When my beloved Aunt Dorothy was admitted to Mt Sinai Hospital on January 1, 2021, I should have taken it as a sign that the year was going to deliver challenges beyond any I’ve experienced before. Then my mom passed away in January, Dorothy died in February, my brother was hospitalized in March, my parents’ house was flooded in July and my dad died in August. But all that happened until August could never have prepared me for what came next and how that changed my life.
For the five weeks, my aunt was at Mt. Sinai, I was constantly getting calls from the hospital physicians advising me of new and unexpected symptoms that she was experiencing. They would tell me the treatment options and (as her health care proxy) ask me for my approval of new protocols. My aunt’s near-complete blindness and deafness made everything worse. She couldn’t hear a phone and she couldn’t see a television. So the isolation of COVID was like the torture of a solitary confinement cell to her. Although she put up a good fight against the virus, she deteriorated mentally. Because of strict visitation rules related to COVID, I was not allowed to visit. I begged the hospital to make an exception in her case. Eventually, they let me in to see her for two hours a day provided I donned PPE so that I was masked and completely covered from head to toe in a protective suit. Because my aunt could not see or hear, I would squeeze her hand and gently massage her arms at each visit. She knew my touch and I knew that would inspire her to keep breathing and to hold onto life. But I was exhausted.
Outside the hospital, my mom’s dementia was progressing rapidly. She lost the ability to swallow so her body was not getting the nutrients it needed. Her organs began to fail and on January 14, she passed away in her sleep. As my family gathered around her peaceful body, the calls from the hospital about my aunt interrupted. I begged them to give me a break, which they tried to do, but it seemed like there were always new symptoms requiring new treatments that needed approval. Finally, when I got a call as I neared the gravesite for my mom’s funeral, I turned off my phone to keep myself from losing my mind.
I spent the next three weeks driving the 2-3 hours from my home to the hospital, comforting my aunt for the two permissible hours then treating my own patients virtually from a quiet room at the end of her hallway. After that, I’d drive up to see my dad who was missing my mom terribly and because of COVID precautions could not have friends or many family members come to his house to comfort him.
Eventually, Dorothy gave up on the hospital. She begged me to take her back to her apartment. When I visited, that’s all she would say to me, “Take me home. I want to sleep in my own bed.” So I spoke with the doctors and we came up with a plan to transfer her to Brooklyn where she would have the loving care of hospice nurses as well as the devotion of her long-time aid, Gifty. Dorothy was so happy to go home, but her body simply had no fight left and she passed away two days later.
I made arrangements for her funeral and started to clear out her apartment, but her having COVID made everything harder. Because of safety concerns, no one would enter an apartment where someone had been living with the virus. It took Gifty and I, wearing masks and protective clothing, four weeks to clear the rooms until they finally met the building management company’s requirements.
Then just as I was handing in the keys to the cleared apartment I got a call from my sister-in-law. “Lauri, come here quick. Matthew can’t stand. He’s weak. He has a severe headache, he’s vomiting, and he can’t think clearly. I’ve already called 911.” It was just four weeks since Dorothy’s passing and already I had another family member in the hospital. And once again, COVID made things more difficult. Only my brother’s wife was able to visit him, so I was again on the phone, listening to the latest reports: lab tests, CT scans, MRI’s, etc taken in an effort to figure out what was affecting my dear brother.
Without my brother’s help, I was the only one visiting my dad. And now all he wanted to tell me was how much he missed my mother. “She was my life. She was my everything – a perfect wife, a perfect mother, a perfect person.” A few weeks later he would tell me, “I’m so depressed. This has gone on long enough. I’m 101 years old and I’m ready to die.” It hurt so much to hear those words, but I completely understood why he was saying them.
My parents had a fabulous marriage. They were madly in love with each other. When they were young, they swam together, skated together, and played infinite games of tennis. They loved to travel and giggled their way through the Caribbean, Central and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Whenever anything went wrong on a trip the two of them believed (and expected!) that something better was going to come their way. (And it seemed like that’s exactly what happened each and every time!)
They danced in the aisles at concerts and never tired of telling the story of how they had to run from the thunderstorm that arrived when they saw Diana Ross in Central Park. They loved New York City. Manhattan was their favorite place for a romantic getaway. Brooklyn and the Bronx are the boroughs to take friends for fun adventures. I can still hear my dad telling his aide, Joseph, the stories of how he grew up on the Grand Concourse and how he loved playing stoop ball after school each day.
But now just when my dad’s flame was dimming and my brother was fighting to get back on his feet, there was a disastrous storm that decimated the East Coast. It flooded my father’s basement with four feet of water so there was yet another challenge to face. For five days, emergency crews came to remove the water that was destroying my parents’ home of 65 years. I called restoration companies to see what we needed to do to correct things. The damage was beyond my wildest dreams.
And then I got another call, “When dad woke up this morning, there was some blood on the bed.” I sped to the house, thinking only of my beloved father while ignoring the basement. I stayed there for two weeks as my father drifted away. The family gathered, we had a funeral and then we had to deal with the consequences of the damage from the sea that destroyed the lower level of the house.
At this point, I was doing all I could to keep my sanity. I was meditating, going for walks by the ocean, and reaching out for support from those people who I find bolster me the most. I was exercising and eating well, but I was losing ground. I was arguing with my brother, sniping at my boyfriend, and I couldn’t bear one more person calling me for an update on things. My world was falling apart and I had no idea how to manage it all.
In desperation, I walked out onto the deck of my house late at night and I stared up at the stars, raising my hands to the heavens and I called out as loudly as my lungs would allow, “Okay all of you. I did all I could to care for you. You’ve got to help me. I cannot do this all alone. I need your help.” I started bawling. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I felt a searing pain in my throat as I stood in the blackness of the night. I don’t know how long I stayed outside staring into space, but when I came back inside, I was completely exhausted and so I walked into my bedroom, crawled under the covers and fell asleep.
That night I had a dream. My mother came to me and said, “ I’m here and I’m always here for you. You’ll know I’m around whenever you see an owl.” Then I had a second dream. My father came to me and said, “ I’m here and I’m always here for you. You’ll know I’m around whenever you see an animal in the sea.” And slowly but surely, owls came to nest in the trees outside my windows and humpback whales swam in increasing numbers off Indian Wells Beach near my home.
I never believed in communicating with the dead. I never expected to hear from my mom or dad after they died, but I can say with certainty that when I was so desperate that I opened myself to the possibility of feeling their love and hearing their voices, I felt their presence and was finally released from the horrifying grip that 2021 had on me.
I will be writing more about what followed in my next pieces, but for now, I simply want to offer the possibility that the world is filled with far more love and support than most of us believe. Our journeys can be far less challenging if we open up to the whispers of kindness that come in unexpected forms. We are all connected and remain connected long after we pass away.