Grief in the Time of COVID-19
By Brad McMullen
It is the beginning of March. I’m heading back to Elko, finishing a visit to my parents after my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer, and had undergone his first few surgeries and treatments. He’s been wearing clothes that I wore in high school. His own clothes are too large because of the treatments. A big chunk of the trip was dedicated to finding an adjustable belt to help keep up his too-loose pants around his waist. Before I head to the airport and my dad goes to take a nap (he’d been taking a lot of those lately, my mom told me) we hug. I can feel the vertebrae of his spine through the thick fleece he wears to keep warm. I tell him I’ll be back soon to visit, thinking I should be able to get back in May, or sometime early summer. Then COVID-19 comes. Travel becomes dangerous. The possibility of traveling to see my dad just as potentially fatal as the disease that is wrecking his body.
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Time passes. I keep in touch through phone calls. As I talk to my mom, my dad’s voice in the background. He complains about how he’s behind on yard work and how unpleasant his various treatments have been. Time passes and life in lockdown becomes normal. It doesn’t affect either of them–he was already too tired to leave the house–and she spends most of her time at home taking care of my dad. Time passes, and it’s the last Saturday in July when I notice a missed call from my mom and text saying my dad’s condition has taken a turn. I call back and leave a message when it goes to voicemail and wait until the call comes. My dad is in bad shape. The nurse will come by the next day and give a recommendation about whether they should start hospice care. If I want to see my dad, if I want to be there to help, I need to start making plans to get back to Michigan. I tell my mom I should be able to get on the road on Tuesday. She tells me she’ll update me tomorrow. The call ends.
I seek solace in the arms of my partner, lying in bed with him and thinking and talking through a plan to get there. I have friends along the way–safer to stay with them than in a hotel–gloves and masks to wear when not in the car, and plenty of podcasts to listen to as I drive halfway across the country. Packing and laundry begins. The next morning my mom calls again. My dad starts hospice the next day. The nurse does not expect that he has long to live. If I drive, I may not make it. I find a flight that leaves Monday morning and gets me there that afternoon, and book it without hesitation. I tell her I won’t have a suit to bring. With everything closed, I hadn’t been able to get it cleaned, but thought I could do that Monday. She says with the COVID-19 restrictions we won’t have a funeral, so I won’t need one. I crawl back into bed with my partner, and he offers to come help the parents he’s never met. But that just adds complications, so he offers the next best thing–his stuffed Sloth, to be there to hold me when he can’t. My other travel companion was Pudgie, the stuffed hedgehog my dad got me as a child.
The airport the next morning is empty. Everyone is wearing masks, everyone keeping their distance, everyone careful and avoiding touching anything more than necessary. Boarding is from the back to front, and I have a row to myself on the mostly full flights. I reach into my bag and pull out the book I brought to read on the flight–a history of the Donner Party. I thought a story about the depths of suffering might ease my burden, remind me that people have survived worse–worse than cancer, worse than COVID-19. I was wrong.
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On arrival, things go awry. As my mom was getting ready to leave the house, hospice arrived with everything needed to make my dad comfortable. She cannot pick me up. I try to find a ride. Lyft and Uber have no one, and the taxi stand is empty. I wait. Eventually a taxi comes and takes me home. My mom is helping set up a hospital bed in the family room for my dad. I head immediately upstairs to a shower, bagging the clothes and mask and gloves from the flight to immediately go into the laundry. I scrub myself clean and put on new, uncontaminated clothes. Then, and only then, do I come any closer than 10 feet to my mom, or think of even going within half a house of my dad. I hug her when I see her, and she takes me to see him. He is even thinner than in March. He is so small he could wear my elementary school clothing. I look at him and all I can think of is the descriptions from the Donner Party book of starvation, of death drawing near. I hold his hand as he tells me he’s glad I made it.
The days quickly fall into a routine. We feed my dad when he gets hungry (which is rare, his body no longer needs much). He mostly eats lemon ice and beef broth. The hospice nurse leaves medicines to help ease the coughing, the pain, the worry. The medicines are things I am familiar with, but from other contexts–one a poison from Shakespeare, another something Daren the Lion lectured never to use. Things linked to death and wasting now used to ease the pain.
