Letter from a Virginia Senior Home

When the weather is nice, we go outside. There is a path around the building that goes through the parking lot and the garden out back. My wheelchair usually gets stuck since the path isn’t paved. The girl at the front desk sits with me outside some days and we just watch the cars drive by. There are always lots of ambulances and police cars. Sometimes, they do stop here. It’s never a good visit.

The building was shut down in March when the rest of the state did. Social gatherings were limited, only medical trips were allowed, and tables were spaced apart in the dining room. At first, it was only supposed to be for a few weeks. Then it became a month. Then two months. It hasn’t stopped.

Every day is the same. First, I wake up and wheel downstairs for breakfast. On the days that she forgets, I ask the girl at the front desk to put CNN on for me in the library. Usually, I fall asleep and wake up to a nurse checking on me. Every couple of days, a man from outside comes in to look at my knee. It still hurts because it still has shrapnel in it. It keeps me up at night.

We found a new normal. The nurses wear masks but we don’t have to. I hate them. I can’t hear what they say. I don’t know what’s going on anymore. I feel like we aren’t speaking the same language. The girl at the front desk stands in as a translator; for some reason, I can understand her even with the mask. This frustrates the nurses and they leave to help another resident. The girl just laughs with me and wheels me back to watch CNN before going to her desk.

We started doing social events again. I can look forward to movies and book club again, instead of sitting alone watching CNN. But it isn’t the same. My son-in-law and daughter wouldn’t visit me much, but other residents would have visitors. Kids would run up and down the hallways to hug their grandparents. There would be laughter. There would be reasons to laugh.

The rhythm became bearable. A lot of the residents were still angry about being stuck inside, but they slowly came to accept it. We would sip our tea, read our books, and talk about what headlines we saw in the newspaper. Richard liked to show me the comic section. Peggy would talk about what shows she would watch that night.

The building had been shut down and we were cut off from the rest of the world, but it was only as a precaution. Unlike other senior complexes, we had no traces of the virus. We considered ourselves lucky. The staff started talking about opening back up. Families could visit, but they had to sit on the outside of the screen porch while we sat inside. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start. Things were looking up.

Mid-June, we got out first case. The case count kept climbing and within a week, we were stuck in our rooms. Staff would come in, dressed head to toe in blue fabric as protection. Whether it was protecting us or them, I’m not sure. It felt alien; they had plastic shields over their faces and goggles that made their eyes look small. The blue latex gloves made their hands puff up and look swollen. It was hard to recognize which nurse was checking on me since their faces were covered with masks.

But most of the day, I spent alone. Instead of watching CNN in the library, I was tucked into my room. Reading the newspaper was now something I did by myself, with no Peggy or Richard there to discuss it. The only time I saw people was when the meals were delivered or when I needed care, and even those interactions were distant. It was lonely. It wasn’t just my knee that kept me up at night anymore.

The girl at the front desk kept some sense of normalcy. Every day, she would deliver my mail to my room and wave at me from the doorway. Before the building got the virus, she would sit and watch CNN with me whenever she had a few minutes to spare. She was always busy working with the nurses and coordinating socially distanced visits for families. But she was young. Hearing her laugh made years melt away. It wasn’t anything specific she did, it was just the youth in the room that would calm everyone. We could wax poetic about life and what we’d learned, and she’d soak it all up. The other nurses were older and were tired of listening to our ramblings. But she had only started working with us in April and hadn’t grown weary yet.

Richard would tell her about his time in Vietnam, I would talk about my time in Korea. When it got close to the end of summer, we knew she would be leaving us. While the rest of us were stuck inside, the girl had places to be. A full life ahead of her. A college degree to complete. A family to start. To say I was happy for her was an understatement; but I was also incredibly jealous. If I had the chance to start over, what would I change? Probably not much. Maybe some small choice I made back in Korea set this entire pandemic in motion. Maybe if I had moved to Alaska like I had always talked about, I wouldn’t have suffered in quarantine alone. Maybe there is nothing I can do to change things, and no one had the power to shift the course of this century. Maybe if we could change it, we wouldn’t. It might not be worth it. I would at least take the shrapnel out of my knee.