Living in coronavirusworld 139: I just want to go home

8/14

hmmm...what next?

Going to Trenton to visit my mom. Realize I haven’t seen her in person since February 22nd! Almost six months.  And that long since I’ve taken that familiar New Jersey Transit train  trip. And five months since I’ve been in Penn Station.  What I find is that same eerie emptiness I found at La Guardia.   Only a few eating places, newsstands and a drug store open. And more homeless people than I’ve ever seen laid out on the floor. My train is maybe a third full.

My sister meets me and we go to my mother’s assisted care facility. She gets one  30 minute supervised visit with two people once a week. A multi-page health form to fill out. Our chairs are at least six feet from hers. And of course masks.  And an attendant keeping a wary eye. My mom has trouble hearing, she scoots forward a little. The attendant intervenes. When she can’t hear, she lowers her mask and we tell her that doesn’t help. The thirty minutes go fast. I feel like you just got here, she says. As I get up to leave, she reaches out her hand, I give her a fist bump. The attendant immediately comes over and tells me if I do it again, I won’t be allowed back. Immediate disinfection steps taken. 

My sister and I go for lunch at a pleasant outdoor Italian restaurant. We talk about the sale of her house. It’s a common story.  In order to keep up the payments for her facility, we’ve got to liquidate all the resources she and my dad spent a lifetime building. That’s what we do here.  If my sister takes her to get a new hearing aid, she’ll have to be back in quarantine for two weeks. As we talk, I realize how like incarceration her current situation is. Kept in one room, one isolated visit to the dining room  a week, one visit with family, closely watched. Only better decor and food. And the food part, maybe not. Quarantine after a trip out is actually like solitary confinement. Which has been deemed “cruel and usually punishment.” Look, I get it.  They’ve only lost one person while over 40000 have died in nursing homes across the country. But the psychic and emotional toll of extended isolation  has not been fully recognized for the residents. Who feel like inmates, isolated, alone, cut off. This too, is deadly.

Back home, our weekly family ZOOM visit is going on. Talk about returning to school. My high school music teacher son in Berlin is upset that other schools are allowing ensembles to meet, while his is not. He does not really believe kids need this level of protection. (See New York Times, “Don’t call kids Covid spreaders”, 8/15/20) He also has an intuition that New York City may have hit the herd immunity stage. 

Register to vote. 

parties in the park

I take a walk. 115th is closed off. There’s voters registration and children’s activities like “double Dutch” jump rope going on.  The park is filled with multiple parties, the parks have become our living rooms. I watch a goose for 15 minutes, walking gingerly over the rough sidewalk. Grazing in the grass. It raises its head, listening, pondering. Only aware of its own universe. Pondering when to return to the water. Only peripherally aware of me.  I sometimes feel like that goose, wondering what’s beyond my own awareness, beyond the periphery.

Later, my mom calls. She had fallen into tears after we left. The visit only enough to stir up the emotions. Remind her of what’s missing.  I tell her that she needs to continue to believe this will pass. She’s 92. “I just want to go home” she says.