A Proven Way to Feel Better When Isolated and Lonely
Lessons From a Hospital Bed During the Pandemic
The gurney speeds me into the operating room for an emergency surgery on March 20, 2020, week one of the coronavirus lock-down in California. Tidy rows of black scissors and stainless-steel surgical tools ring the perimeter, like soldiers at attention, as I slide by body onto the table. In a state of disbelief, I jokingly tell the medical staff that the number seven signifies completion, but I was hoping the six surgeries I had last year were enough. Then comes the familiar swallow of anesthesia with its billowy bliss and next the frenetic movements of nurses and doctors in the recovery room. Why are the first moments in recovery always so frantic?
Everything happens too quickly to catch up with reality except for one truth. Just three hours after I admit myself to the ER, hunched over with abdominal pain from a suspected ruptured appendix, I learn that the appendix is removed—not ruptured—but I have an “infection of proximity” requiring further watch and a possible intestinal surgery. This is a scary prospect. I’m sequestered in a ghost-town hospital room with no loved ones during a global pandemic. On the faces of the medical staff, I see the anxiety of looming disaster, like troops on D-Day. Staring down the unknown, we form a foxhole of mutual support and encouragement. I decide to pass on my appreciation—and the community’s—for their heroic posture during this crisis. To my delight, several conversations open up, including one with a nurse over her drawn-out dating hardships. Another nurse tells me I’m the talk of the nurse’s station—okay, the hospital is at 50% capacity—but it illustrates one truth I can hold onto in this time of uncertainty, that it’s more blessed to give than receive because giving buoys the spirit. (Thankfully, I avert more surgery and am released four days later).
My experience with isolation is a microcosm of an epidemic of loneliness that accosts everyone. My fitness-buff nephew, locked down in a federal penitentiary, gets out for an hour every three days to use the phone or computer. He reports that “the cops here are wearing masks and space suits now. Lots of bologna sandwiches. I am good though, drawing, studying, and reading.” Many COVID19 patients like 84-year-old Robert McCord, die alone in hospitals after days in isolation. His daughter, Nancy Hopkins, says goodbye through a phone in a plastic bag held to his ear by a nurse. Chemotherapy patients suffer through treatments alone; those living by themselves confront a void alone; families face special needs, familial annoyances, fraying marriages, and confined kids alone. Isolation agitates and depletes us as this sports columnist jests:
“Three weeks ago, I, too, wanted to make the perfect sourdough. Now I’m happy to eat Rice Chex for dinner. The goal posts have moved from write the next Great American Novel to put on pants by 3 p.m. Last month, I wanted my children to use this gift of time at home to learn a second language. Now I am happy if they don’t spray paint curse words on the living-room wall” (Gay, Jason. “Please Stay at Home. Please Stay Active. And Please Stay Yourself.” Wall Street Journal, 14 April, 2020, A,14, Sports).
The elderly grapple with unique challenges that trigger memories, doubts, and fears. Strangers make a wide berth around my 94-year-old mother as she takes a walk in the neighborhood. This well-meaning gesture touches a raw nerve pulsing just below the surface despite 80 years of dormancy. She remembers the yellow Star of David with “Jude” (Jew) sewn on her lapel by her Gentile mom. Her dad is Jewish. It’s 1941, and Hitler’s 1935 second degree law of “Mischlinge” (mixed race children) declares that she belongs to the Jewish race and, like a full Jew, is to be exterminated. My mom is an impressionable girl—barely a teenager—in the streets of Berlin. Pedestrians do far more than provide a wide berth; they taunt, jeer, and threaten her very existence with their furtive stares of seething anger. The star gives them license to release vitriol on an innocent child.
How does my grandma endure the cruel force compelling her to sew the star on her daughter’s lapel? What goes through her mind as chooses a spool, threads the needle, knots the fiber, and stabs the coarse cloth? How does she extinguish the primal desire to protect her only child from harm? How does she persuade her daughter to wear the coat outside? She fastens the star high on the lapel to fold down in the streets, but it doesn’t blunt the horror.
“It was the worst thing I ever experienced” my mom recalls with bitterness. “I cried and physically struggled with my mom as she was trying to sew on the star. I screamed at her: ‘Why did you have to marry a Jew and make me suffer like that? You don’t have to go out like me!’ I was really beside myself. I loved my dad! But it was unbearable to me and I just cried my heart out.” She leaves the house with the lapel turned up for the Nazi spy stationed at the apartment complex entrance to see, folding it down when he’s out of sight. Now, as people make a wide berth around her 80 years later, the pain reemerges. It’s remarkable how grim memories are preserved like honey-colored amber; it’s sad to witness their centrifugal force.
Isolation can also propel us toward others and thus improve our own well-being. It starts with accepting that intent does not always equal effect, that our well-meaning actions don’t always create the desired results. They may even create opposite results like control or rejection. As the elderly are protected worldwide, their experience touches triggers loneliness, taps raw nerves, reminds them of their frailty and finitude, stokes fears of the future—health care rationing—and stirs doubts of their worth and value. We can protest that we are trying to shield them from harm, but still the desired effect doesn’t land, like a navy plane that narrowly misses the carrier and has to circle in for another try.
How do we stick the landing? It starts with pushing against the centrifugal force to withdraw to our own islands. We commit to creative acts of kindness, especially toward the most vulnerable. News stories of family, friends, and strangers going out of their way to send cards, bring meals, flowers, medicines, and other assistance to the elderly and medically compromised display what is needed. The story of two Maryland teenagers using their free time to start “Teens Helping Seniors” is a heartening example (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/15/us/iyw-teens-delivery-service-for-the-elderly-trnd/index.html. It’s about sacrificing for those most deserving and least demanding. The happy irony is that giving actually helps us feel better in our own isolation.
Who is languishing on the outskirts of your social network? Each one of us is needed to flatten the curve of this crisis of loneliness. As the Geico Insurance commercial jokes: “Some things are easier done than said.”