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.
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