A Pandemic hit our Little Home
*names have been changed and initials have been used for privacy*
My first day at work in February 2020 was normal. Shyly, I shadowed the other Activities staff with the two-tiered, plastic shelved cart stocked with coloring materials, books, menu papers, CDs, and little odds-and-ends. When I was with Debbie, with her let-somebody-try-me attitude accompanied with her short, blonde, flared-up hairstyle, we’d pass the hot drink table, turn left, pass the gift shop, and punch in the password at the stubborn double doors to the kitchen. Frantically, I’d watch her fingers press the numbers and try to mentally stuff whatever I saw into the endless code bank at the nursing home.
“They usually like when I bring them snacks,” she said that day, “they don’t want that crap up there.”
I liked Debbie. I liked how she came in every day with her full self and let people deal with the rest. I liked how she’d tell me smoking was a bad habit to have on her way outside to have a cigarette. I liked how she knew names and joked around, and how when she saw me hesitate in interacting with a resident, she told me not to worry, “I’d learn everything.”
Everything was an understatement.
I began to hear mumblings about some virus on residents’ televisions in March, how it was in China, and other faraway places, but my mind couldn’t fathom it being any closer. Eventually, as days of virus news coverage went by, it became background noise.
Our weekly nursing home musical performances from shaggy haired women guitarists and bearded singers continued.
The Activities staff would take the elevators up to each floor and travel back down to the ground level, wheeling each resident down the ramp easing into the large living room. I would turn them backward and roll them over the bump at the frame of the door, asking them if they were excited. The ladies with their curled hair and bingo prize rings would smile a polite, “yes” and typically, I’d get a straightforward nod from the men.
One by one, we’d roll the residents into rows. When those filled up, we’d push their wheelchairs to the rim of the room or guide them to a chair with a hand over the hunch of their backs.
As our musical guest strummed on their guitar and belted out the lyrics to what always seemed to be Country Road by John Denver, little cups of ice cream or plates of cake would be handed to each resident — not without a double check from the stapled pages of the dietary lists.
P would sit in his wheelchair and nod his head between his plate of food and the performer at the front of the room. His graphic tee shirts would often end up sprinkled with crumbs that fell from the white, wiriness of his long beard.
S, with all her feistiness, would bring her set of sticks down from her room and play on the metal of her walker. The pitter-patter of the wood wove melodies around the singer’s words that made everyone smile in amazement. Her roommate M was never too fond of her playing because she was never too fond of S. One time, she had gotten so jealous that she made us all listen to her sing Ave Maria after seeing how enthralled the room was with her roommate’s playing.
I wish I had savored these moments a little more when I got the chance to stand at the back of the room between my trash collection rounds. I wish I had looked around the room and stopped at each face — sleeping, eating, smiling, stoic, singing — and stayed a while.
The first death that struck the building started a wave that rolled right into the storm the virus brought.
It all started with F.
F was a rock.
Staring out of the window, staring off into space, she was somehow still fully there. Sometimes she would watch me. I’d look at her, walk over, give her a little pat on the shoulder, and say, “whatcha thinkin’ about, F?”
It was always an “oh, nothing” or an extremely sarcastic something.
No one could tell F what to do. Slowly, she could be convinced.
After a month or so of getting to know her, I found myself on the outside of her room door, a PPE cart sitting next to it. I’d heard she had sepsis and then I’d heard she had cancer and then I decided that whatever she had it was killing her fast. When I didn’t gown up to go in and talk with her for a while, I stood on the other side of the open door and waved. When she was asleep, not able to do much else, I gave her drained, paling body an assuring smile.
I think F was my entrance point; she was the moment I knew I wasn’t just working a job, that something was creeping its way inside of me.
The day she died, I saw a tall man with a long face and a beard about to enter the building. I imagined him to be F’s son when I saw him looking at the boxes of things marked with her name. I wondered if the nurses stuck in my multicolored cupcake “thinking of you” card, which I intentionally picked out to give to F when she stopped eating. I remembered how she held it and looked at me with such surprise, like I had traveled miles to go get it.
Next came M.
Being in her early 100s, she was the oldest woman on the floor. She was quiet and a bit ill when I first met her. One time, I did get her to have a bit of a conversation about her family and what it was like to grow up in our city all her life. She was soft spoken and always sitting in bed, with the TV mumbling in the background. I would try to visit with M on a couple different occasions during the time she started slipping into the sickness that ended up taking her. Her roommate was an Italian woman in a wheelchair, who rarely spoke and wandered around the hallways like she was making a nurse’s rounds. When M died, I saw her melted expression watch her roommate’s body get rolled into the elevator in a white bag. In only a little while longer, and the virus would claim her life.
