Views from the Real World on the Ground Floor

First, the good news. 

My mother is in fairly decent shape, all things considered. The reports that she was not eating are accurate, but she’s quite communicative, when she thinks the situation warrants it. 

Yesterday, however, was quite the emotional roller coaster ride.

At noon, a conference for the relatives of residents hosted by the nursing home outlines the challenges such facilities are facing around the world: staff shortages, widespread Covid19 infections, difficulty meeting basic needs for everyone, staff and residents both. Not long after that, they let me know that my mother has not been eating enough, is on an IV, and is only communicating in one-word responses. I ask for permission to visit her; and the Montrose VA home says yes. The concern is that she seems to be deteriorating, and that if we wait too long, she may not be able to recognize me or respond.

Some friends question my judgment in going up there. It is, after all, a decision to enter a very active Covid19 infection zone. I definitely feel, however, that my duty to my mother is to be there for her. No question about it. There's some anxiety about the decision in the background, but it has no power. In the end, I can find no hesitation in me.

There are multiple security checks before getting to the facility. I’m challenged to make sure I’m not displaying any symptoms of infection. The challenge is businesslike and ice cold; by now, what was once unthinkable has become a routine. I get waved through in a perfunctory manner. For me, the visit is a big deal; to the guard, ho-hum.

There are almost no cars in the parking lot. This alone is testimony to how isolated these communities of elderly people have become. Anyone complaining about the measures we have taken so far ought to go see the impact on our senior citizens; I’m not even in the door, and the danger to them is already palpable.

A long wait at the door to the facility itself generates a touching conversation with the security guard on that post, John, who I've run into many times. Usually, our contact is casual and brief; this time, I find out he's had five heart attacks and one Near Death Experience. In it, he saw Elvis, a young Elvis in a leather jacket, seating on a big leather sofa with an acoustic guitar. Elvis was with his mother. They sent him back to earth. "We're not ready for you here yet," they told him.

"I don't get it," John remarks to me. "I'm not even an Elvis fan." 

Verification, I think to myself. The NDE was real. 

In the process, we touch on the human dimension of lives that do not know one another; it confers a special value on what would otherwise be an irritating wait. 

This man — and all the others manning posts like him— is a hero of this epidemic. They are ordinary people, doing ordinary things that transform into the extraordinary simply because of their courage and willingness to be there for others. My respect for them deepens by the minute. It's one thing to read about it; it's another to walk into a facility filled with souls like this, those who are brave enough to get up in the morning for others despite the risk to themselves. It puts the lie to the idea that we've become a nation of cowards that does nothing but whine about every threat that comes along. There are such people, truly, and they do love cameras; but they are tiny creatures, to be ignored in the enormous wave of right attitude and right action sweeping through the places where this crisis is active. This is no media event populated by misstatements and absurd protests. It's a place that enshrines an invisible line between life and death, where one mistake can be terminal.

Elder Jesse—another one of the heroes in this story, the staff member who helped arrange the visit — finally meets me at the front desk. He, as well, treats this quarantine zone as a routine fact, not a special place. 

We set off down the echoing, immaculately clean corridors. Some few staff go about their business, one man sweeping the floor with a nod to me, but the place is eerily empty. There's a sober hush across the halls; even the fish in the massive salt water aquarium in the common room seem subdued. 

As we prepare to enter the wing with the Covid patients, I put on a Tyvek clean room suit, gloves, double mask, and face shield (homemade, but quite functional) when I enter the isolation wing. 

There is no soundtrack. It’s a realm of chilling silence, far from newscasts and Hollywood movies. I find that I’m not afraid or even worried. This must be something like the way the staff feel: it's real life, and I have a responsibility to it. If that responsibility means I have to stand down my concerns for personal safety, it's done without hesitation. Even ego obeys when we awaken to the precarious nature of life. I'm in the midst of facts, not my opinions about things. 

This isn't a story someone wrote.

In a strange way, it's almost a relief; now I enter the fact of this pandemic, the fact of my mother’s infection, the fact of the extraordinary people who are caring for her and others. No matter how brief, the privilege of touching these people and their service sinks deep into me. There is an impression of a kind of love here that we cannot, as humans, attain except in extremes of circumstance; a very matter-of-fact, here-we-are, no-bullshit kind of love that acknowledges relationship, the intelligence of the ordinary when it is attended to with real care, rather than the usual presumption and hubris.

I get into my mom’s room, which is as ordinary as any room. Somehow the banality of the extreme never fails to impress. 

Here I am. Is this all there is to it? 

I'm just here. That's all.

So be here.

I can’t go near her, and feel oddly suspended in a bubble of distance created by danger I can’t see, danger that appears completely theoretical but for all the gear I'm wearing. Mom doesn’t recognize me at first; no one would. I'm covered from head to toe like someone from a science fiction movie. 

