Space / Time by Siobhan Ring

Space / Time | Siobhan Ring

In the heat of the first pandemic summer, I set off alone on an ill-advised, improvised, road trip toward my mother.

More than a year before COVID plowed into our collective lives, my brother and I had moved her from her home of 35 years to memory care. On moving day, she walked out of her house with her head up, although she had only reluctantly conceded to this plan. “I can adapt to anything.” she had told me, years earlier, as she resisted any serious discussion of this eventuality.  She proved herself correct.

Every few months I flew 2,841 miles from Seattle to upstate New York for a long weekend visit.  Although I told her I was coming, my arrival was always a delightful surprise. When I was there I felt loved and mothered, even as I zipped up her coat and reminded her who I was. 

In the selfies I captured on my phone from my visit in late January 2020, our heads tilt toward one another, we are smiling, and my arms are wrapped around her shoulders. She is bundled in the ankle-length puffy blue coat I bought her to guard against the cold winters. On the day I flew back to Seattle from that trip, the first person in the United States was diagnosed with Coronavirus. Soon the promise of safety we had bargained for her freedom evaporated into the contagion-filled air. 

As the COVID-19 lockdown stretched on, the staff at the memory care began orchestrating video calls. One day, in a sweet moment on FaceTime my mother smiled at my image on the tablet and said, “It’s so good to be together.”

And then her face clouded. “Is that what we are?” she asked.

“Yes,” I tried to assure her, “we are together.” 

“But how is that?” She asked, looking up from the screen and scanning the room she was actually sitting in with a skeptical face. “I don’t think it’s like that.”

She had a point. It really wasn’t. Even her muddled mind could see something was amiss in the space between us.

In July 2020, with cases dipping, New York State lifted some of the visitor restrictions on congregate care facilities. I ruminated obsessively on the question of how to get to my mother. It was the bewildering pre-vaccine days of the pandemic. Waves of illness overwhelmed hospitals and ravaged assisted living facilities like a capricious deity. I did not want to be the vector that killed my mother. Flying was too risky. A friend had a camper van she would lend me immediately, available for just enough days to drive from Seattle to NY, spend five days there, and drive back. I would travel in my own sanitized spaceship and arrive untainted.

My mother was, as a rule, up for adventure, but even she would have questioned the wisdom of this proposal. Then again, she might have done it in my situation, if she could have grasped my situation. 

I’d driven six hours eastward over the Cascade Mountains, across the Columbia River, past acres of potato fields, and was just hitting the Washington/Idaho border when New York State’s Governor announced that Washington State had just been added to a travel advisory. Residents from WA entering NY would now have to quarantine for 14 days. I got a text notification that my campground reservations at NYS Parks had been canceled based on my home address and a voice mail from the director at my mom’s facility. I pulled over and texted a friend who worked in the WA Governor’s office. “We’re trying to get off the list,” she texted back. I kept driving. 

Somewhere in Montana, my second-rate cell phone service got spotty and the GPS gave out. Never one with a good grasp of geography, and having left without a map, I texted my wife from a truck stop “What are these mountains called and when do they end?” She was not amused. 

I bought a paper map at a truck stop, asked the man at the counter where I was, and texted my wife again. I asked her to look up the meaning of the dashboard indicator light that had just turned red. This is the sort of problem my anxious mother would have envisioned. She always told me to leave time for an emergency on my way to the airport, which I never, ever, do. 

The hours delay for impromptu camper maintenance derailed my hastily planned itinerary. As darkness fell that night, I pulled off at the first highway sign tent symbol. I slept parked in a campground that was just a wide field somewhere in Montana. A ridiculous grouse waddled past my window in the morning. I got up and drove East.

As I crossed into South Dakota, I got another message from the friend in the Governor’s office. “It doesn’t look like we are getting off the list,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

 That night I stayed in a vast campground in Hermosa, SD, on the outskirts of Rapid City, surrounded by RVs festooned with Trump for America flags. Alone in my queerness in the van, I briefly considered trying to cover up the gay bumper stickers. Instead I called the memory care and asked to speak to my mom. I told her a funny story about my son that I had told her before and read her a poem she always asked to hear twice. I hung up, closed the curtains on the van, lay down and marveled at the absurdity of both my effort and its failure.

