Coronavirus, Grandparents, and Nursing Homes

My grandmother was picture-perfect. She looked like a grandmother from a story book. Her hair was white, held back in a bun, and she wore wire-rimmed spectacles. That was her word. Whenever she misplaced them, she said, “Now where are my spectacles.” She wore cotton dresses with a floral print, that zipped up the front. On her feet, she wore what we called “old-lady shoes,” round-toed black oxfords with a heel.

I have few memories of my grandmother walking. Mostly she sat, to hold us or watch TV. She liked wrestling and her favorite wrestler was “Haystack Calhoun.” When she offered us candy, she gave us chalky mint lozenges or horehound drops. Both were a disappointment, but we enjoyed seeing her go to the server, open a cupboard, and then take out her glass candy dish.

My grandfather dressed the part of an elderly gentleman. When he walked from Greenwood Hill to the liquor store in downtown Pottsville, located at that time on North Centre Street, besides wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, he put on a suit and tie and on his head, a bowler hat. At the liquor store, which in those days was little more than a counter where customers placed their order, choosing from a fixed-price catalogue, he bought a gallon of Manischewitz Concord Grape.

He carried it home and into the kitchen, where he sat at the table and drank his wine from a Cheez Wiz glass. When my grandmother complained he was overdoing it, he had his set reply: “Christ too was a winebibber.” If it was good enough for the Lord, then no one, not even my grandmother, had the right to criticize.

My grandparents lived with us, or rather, we all shared an apartment house, my family on the ground floor, my grandparents upstairs. My father bought that house in 1960 so we could all be together under one roof.

My grandfather died at home a year after we moved in. He was “senile” as we said in those days and his hobby was hammering nails into anything made of wood, doorframes, doors, his bed, his dresser, a chest of drawers, anything! We children watched. He took his work seriously, but we laughed behind his back.

When my grandmother died in 1964, for the first time, I saw my father cry.

My picture-perfect paternal grandparents died at a time when, in Schuylkill County, there were no assisted-living facilities or nursing homes. The closest thing we had was Rest Haven, two old buildings sitting atop a hill in Schuylkill Haven. It was for poor people. It was not for people like us.

I never knew my maternal grandparents. My mother was raised by her grandmother and aunt. Of her grandmother, my mother exclaimed, “She was a tartar!” Without knowing exactly what the word meant, we understood no one stepped on our great-grandmother’s toes.

No one stepped on our mother’s either. She too was a tartar, a person given to a violent temper, who could prove to be unexpectedly formidable—that’s what Merriam Webster has to say.

By the time my mother was up in years and starting to go downhill, Schuylkill County had its fair share of nursing homes and assisted living facilities, a term that first came into use in 1966, two years after my grandmother died at home. Our mother wanted nothing to do with assisted living. She wanted to stay in her home, but she did not want to share. No one was going to get a foot in her door, unless of course it was one of her three daughters.

In 2010, when my mother started falling and forgetting on a regular basis, I lived in France and my two sisters were raising their families while working full-time. We were not ready to move back home, but we found alternate solutions, other people ready and willing to live with her. My mother’s response: If it’s not one of you, the answer is “no.”

In the fall of 2010, she moved into Providence Place, located on the other side of the woods behind her home. In 2012, she died in Rest Haven. I was at her side.

This is a painful story, one that stirs up doubt and guilt, and I stick to the bare facts. My sisters and I did our best, but we wish we would have known how to do better.

I evoke this story today because of what is happening in nursing homes all over Europe and the United States. Covid-19 is spreading rapidly within these closed and often poorly equipped communities. Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, claims the virus has transformed nursing homes into “death pits.” Horror stories abound on both sides of the Atlantic.

In France, where we are living under a strict lockdown regime, deaths in nursing homes account for nearly half the victims of Covid-19, and nursing home residents have been dying alone, cut off from their families. As they approach death, they cannot be accompanied by their loved ones nor by priest, pastor, imam or rabbi. Funerals are postponed till a “later date.” The dead go alone to the grave.

Lockdown or “confinement” began in France on March 17th. On April 20th, visits to healthy family members in nursing homes were once again authorized. On May 11th, we will begin to gradually emerge from lockdown. In two short months, France will have changed. Practices as old as civilization itself will have been disrupted: accompanying the dying, accompanying the dead.

Today I imagine the pain and utter despair of all those whose parents or loved ones have died of Covid-19 in nursing homes. “Death pits,” “slaughterhouses,” how can anyone be at peace hearing such words? How can the families of victims come to terms with the death of a loved one?

Like me, many were simply trying to do their best. How could they imagine what is happening now? Who could have helped them to “do better”?

Once again, coronavirus has turned the world upside-down, downside-up. We live in a society that idolizes the young and the new. The old we prefer to forget, and we’re all too ready to overlook the underpaid workers who take care of them.