The thinking man thinks ahead. I have a sign that I wrote in all-caps with a sharpie in a notebook: Hi mom! It’s Lee. I now fish around for it in the plastic shopping bag and hold it up.

It's a good idea; she immediately understands it’s me when I hold it up. It’s good to get past that moment of confusion, because after her strokes, my mother seesaws between native hyper-intelligence and childlike bewilderment. This visit, she’s far more cognizant than the nurses let on. She begins by cheerfully grumbling that the damn Covid virus has knocked her back; yet it seems more likely, with all the evidence at hand, that she is having congestive heart problems, a possibility being adjusted by on-the-fly changes to her medication.

The conversation is perhaps unimportant; after all, in the sense of actual information exchange, it’s minimal. There are brief but touching FaceTime calls to the grandchildren and her sister; I scold her for not eating enough. Helen keeps telling me I must have pulled a lot of strings to get into the facility, and I reminder that the only thing that got me in was her ongoing refusal to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

She makes one of her comical faces (an essential part of her senior-living communication toolkit) sticking her tongue out and rolling her eyes back in her head. 

It tastes terrible, she says. 

I tell her it doesn’t matter what it tastes like, she has to eat it. 

My mom is in many ways a shell of her former self, like a child. Her medical condition has reduced her to a tiny, shrunken person on a bed with limited range of motion and very little to do. Yet her attitude is enormously positive; she smiles all the time, and seems cheery about everything that happens. 

The love I feel for her is too deep, too subliminal, to be of easy access, simply explained. I can't even walk up to it and touch it inwardly. It has a delicate nature I can't quite explain. I skirt it cautiously, not wanting to damage it, but just savor its taste.

It is an undertone, a note that began sounding in my own life before I even knew I existed that is still reverberating. There are many inner notes of this kind in a lifetime, but few contribute so much to the harmony of one’s awareness as the love for one’s mother. It is, in a spiritual sense, where the song begins; it includes the beat in time before the song, as well as the full length of its music. 

It’s impossible, in any single moment, standing in a room anywhere — let alone separated by layers of high-tech plastic — to appreciate the nature of that song in its entirety. One simply knows that it exists; and that all of its depth, its dimension, its flavor, need to be savored over and over again in many different times, many different places, in order to truly appreciate it.

All I know now is that this is my mom. My care for her is deep in a hidden place in my heart.I don’t want to get too sentimental about it; her condition and her attitude towards it are a form of worship, and I tiptoe around them like a visitor to a cathedral in the middle of a service. It feels like we're at the moment of communion. She knows how to officiate here; I'm an interloper. I may be the one that can walk and talk and think and drive, but she exudes the simple, uncomplicated authority of those who suffer and bear it with dignity. 

It reminds me now of Dostoyevsky's comment that his hope in life was that he could prove worthy of his own suffering.

The moment comes when I have to say goodbye. Despite all of the emotional currents swirling in multiple directions, and my relative lack of fear, there's an intellectual part of me, small but incredibly insistent, that is saying length of potential exposure time needs to be minimized. Finally, I cede to it.

I tell her that I won’t be back unless she’s on her last legs. Are you on your last legs? I ask her. She raises her left hand — the only one she has much control over anymore — off the bed and wiggles it around, checking to make sure that it still works. It’s a crippled, arthritic thing, wrapped in a bandage, but it seems to have an enthusiasm for life all its own, independent of the two of us. 

She looks at me with a big grin. No, she says. She’s quite definite about it. 

No. I'm not on my last legs.

Good. I say. 

I'll be back.

On the way out, I exchange briefly with the nurses on the wing, all heroines who ought to be given medals of honor for their work. 

These are not rich, powerful people: they are brave, incredible people. 

Even now I feel a wave of gratitude for them. I owe them — we owe them — a debt that can never be repaid. There is no greater honor than real service to others. This place, I realize, is not just close to heaven. It has heaven right here in it. The kingdom of heaven is within these women, and they bring it to us not floating on clouds with a chorus of angels, but in the most ordinary of activities. How much of life is like this, with us blind to it? Perhaps all of it. It takes the worst situations to teach me this, to remind me of how I live in the midst of miracles and walk past them all day long, taking them for granted.

As I leave the isolation wing, stripping off layers of gear and disposing them at once, nothing has changed except my attitude. 

I’ve entered the belly of the beast; the creature that has swallowed our imaginations, our society, our economy. 

It turns out it is filled with love and incredibly courageous human beings. They are too busy taking care of business to blame, argue, or accuse. They simply get up each morning, and they care for others.

It occurs to me, as I make this diary entry, that I hope history remembers not the blowhards and fools who have strutted across the stage of this pandemic in what they think are the lead roles, but these every day, ordinary men and women. They are the heroes; they are the leaders. The world is safer in their hands than in the hands of those who control all the money and wield all the power; and thank God for it. 

When we survive, it will be because of them.

Bravo.

Go, and sense yourself, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.