As the days pass, he sleeps more and more, with small bursts of activity, of awareness here and there. During these moments, he wants to eat or adjust himself on the bed, which requires one of us to help move, his body lacking the strength. My mom and I take shifts watching my dad. Wednesday morning, while my mom sleeps and I watch, he wants to move around and get out of the bed that has become his world. I help him get out of bed, hold him upright, put his feet on the ground, then help him stand. It takes me time to figure out how to hold him to give him the sensation of movement. His legs move up and down, slightly, but most of the movement comes from me holding him up, pushing him forward, down a short hallway, then back. I help him sit back down, put his feet back in the bed, lay him back down. He quickly falls back asleep, the short adventure down the hall taking all his energy. As he slept, I couldn’t help but think that it was like helping a toddler walk, all the stability and control coming from the contact with someone else. I wonder how I had reacted when he helped me go on similar adventures that I no longer remembered. Had I been as tired from the exertion as he was?
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My mom woke me up early Saturday morning. My dad had passed in the night. I sit with my mom while she calls hospice and the undertaker. We hold each other and keep ourselves busy as we wait for them to arrive. The nurse confirms his death, and helps us dress him one last time, and gives us instructions on how to dispose of the medicines–now back to deadly poisons and addictive substances. The undertaker comes and removes my dad’s body. There is no hearse. Only a black Dodge Caravan, the same car my grandfather used to drive, the car I inherited after his death. He sits with us, going over things we’ll need to know in the days to come, how he’ll let us know when his ashes will be ready to pick up. Then he gives us a final moment with my dad. We kiss his forehead and hold his hand one last time, then help the undertaker put him on the gurney, wheel him out of the house and into the van. We are mechanically assisted pallbearers in the only funeral procession that COVID-19 allowed.
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The days that follow are full of phone calls to family and friends, informing them that my dad is gone. Most of them are far away, unable to come, but join us in grieving over the phone, calling back and checking in, staying in contact as we grieve. Calls to banks, and delivery people, and my dad’s workplace are also made, but those calls usually result in messages left in the voice mailboxes of people working from home; people working reduced hours while dealing with increased workloads, people who do not have time to communicate and who do not call back until called again. I had been warned that the paperwork, that the bureaucracy, was almost as bad as the death. I do not know if COVID has made the process better or worse. Each night, I cling to my partner’s Sloth, wishing that the arms that held me were his. I cling to the Pudgie, the hedgehog my dad got me, and wishing he were still here.
A week after my dad left, the ashes are ready to be picked up. We go to the crematorium to pick up the ashes in their shiny metal urn. It looks nice, sleek, a design my dad would have liked. It feels cold to the touch, but I clutch it to me as I carry it to the car, gently placing it down before my mom and I head to the apple orchard he liked, getting the apple cider, cheesy bread, and chocolate donuts he loved. When we bring him home that afternoon, we place the urn above the mantel, back in the room where he lay in bed the week before.
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Grief in lockdown allows for few outlets. Part of me wishes to contact friends still in the area, go out and see people, but the fear and worry of getting sick, of joining my father too soon, stalks my thoughts. So, I turn inward, jumping from TV shows to social media games to books to find solace. Jessica Fletcher brings some comfort to my soul, but not enough to distract from the grief fog that fills my brain. Social media brings no solace. It's full of the grief of others. Grief at injustice. Grief for what our nation has been, is, and may continue to be. Grief at a disease that refuses to abate. I am uncomfortably aware of other losses, slipping easily into grief for people I only know through screens. First the father-in-law of an NPR host passes, and I grieve as if I know them, recognizing myself in the tweets about how his husband grieves. Then a beloved drag queen passes, and I watch her lip-syncs on repeat. As I write and edit this, an actor passes, the grief comes back, as fresh as the day my dad died.
The only respite comes from books. Specifically, cheesy, Hallmark-original-movie-style romance novels. That could be for any number of reasons, but I think it’s because they’re about touch and contact. They’re about forming connections with others and finding strength from their touch, from getting the zing that means you know you’ve found someone special, whether family, friend, or lover. The zing that fights back the fog of grief that fills my head and heart, the zing that memory provides, remembering my dad from before he got sick, before he died. Contact may be gone, but the memory of contact remains, and that can’t be taken away.
Photo/Jessica Brandi Lifland.
Brad McMullen is the Programs and Gatherings Manager at the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada. He is also on the board of the California Trail Heritage Alliance. He has more master’s degrees than anyone needs (two from the University of Oregon in Folklore and Arts Administration, plus one from Cardiff University in Welsh). He is originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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