Next came V.
She was often wheeled to the living room as she was prone to falling and the nurses needed to watch her. While taking menu orders, I’d attempt to strike up a conversation with V, using some simple sentence like, “how are you doing today?”
Most times I’d get a blank stare and others I’d get long sentences of mashed up words. There was something in her eyes, something left over from the times when she would be able to sit and speak to me in the way she wanted to. Sometimes, I’d get that person. I remember conducting an activity program in the living room, where V was sat in the corner near the hanging TV. She looked at me with a joy in her face I hadn’t seen before. It was like she recognized me from some happy memory a long time ago. She waved to me and told me she loved me, and nearly laughed with delight when she said it.
I remember the hanging faces of the couple of family members that were able to come in and say goodbye to her.
It felt like right after that time, the CDC’s restrictions seemingly began to fall from the sky and settle into the atmosphere of the building like fresh cement.
Masks were to be worn and gowns were to be donned if you were permitted to enter the COVID-19 wing on the third floor. On floors not yet effected, residents had to stay six feet apart if they needed to be in the hallways — otherwise they were to stay in their rooms. No outside visitors were permitted in the building under any circumstances. We, the employees, were it.
Loneliness was a tangible threat, standing at the edge of each door with its long, dark frame and sinking shoulders. If someone from Activities didn’t walk in before it, it would sweep in and steal away the hunger from resident’s bellies and the little glittering sparks of joy and amusement in their minds.
The lines between work and home began to blur. One day, as the death count reached its height, I overheard a nurse in the elevator answer another nurse’s question about the building becoming home. With a soft sigh she said, “of course it is, I cry here.”
It wasn’t just her who felt this way.
I tried hard in those days. I tried hard to tell the days apart and fought very hard against the temptation to make a bed for Loneliness next to mine.
At the end of the days, my head felt heavy and my body felt like it had been carrying many other bodies.
Each morning during COVID-19's peak in the nursing home, I’d get into my rusted bottomed Buick and pitter-patter my way to work. Most times I’d play some upbeat oldies, trying to feel light about the elongating days and the growing sunshine.
Driving up the hills to the nursing home, I’d ease into my usual spot in the lot closest to the entrance.
Like a little penguin trudging up a snowy bank, I’d walk up the hilly path to the front doors. After the big transfers of infected and non-infected residents to their respective areas in the building, I would see B, with his long ponytail and rounded frame in one of the windows above the door, sitting in his wheelchair and waving from the infected unit. One time — and the last time I saw him — while walking up with coworkers, the man of little affection blew us a kiss.
We needed a passcode to get in the building. After the first code punch and the sliding open of the doors, a trash bin, sanitizer, a box of blue surgical masks, and paper bags waited before the last code punch at the second set of doors.
The faces that I passed looked a little longer and the air felt like swimming upstream on the way to the punch clock. The Activities department office, where I was headed, felt like a little like its own world, where it was either pouring rain, or filled with rainbows.
The laminated staff communications book became an enemy.
Every day I’d flip through the pages, close my eyes, and hope I didn’t see any new names next to the words “passed away.”
The floor I usually worked on felt like I was boarding a spaceship. The world outside looked like fuzzy light through the plastic padding on the windows of the hallway. I stepped into my white hazmat suit, the plastic crunching when I walked. The two plastic bags covering my shoes made me sound like some factory-made monster as I approached the double doors to the spaceship’s hallway, better known as the floor’s COVID-19 wing. It looked lonely. It sounded like all the air was sucked out of it, except for the T.V. in the first room down the hallway, always playing something from The Christian Broadcasting Network. The two residents, R and M, would fight about why that channel should or shouldn’t be on.
It looked so different.
So many times before I had been in that exact same hallway, running up and down, getting cups of water or off-brand ginger-ale, saying “hello,” and staying to chat. It’s something to see life fade away. The light dimming every time one of the residents had to see a loved one on a screen. How they weren’t even supposed to have human touch from us employees who could zip ourselves up from head-to-toe in PPE.
I tried to show them I understood.
Through the sweat pouring down my forehead, curling my hair, and fogging my goggles, I’d march up and down the hallway. With the department’s iPad, I’d show residents family and friends and listen to them cry and wish. I’d have to come up with answers to daughters telling me they wished their mothers weren’t trapped in this situation because they were depressed and giving up on making it out. Sweat mixed with tears, and tears tended to stay on my face since I couldn’t touch my goggles or eyes to wipe them off.
