come in, often, carrying grief — the slow grief of watching someone they love slip away, the helplessness that memory care can press onto the people who visit.
What she loves most is watching that change.
"When they start feeling better, when they start feeling that joy," she says of those moments when a resident sings, laughs, bats a balloon across a circle, "there's that light." And the families see it. They sit in on the games, watch the movies alongside the residents, join the bingo games. They stop feeling like outsiders looking in.
"When the families feel welcome too," she says, "that's what I love."
She was named Employee of the Month at Park Place, recognition that her colleagues say simply reflects what anyone watching her work already knows.
Cindy grew up in a family of service. Her mother was a nurse for many years before retiring. Her father was a steel mill worker and a veteran. Both of her brothers served, one in the Navy, one in the Army. Her sister went into dentistry. They all live within a few blocks of each other in Hammond, a little square of family anchored close together, the kind of proximity that makes holidays easy and hard times easier.
Cindy came to Park Place through a connection she had built years earlier at St. Anthony's, where a supervisor had first recognized her gift for this work and later, after COVID scattered everyone into agency positions, reached out and said: come here, we need someone like you.
She had spent her agency years moving from facility to facility, never quite settling. What she wanted, she says, was a home base. A unit where she knew everyone. A place she could learn deeply.
Park Place was that. She knew it quickly.
