Coronavirus Quarantine is Stealing My Mom’s Last Days

I showed up at the assisted living facility (ALF) on March 16th and told my mom, “Let’s pack a suitcase and get you into your new place. The movers will be here to pack up the rest.” I was moving my mom to a small Board & Care house with six residents just as Covid-19 was hitting. My mom was nearly blind and she needed more assistance and much more socialization than she was getting at her current place. She loved reading and mah jongg and Words with Friends, all of which she lost along with her sight, but the thing she loved best was people. In assisted living, she was lonely.

My mom maneuvered around her tiny room, even though she was nearly blind, and directed me. “Bring my toiletries and my knitted afghan in case I get cold and that photo of your father with the fish,” she said. I grabbed a pair of her sturdy Sketcher sneakers and her talking book from the Braille Institute and two jars of gefilte fish from her bookshelf because I knew she’d want those. I steered my mom and her walker with one hand and pulled her overstuffed suitcase with the other, into the elevator, into the garage, into my car, and then into the Board & Care house, which would be her new home. I did not see my mother again for nine weeks.

We know that Covid-19 is particularly dangerous for the elderly. We know its devastating toll on nursing homes. We have seen the photos of families visiting their loved ones through windows. But window visits aren’t comforting for blind seniors, like my mom. She can’t see and doesn’t hear well. In the nine weeks I didn’t see my mother, the inoperable brain tumor marched across her head.

The day after my mom moved in, elder care centers went on lockdown. No non-essential people were allowed. There were no visits from Occupational Therapy or Physical Therapy, no weekly dinners at my house, no afternoons with the helper we’d hired that she loved, and no visits from me, holding her hand while I described old photographs and Alexa played Patsy Cline and Neil Diamond. Was I a non-essential person? To my mother, I was essential. The hospice doctor called the Covid lockdown a kind of, “solitary confinement,” for blind seniors like my mother.

At first, my mom called me seven to twelve times a day. Her calls started every morning at 11 am when she phoned to say good morning. They continued with regularity throughout the day. I was glad she remembered how to use Siri even though I had to let some of her calls go to voicemail. I checked on her every evening at 7 pm to say good night. Even though my brothers called her and my children called her and my husband called her and her cousin and her sister called her, I knew my mom was so lonely.

I kept asking when I could see my mother. It wasn’t safe and there were other elderly residents in the house. I bought two books called Joggin Your Noggin and played word games on the phone with her. My mom could finish everyone nursery rhyme and fill in every song title from the 1960s and she knew the name of my kids and both of my brother’s kids and the president and even the year.

But as the weeks went by, my mom became more and more confused. She was confused about whether the aide had come to bring her oatmeal and whether she had last spoken to my brother an hour ago or five days ago and how to use the remote control and what show she was watching and why her legs hurt. She needs a wheelchair and a hospital bed and someone to feed her. I had not expected to lose her so fast. I had not expected to need hospice so soon. We played our telephone games and she knew what went into the refrigerator, and what category: dog, fish, cat, and hamster fit into, and she knew many other things like the recipe for my Grandma Tilly’s chocolate cookies. It had been more than two months since I’d seen her.

When she called me one morning to tell me her arm wasn’t working, I called hospice and the nurse said she would see if she had a stroke. I felt like I was going to stroke out too — from the grief of it all — from the angry why-can’t-I-see-my-mom-every-day feeling and the bitter really-my-mom-has-to-die-during-coronavirus feeling and the anguished I-lost-the-last-good-nine-weeks-of-my-mother’s-life-and-they-are-never-ever-coming-back feeling.

I want to turn back time to before my mom fell and went blind. To when she lived in the independent senior living apartment that she loved. She had framed pictures on the wall from the house where I grew up, and turquoise chairs and a glass-topped table from Pier One, and all of her mirrored bedroom furniture, also from Pier One, which was her favorite store. The Pier One on Ventura Blvd., the one where my mom shopped, the one I took her to so often closed a few months before my mom fell. That was the end of my mom’s favorite store and, in a way, the end of the vibrant chapters of her life, too.

I got to hold my mom’s hand again recently. The woman who loved to play word games, and who had each fingernail painted a different color when she got manicures, and who organized the apartment roster and the potluck parties and taught mah jongg, and took both a memoir and an improv class at the senior center is fading away. I will never get back the nine weeks of her life I missed. The nine weeks where she called me every Sunday to give me her grocery list: Melba toast, gefilte fish, Diet Coke, prunes, and chocolate chips — lots and lots of chocolate chips. Thinking this way doesn’t help, I know. But I lost the last nine weeks. Nine weeks neither my mom nor I will ever get back. My heart is hurting in a million different directions on this day. I want to see my mother.