Playing the piano or learning to play the piano is good for the brain at any age. For retirees and beyond, it is a great way of helping to keep the brain fit and active. I think the perfect example of this was my own Grandmother.
Music kind of runs in our family and even though her family was not well off, she learned to play the piano as a child (she was probably taught by another family member). She would have had piano lessons for about 4 years.
I don’t know at what stage she stopped playing the piano, but I heard that she never had anytime to play the piano when she was raising 5 kids. Apparently she stopped playing the piano until all 5 of her children had grown up and left home. In a lot of ways this is very understandable. Being a parent gives you tremendous responsibility and the demands are constant. Also she would not have had the modern conveniences we take for granted now. I’m sure her housework was her daily workout – she would have had no need for a gym membership.
The other factor that would have made raising and caring for children all the more difficult was that she was doing it during the great depression and World War II.
When her kids had left home, she found that she now had time on her hands. I’m not sure whether she planned to spend her retirement years playing the piano or whether it just happened, because she always had her piano and she had held onto the music she had played as a teenager.
When I was a kid, I remember the family trips interstate to visit her (my Grandfather had passed away when I was very young) and we would stay with my Grandmother. Every morning, except for Sundays when she went to church, she would spend her mornings playing the piano.
Her routine was to get up, get dressed, brush her long silver hair and twist it into a bun. She would then have her breakfast, wash the few dishes and go straight to the piano.
My Grandmother would then spend the next few hours playing the piano and sometimes she would sing if the music had lyrics. She was always so happy playing the piano. It was always the same pieces of music but she didn’t care. I didn’t mind that she played the same music all the time because I knew how much joy she got from playing the piano.
She was always so happy playing her piano that she would often loose track of time. She even told me once when I was a teenager that she would often be at her piano so long that she would sit and play until lunchtime. She even told me (and it was confirmed by one of my Aunts) that sometimes the people from Meals on Wheels, who would deliver to her a hot lunch every weekday, would be literally banging on her front door because she was too focused on her music to hear someone merely knocking. Everyone thought this regular occurrence was amusing and no-one ever got annoyed simply because she was just so happy playing the piano.
My beautiful Grandmother went from being a ‘senior’ to being an old lady. At the age of 91, she moved in with one of my aunts and she stopped playing the piano because she was forgetting how to play and making too many mistakes for her liking. A couple of years later she moved into an aged care facility where she lived for a few more years.
I am so impressed and in awe of my Grandmother that she could live in her own home, still doing all her own housework and taking good care of herself, with the one exception of receiving a hot meal 5 days a week. I have always credited her good health and longevity in part to her playing the piano everyday for many, many years. I also think her piano playing helped delay her getting dementia and I know it would have probably slowed the progress of the disease.
My Grandmother passed away at the age of 99, just ten weeks short of her 100th birthday (and if it wasn’t for her catching pneumonia, she might have lived a few more years!)
I definitely think learning to play the piano, or returning to playing the piano is so worthwhile on so many levels. I believe it helps with delaying physical as well as mental decline. I hope you find the joy my Grandmother had in playing the piano and that you have a long and fulfilling retirement.