After the pandemic, there will be no “getting back to normal.” “Normal” as we knew it is dead. In the post-pandemic world, one thing is certain: we’ll sure have a lot to think about.

The Three Musketeers in These Coronavirus Times

In March 1844, readers of a French newspaper called “Le Siècle,” The Century, discovered the first episode of a serialized novel that went on to become a blockbuster worldwide. In the first chapter they met a young nobleman named d’Artagnan whose ancient but impoverished family lived in a crumbling castle in Gascogne, closer to Spain than to the faraway capital of the Kingdom of France.

In that first chapter, d’Artagnan sets off on a cob horse for Paris, hoping to make his fortune as a musketeer of King Louis XIII. By the time he reaches the outskirts of the capital, he is on foot, with only enough money to rent a room in a garret not far from the Latin Quarter. The first time he steps outside, he literally bumps into the three musketeers. Young d’Artagnan begins by challenging them to a swordfight. Before it’s over, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, the three musketeers, and d’Artagnan have vowed to remain friends for life.

“All for one and one for all!” We all know the line and in one form or another, we know the story. Since 1844, The Three Musketeers by French novelist Alexandre Dumas has been translated throughout the world and adapted to stage and screen right into the 21st century.

“All for one and one for all!” Now there’s a motto that resonates in these coronavirus times. Another motto that comes to mind is E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one.” It dates back to the first days of American independence and appropriately, this 13-letter motto engraved on the first great seal of the United States expressed faith in the new nation born of the original 13 colonies.

In 1831, while on a mission to the United States to study the American prison system, Alexis de Toqueville, a French philosopher and political thinker, devoted most of his time to observing American society instead. The result was the two-volume study Democracy in America. One of his observations was “there’s nothing less independent than a free citizen.”

That may sound strange to the ears of a people who fought a war for independence in order to become free citizens of the United States. Yet, if we reflect upon de Tocqueville’s words, we understand that freedom is synonymous with responsibility. “All for one and one for all,” as the three musketeers would say. We’re only as strong as the weakest among us and we are responsible for each other’s care.

As the number of cases of coronavirus rises throughout the United States, as in France, health workers fight not only the virus but their own exhaustion after weeks on the job, the time may have come to think about what it means to exercise our freedom collectively.

This is what we do when we respect the rules of social distancing. We protect ourselves and most importantly, we protect others. In France, every evening at 8PM, many open their windows to applaud doctors and nurses working to save lives. Those same doctors and nurses would like their fellow citizens to applaud less and respect “confinement” more. With warm spring days upon us, too many forget and step outside, crowding city streets.

And while some of us stay home, others are at work. At the end of an interview with a doctor in a Parisian hospital overflowing with cases of Covid-19, just as the newscaster was about to sign off, the doctor asked if he could say a word more. He wanted to thank the cleaning staff of his hospital. Every day they were on the job, working in a dangerous environment with little protection. Without them work in the hospital could not go on.

Nor could we do our shopping for food without the checkers and grocery stockers working in supermarkets. Right now, more than ever we need the drivers of delivery trucks, the behind-the-scenes workers filling on-line orders, farmers producing our food and all those working in factories so we can procure the basic necessities of daily life.

All of them are free citizens working collectively, exposing themselves to danger, and doing it for us.

With the arrival of coronavirus, we’ve entered a new world and what awaits us on the other side of the pandemic, nobody can say for sure. Yet societies in Western Europe and the United States have somehow been turned upside down—and especially downside up.

Not so very long ago, French President Emmanuel Macron was calling for a “startup nation,” a nation of independent entrepreneurs with little need of government in their lives. He turned a deaf ear to the demands of the nation’s public hospital system and to its underpaid staff. Now, that public hospital system has become the backbone of the nation. Doctors, nurses and aids work tirelessly, and without them France would fall apart.

France is a highly centralized country, where the president makes decisions for the nation. The United States is a federation, where states retain certain rights. In times of crisis, however, governors look to the President for guidance. At this time, the President of the United States seems to be looking out for Number-One—not the nation, but himself.

“All for one and one for all!” Captain Brett Crozier, the former captain of the aircraft carrier "Theodore Roosevelt," understood those words when coronavirus swept through his ship and his first thoughts were for his men. For that, he lost his job. As did last Friday, April 3rd, Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, who told Congress about the Ukraine whistle-blower complaint that lead to the impeachment hearings of President Trump. Mr. Atkinson’s main concerns were the common good and the truth.

It’s not about you, Mr. President. It’s not about me. It’s about us all, free citizens who, in a time of deep worldwide crisis, must learn that our freedom is dependent on the wellbeing of each and every one of us: “All for one and one for all!”