Mourning in America: COVID-19 Is Not Theoretical. It Is Real, and Very Personal.
We Talk About the Numbers, but the Numbers Represent Real Stories
We Talk About the Numbers, but the Numbers Represent Real Stories
Dad, mom, Annie and me during a visit to Elkhorn-Jones in January.
My friend Elizabeth Jaeger posted an essay to her blog about the wreckage that is caused when a family member contracts the coronavirus, and how its impact spreads from the ailing family member to others.
Her key line — the money quote — is this:
“The pandemic isn’t about statics or a failed federal government. It certainly isn’t a hoax. It’s about one of the people I love most being taken from me way to soon.”
My mom is in a memory care unit in Las Vegas. Elkhorn-Jones is a small, but excellent facility that specializes in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. Its staff is amazingly attentive and they keep the residents busy and engaged, which keeps people like my mom on an even keel.
Before going into the facility, she would get agitated often. My dad was no longer capable of managing her and keeping her busy and focused, so she would endlessly reorganize the Tupperware containers in the kitchen, reshuffle the pantry stock, and rant about people coming into the house — people who only existed in her Alzheimer’s distorted mind.
Going into Elkhorn has been the best thing for her, as I said, but dad struggled with the decision from the very beginning, battling the inevitable guilt and struggling to overcome boredom and loneliness. I don’t think I fully understood how lonely he was until the lockdown began, and the one lifeline he had to my mom was temporarily severed. I’ve been talking to him at least twice daily during this crisis, and some days it is hard. When I get frustrated at his unwillingness to do anything about his boredom, which happens far more often than I care to admit, I have to remind myself that he has spent several years watching my mom, his wife of soon-to-be 60 years recede into a different reality, and that he has had to let her go, move out. There is a kind of mourning that comes with this that few of us can understand. As he told me one day as he complained about how others would approach him and tell him they understood because they had a brother or aunt or close friend go through it: “It’s not the same. This is a spouse. This is my mate.”
On Monday, he told me that Elkhorn had called him and that my mother was confused and seemed unsure that she was married. “Do I have a husband?” she apparently asked. The arranged for him to talk with her via FaceTime and, while it settled him and seemed to help her, the reality is that this preventative quarantine is accelerating her detachment from our space and her shift into a space none of us can comprehend.
I had already come to grips with it, as far as my relationship with her. Living in New Jersey has meant that, over the last couple of years as her condition has worsened, I could only visit twice a year or so. Distance, as the cliche goes, may make the heart grow fonder, but it wreaks havoc on the mind of someone with dementia. Distance means forgetting, and when we were out in Las Vegas in January, it was clear that she was struggling to remember who I was, who my wife was, our names, our relationships. I was her friend. Annie was her girl. My dad was her guy.
Dad lives only a couple miles from Elkhorn, but he might as well live anywhere on the planet, because he can’t visit. And the longer this goes on, the more lonely he will get and the more memory she’ll lose.
I don’t see another option, however, despite what we are hearing from President Trump and others on lifting the stay-at-home measures. The virus is spreading rapidly. The number of positives is growing exponentially and, while it initially was most dangerous for the aged and those with compromised systems, we are hearing reports that otherwise healthy younger people are dying.
Still, the most vulnerable are seniors — my dad, my mom — and nursing homes and assisted living facilities pose special risks. The first major outbreak in the United States occurred in a nursing home in Washington state, while 43 of the state’s 375 long-term-care facilities (11.5 percent of all facilities) have had cases of COVID-19.
We need to keep those facilities on lockdown to limit their interaction with family, friends, service workers, and others, so that we have a chance at preventing the virus from attacking residents. And we need to maintain the social-distancing rules we’ve been using — or many of us have been using — so we can manage risk.
I understand that people are frustrated by being forced to shelter-in-place during this pandemic. I understand that, for many of us, those who are healthy, who have few or no risk factors, these measures seem extreme and the threat seems theoretical. It is not. The numbers we see on the news are real people with loved ones who have been left behind, who have been left to mourn, often without having the chance to say goodbye.
And that’s a tragedy that cannot be quantified.