from https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/04/22/pandemic-journal-april-13-20/
Nellie Hermann
April 21, 2020

WELLFLEET, MASSACHUSETTS—My mother is eighty-one. For the past three years, since her memory loss became severe enough that it no longer seemed safe for her to live alone, she has lived in an assisted living facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It’s a beautiful day outside my window,” she says to me over the phone when I tell her again about the virus, and why my brother and I can’t come to visit her. “You would have no idea there’s anything out there you could catch.”

On Monday, April 13, we learned by email that Mom’s facility has thirty-one positive cases of Covid-19. When I talk to her now—on a video phone that my tech-savvy brother set up and had a staff member plug in for her—I have the impression that I’m speaking to her in a bunker, the virus an invisible threat just outside the door I can see behind her. It’s a blessing that she doesn’t feel imprisoned, but the same obliviousness that may protect her from fear is also a danger to her, as she continues to go out that door in search of company and distraction.

We were informed of the first two cases in the building on April 7. The entire facility was tested a few days later, along with all assisted living facilities in Cambridge, as part of a pilot program run by the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard’s joint biomedical research center. I had expected the number to rise, but the sudden jump from two to thirty-one was breathtaking. I had already been wondering about taking Mom out of the facility and bringing her to be with me here, in the house on Cape Cod she bought eleven years ago, after selling the home my siblings and I grew up in. Now, instantly, the question was urgent.

What would it mean to take Mom out? Last summer, I brought her to Cape Cod just for one night, and she was completely disoriented: she didn’t remember the house, despite its being filled entirely with her things (in her bedroom, she said dreamily, “I think I used to have a dresser like that”). In the midst of this pandemic, there are only unanswerable questions: If I take her out, how long will it be before I can bring her back? What if I take her out and she gets sick here? What if I get sick and am unable to care for her? What if she is confused and wanders off, or falls and breaks her hip?

I frantically call around to see what my options are if I want to hire help. Shift aides coming and going from the house seem not much more virus-safe than her current situation, while overnight help—should this prove to be a situation that continues for months—will be prohibitively expensive.

Being with Mom at this stage of her illness is not easy under any circumstance. She was my closest friend for much of my life, and it is excruciating to confront—over and over again, even in the span of ten minutes—that she is in front of me and at the same time already gone. I am not sure that my fear of Covid-19 is stronger than the fear of being in the presence of Mom’s condition all day long for an indefinite period. But one of many cruelties is that she is still present enough—she is still enough herself—that it feels like a betrayal to do anything other than leap in the car to rescue her.

While I work on a possible plan, there is a wind storm. The Cape Cod house, built in the 1700s, literally howls. I walk the dog while crying to a friend on the phone; I can feel my resistance to the plan I am making, another storm coursing through my body. My friend asks, “What do you think your mom would tell you to do, if she were able to?”

I am grateful for his question. I remember Mom saying repeatedly that what she most wanted for her future was not to be a “burden.” It’s quite possible that she would tell me to leave her there, in the assisted living facility; not only that, but I think it might objectively be the best course of action. The fact is that she can’t be rescued from the condition she already has, which has already reached the point where moving her may be very little protection.

I decide to try to hire someone who can be there with Mom during the day, making sure she is staying as safe as possible. This seems like the right plan, but still I feel guilty and anxious. Everywhere in the news are haunting stories of facilities elsewhere that have lost control, whole communities turned into apocalyptic landscapes of horror and death. What happens when we get the next email, likely any day, that says exponentially more cases have been identified in the building? What happens when we start to hear of people dying?

One of the things this virus is forcing all of us to recognize is that we live in the present moment. Plans, now, are really just hopes. But isn’t this always true? Wasn’t it always folly to think otherwise?