I will never forget J.
Her hands were cold and brittle under the pads of my gloved fingers. I tried my best to let her know I was there with her, sweat and tears fogging the face shield over my hazmat suit and mask. My heart was racing. I’d never seen someone die so close. I’d never seen someone die at all. I stood and held her hand a little longer.
“It’s all right, J…it’s okay. God is with you,” I hoped she understood me through the little bursts of noise passing the lump in my throat.
Her lips, crusted and slow, were moving to say something. Her eyes, cracked, were teary.
I wanted to be big enough to make her feel better, but the speed of my pulse was shaking me.
I worked up enough composure to calm down and give her all the peace I could squeeze from my body. I let all the love warm me up and collect in a huge ball of heat in my hand.
I ran my other gloved hand over her thin, yellow, and graying hair. She was just in her room on the floor below, having returned from the doctor’s office and eating a sandwich she pulled out her purse. We were just sitting and looking at pictures of her father, mother, siblings, aunts, and uncles, laughing at one particular uncle who never seemed to hold a straight face. She was quiet, unassuming, and agreeable, never making a fuss and always ready with her lunch and dinner picks for me to write down.
I could see her in the recliner next to her bed, running her bony fingers over the letter of a chapter in the King James Bible gifted from Activities. She couldn’t believe something so big and brand new was free, and she couldn’t wait to open it up.
I looked over at the crucifix, wrapped around the bar on the side of the bed. Soon, someone would place it in her hands.
It continued like this for at least a couple months. The peak of the virus took residents every other day. My regular floor became a completely COVID-19 positive floor, the far-right hand corner of the floor being the worst. People who were still in the thick of the virus stayed there while those who were in recovery began to transition to the other hallways.
The two doors that always remained opened before the virus were closed. The residents that lived so comfortably and happily in the two rooms before the closed doors were moved. Just beyond those doors was a stinging silence and an occasional hum from a television. In the morning, I’d make my rounds collecting menu requests and dropping off the nursing home’s daily newspaper. Many times, the residents were asleep. When I’d circle back later in the day, I’d often find residents in the same way.
It was difficult to make suggestions for things to do. Coloring, watching TV, or listening to music tends to take the back seat when all one wants to do is be a person around people again.
I’d stop in front of the cart of disinfectant and gloves before the inside of the doors and peel down my hazmat suit and gloves. Tactfully, I’d sanitize my hands and spray my shoes and body with Oxivir.
I felt guilty for being able to escape, for telling people they’d be back to their rooms soon or that they’d be able to see their families soon while I was going to clock out and drive home to my own family.
Back on the top floor, things looked similar. Since the middle hallway was the positive wing, only a couple residents remained outside of it. The same silence that enveloped the other floors cut through the radio playing a seemingly unending loop of Watermelon Sugar by Harry Styles.
A resident I’d grown particularly close to was moved up to that floor when her test came back positive. She always struck me as a bit mysterious when I first met her on her home floor. She’d sit in the back of the living room while we did activities and do her puzzles, humming a tune to herself. I often used snacks as a way to her — something she rarely refused.
When she contracted the virus, she grew fragile; her humming grew louder and sounded distressed. She would wander the hallway like she wandered the hallways of her home floor, but she couldn’t leave. The doors out were closed and two tiny windows looking out were her only escape. A few times as I was walking past the doors, I would see her.
“Are you okay?” I’d ask through the glass.
“I don’t know where my room is,” she’d say, worry wetting the roundness of her eyes. Her face would tremble, and her brows would furrow.
“Just a minute, okay? I’ll show you.”
After gowning up I stepped back into the “spaceship” and took her shaking hand. My other hand clung onto her waist as she burrowed her head into the side of my chest. She began to cry.
We took the few steps back to her room and I helped her into bed. She laid down, still shaking, still crying. Her hands grabbed onto mine.
“Thank you,” she said. “I think you help me a lot.”
Downstairs, at the end of the day, I started to go through the numbers and look at the names of those we lost, represented by their dietary stickers on the wall.
I would walk through the hall and smile at the residents’ “life quotes” printed on posters along the wall.
I’d breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the world inside the building wasn’t left unguarded. There were extraordinary people, much like my boss, who showed up early in the morning and left late in the day heavy hearted, yet hopeful that the next day would be better. I remembered an Activities employee, Sandy, and how she took on the duties of nurse and CNA to take care of the residents that seemed to be dropping like flies on her floor. How she loved each one like they were her mother or father.
I felt good about the world despite the chaos in it.
