The First Year of COVID
By Amy Schutz
I remember reading about a new disease in Wuhan, China in January 2020. The citizens of Wuhan were forced into lockdown, unable to leave their homes. I saw a picture of a woman ringing a gong from her window to get help. I felt sorry for the people in Wuhan. After two Ebola scares in Africa, Ebola never made it onto American shores. I didn’t believe this new disease would either.
Then in February, cases began appearing in Washington State and California. But those people had traveled to China and brought the disease back with them. By the end of February there was a case in Solano County at the University of California Davis Medical Center—someone who had not traveled to China and did not know anyone who had traveled to China. It was the first reported case of community transmission. There soon would be others.
In March, a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, reported an outbreak of COVID among the elderly residents living there. I saw pictures of family members staring through windows while their loved ones died alone. Now this new epidemic, without a cure, came close to home for me.
My father lives in a nursing home. He had never wanted to go to one, and we all felt terribly guilty. My dad has dementia. He would get lost wandering from home. Once he fell in the backyard and lay in the steamy heat of a North Carolina summer until my mother woke up from her nap and realized he was gone. We had cameras installed so that my mother could monitor him while she went grocery shopping. We hired caregivers that he eyed with suspicion. My mother just couldn’t care for him at home anymore. My sister and I had full time jobs and school age children.
It was okay though because my mother visited with him every day for hours. She would comb his hair, put in his hearing aides, cut his fingernails. That all ended with COVID. In March, the nursing home was in lockdown with no visitors allowed. Suddenly, we had to trust my dad’s care to strangers. With dementia, he was as vulnerable as a preschooler who can’t really tell you if something is wrong. Furthermore, my father is a cantankerous old man with a temper, who curses when he gets frustrated.
My sister set up a computer with FaceTime that the staff and my father used with varying success. Sometimes all I could see was the ceiling fan. Another time we noticed someone had cut off his mustache. My mother had never seen him before without a mustache. The staff, however, took care of him with courage and grace. They were risking their lives as well by working there. Many of the staff had young children.
I called him every day and made myself stay on the phone for 30 minutes no matter how painful it was. Often he couldn’t hear and just kept shouting, “What did you say?” I would just tell him I loved him over and over. Other days were better. I explained to him about COVID, which he called the plague. This led to numerous discussions about Camus and whether or not he killed a man in Algeria.
As my father got more comfortable using FaceTime, I would get more calls. Anxiously he would ask me, did I know where his wallet was? He had bills to pay. Could I come and pick him up from the airport? His plane had arrived and no one was there. We would all try to reassure him, my mother, sister, and I. But sometimes the conversations would loop around endlessly.
My father then began talking more about the New York City of his childhood. He grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn on Avenue I. The kids used to play stickball in the street. His mom would lean out of the third floor window and yell when it was time for him to come home. The apartment was small, a one bedroom for five people—a long way from the luxury his parents had lived in Germany before they had to leave. My father slept in the kitchen, “Too close to the refrigerator,” he once told me, patting his rather large stomach. “My dad would meet me for midnight snacks.” He told me about Midview High where he went to high school. And City College where smart, hard-working immigrant kids could go for free.
One day when I called, he told me he had taken the bus to the far Rockaways to go swimming in the ocean. Another time he asked me if we could go to Tien Shan on the corner of 125th and Broadway, by the subway station. “You have to walk up three flights of stairs but they serve good noodles.” Or we could go to Houston Street and get bagels from Russ and Daughters Bakery. Did I remember our apartment at the corner of 78th and Broadway, walking distance to Central Park and the Natural History Museum?
Once he told me he was tired because he had been giving tours on the NYC subway all day. I learned about how he had been called in as an engineer to inspect a subway tunnel. He told me he was thinking about taking classes at the Brooklyn Museum. He wanted to try his hand at portraits. He spoke about Boris Livitsky and his wife, Madame Martha. They were from Eastern Europe and they taught violin and piano - he wondered if the Livitskys were still teaching violin. He’d look for an apartment on Riverside Drive when he got the chance. I’d ask him how to get places using the subway. He still knew the routes.
We spent many pleasant hours talking about the New York of his youth. A place that exists only in his mind. These conversations seemed to calm him. He told me one day that he might not be there the next time I called. I nodded sadly. If I’m not here, look for me in Brooklyn, he said. Yes, I thought, I can always find him in Brooklyn.
The author’s father with her daughter. Photo by Amy Schutz.
Photograph courtesy of Amy Schutz.
Amy Schutz is a physical therapist and mom living in Truckee, California. Her father was born in Brooklyn, New York and now lives in a skilled nursing facility in Cary, North Carolina.
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