Last Sunday’s edition of The New York Times overflows with writing on the pandemic.
After all, we just passed the first year anniversary of lockdowns across the United States. Every reporter in the nation seems to be saying, let’s rehash--one more time–our reactions and responses, our experiences, the gains and the losses of this extraordinary year.
Well, why not? It has been a bizarre and life-altering year!
But while the Times of March 14 is packed with descriptions of experiences during the pandemic, I cannot find myself in it. My experiences. And the experiences of the many that I know personally, and of those that I do not know personally, but know of.
Now maybe I just didn’t look hard enough.
But if the past year is any indicator, there isn’t going to be much written about what I, and many others, have gone through. And that is the experiences of those of us who have gone to hell and back during the pandemic while we struggled to cope with, in addition to the challenges posed by pandemic, personal loss.
Not losses occasioned by the pandemic–which have been nightmarish enough for far too many. But the losses that would have happened to us, in all likelihood, pandemic or not. And which the pandemic, with its limits and restrictions, its fear and isolation, made more painful, more surreal, more difficult to bear.
Let me explain.
In March of 2020, my partner met again with a neurologist to discuss disturbing changes in his cognition. With memory, his ability to problem solve, with orientation and directional sense, and with balance. During this visit, the neurologist stated that, at that time, he did not see signs of dementia.
This was a change from our previous visit with this doctor, and was a great relief to hear!
Time passed.
Lockdowns in our Great Lakes area commenced, life changed for us as it did for all, spring passed into early summer, turmoil and demonstrations hit many streets and, to our pleasure and delight, our adult daughter moved back to our area, quarantined for several weeks, then moved in with us, staying for months until she moved out in early 2021 for a demanding job overseas.
Much happened during this time. On the political stage, and much at home, in our daughter’s life, in my work life, and between me and my partner. All the while, the pandemic swirled about us, informing every day with its challenges.
But the major event of this time, for us, was not the pandemic, nor our adult child’s professional achievement, nor the resilience we showed in the face of the pandemic. No, it was the blow inflicted by the signs of precipitous cognitive decline in my husband that began to show in the summer and fall of 2020.
Then, during our summer appointment with the neurologist my husband was told that he was showing signs of dementia. And, during our autumn appointment, a firm diagnosis of dementia was reached. Last, during our most recent appointment, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease was handed to us.
I had driven us to the appointment, as I’ve done all our driving for nearly a year, and I recall driving home in a light snowfall through a wooded area, an area that normally I would have enjoyed seeing in a dusting of snow. But I was sobbing so hard that I considered pulling over. I didn’t. I’ve discovered in the last several years that I can cry anywhere and still function, including crying in the car.
My husband did not cry. He sat silently in the passenger seat beside me with the pale and shaken look of someone who has just been informed of the death of a loved one. He looked more vulnerable at that moment than I recall ever seeing. And that frightened me more than any scenario of a grim future running through my head at the time. Or that his crying openly would have done.
So here I sit, now, cooly reciting a version of the timeline of my husband’s diagnosis and the events of our Covid year: in March of 2020, just days before lockdowns popped up over the country, we were told that my husband did not have dementia. Nearly twelve months later to the day, we were told that he has Alzheimer’s Disease.
This is no indictment of the field of neurology. I know, given my spouse’s background in treating the brain injured, that neurology is its infancy, and that our understanding of the mind, and its myriad afflictions, is rudimentary.
No, I appreciate the neurologist taking his time to reach this diagnosis, and his delivering it to us in a sensitive manner. I don’t appreciate the paucity of advancement in the field of cognitive decline given its prevalence, and the crushing toll that dementia takes on many. But that is another topic, for another time.
What I want to stress is that the events of the past several years (it was two years ago this spring that a trip revealed that my partner’s once excellent navigation skills had all but evaporated, and that we had before us, without doubt, a serious problem) have been anything but cool, and have been riddled with pain and loss, emotional highs and lows, grief, loss, and anger, and have been, at too many times, simply terrifying.
Covid-19? What is the threat of Covid-19 compared to what is actually playing out in our lives, daily?
And where are we, and the many that I know who are also coping with loss at this time, in the verbiage overflowing from all corners about “the pandemic” and how it has affected us?
I envision the pandemic as a veil, or a fog, that fell upon us, as we were in mid-March of 2020, that did not remove, or freeze, what was happening then. But rather fell over all, obscuring life below, but not halting it. Everything that was happening at the moment that the lockdowns began continued, in one form or another, for all of us. And lots of hard stuff developed for many during the pandemic.
In other words, life went on. For all of us.
Countless have fallen victim to disease, death, heart attack, stroke, cancer, illnesses of every kind, economic woes, job loss, bankruptcy, housing loss, marital disintegration, relationship loss, accident, crime, assault, and so on.
Yet when one reads about the pandemic–as if it is a train fast pulling out of the station and disappearing–there is this off putting silence, or refusal, to address the question of how have people, already hurting and in trouble, fared with this?
We know it’s killed over one-half million Americans. An astounding figure. We know it’s wreaked havoc in the workplace, on most wallets, in the school room.
But, how did the 94 year old living alone in the suburbs, unable to drive or walk on her own to a grocery, make it this far? How did that fledging business make out with the economic ups and downs? How does a postal carrier keep him or herself safe at this time? What happened to the graduating classes of 2020? How was that diagnosis of breast cancer handled? How many had strokes or heart attacks, but did not get to an ER?
What happened to those people?
What’s it been like to work out of a studio apartment in Manhattan, alone, day after day? What’s it like to be 70 years old, two hours from your adult child, in a small town in western Illinois?
What is it like to dissolve a marriage during the pandemic?
And, what’s it like to die during a pandemic, knowing that no service will be held in your memory? Is it reassuring to learn that you will be eulogized over Zoom?
And, finally, what’s it like to go from a diagnosis of ‘no dementia’ to a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease during the first twelve months of a pandemic? How does one, ah, cope with that?
I can speak to that.
If anyone is interested.
WellCraftedToo 