I was working as a consultant at the time of this endeavor. I kept most of my work meetings on Zoom, pulling off the highway to find a place my hotspot would connect. I met with a client to discuss political coalition dynamics in the parking lot of a gold mine in Idaho, surrounded by real-life oversized Tonka trucks. I interviewed graphic designers for a policy report while parked on the edge of a state highway near the Badlands, a ragged, bewildering landscape. It was 101 degrees and I couldn’t figure out how to run the air conditioning in the camper without draining the battery. I smoothed my unwashed hair into a ponytail and tried to project some not-very-credible professionalism as sweat drained down my chest in rivulets and pooled in the waistband of my sweatpants. 

I didn’t turn around in South Dakota. Having driven 1,140 miles, I decided to go another 617 in the direction that wasn’t home or my mother. A dear friend in southern Minnesota was living with cancer. She’d been living with it for decades, with a quiet sense of refusal. When I pulled into her driveway, she came out and gathered me in a hug. I tried not to let my face show my shock at how worn and delicate her body looked. We had a glorious visit. She died seven months later.

The visit with my friend, my fiercely alive friend, wasn’t about death at all. But, then again, it wasn’t not about death. Would I have continued on if she weren’t sick? Maybe not. The whole venture was provoked by my ardent hope to outpace death’s path to my mother.  On my return trip a woman at an RV park in Wyoming asked where I was headed. “Home,” I said. “I was trying to go see my mother.” I told her of my thwarted effort. “I’d be afraid to do that long trip all alone,” she mused. I was more afraid not to.  

I returned home eight days after I left, to exactly where I’d begun.

Two months after my failed voyage to see her, my mother was hospitalized with a non-COVID infection. Desperate and scared, I flew East wearing two masks in a nearly empty plane.

My mother recovered. I spent a day with her at the hospital, gallivanting alongside her through a generally pleasant delusion. She seemed to be sending me off to college, with great excitement for me about what was to come. A sweet fantasy, since when I actually left for college at 17 we couldn’t afford a second plane ticket, so I traveled alone. When a gaggle of medical students passed by the door to her room in a walking lecture she asked “Shouldn’t you join them?” But I said I’d catch up later. The social worker arrived and announced she would be discharged. But memory care wouldn’t take her back. She had to move to the nursing home next door. 

The pandemic rules required that anyone discharged from a hospital to a nursing home had to be isolated for two weeks. My mother had no way to understand the foundations of this policy; not contagion or a calendar. The first option was to stay in one’s own room, a little gate across the door, like one used to deter toddlers. This attempt at containment made her wary and suspicious, and then afraid, angry, and unruly. She walked through the gate and out of her room and raised her voice. The head nurse made a determined face and announced the second option; she’d have to stay in the empty COVID isolation ward.

We wheeled her there across the open grounds. Fall leaves crunched under the chair wheels and she smiled as a cool breeze brushed her face. In the isolation room, a jumble of tables and chairs were shoved to the side to make space for a semicircle of hospital beds. A giant TV loomed on the wall. Piles of dusty puzzles and games spilled out of a corner, detritus of the pre-pandemic times when this space was a day center for people living with dementia. A sole staff member sat in a chair at the edge of the circle of beds. It was not the place I wanted to leave my mother. I hugged her. She hugged me back with strong arms and held my face in her hands. I left her there and flew home to my wife and child. 

Just eight weeks later, I was ringing a doorbell and shivering in the winter darkness at the back entrance of the nursing home. My mother had had a stroke. The head nurse called and told my brother that she was dying. Not today, but soon. We were allowed to come see her, one at a time, although the doors were locked, and no visitors were allowed. There were exceptions for death.

Entering the nursing home every day was traveling through a portal, outside to inside. Through the back door, I entered a narrow hallway.  A pile of plastic wrapped gowns, face shields, and masks cascaded across a gray table that also held a blue binder and a thermometer.  I logged my name, the time, and my temperature in the binder. I took a gown from the pile and put a plastic face shield over my N95 mask. Gowned up, I was allowed to walk across the common space, a big open kitchen with empty tables and a living room with empty couches, into her room. I could stay as long as I wanted, but I could not leave her room until I was leaving the building.

Alone with my mother in her room, my body pulsed with problem-solving adrenaline with no outlet, and ached with anticipated loss. I gently brushed her hair back from her forehead. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move most of her body. To transfer her from bed to wheelchair involved two caregivers and a mechanical lift. She was reportedly dying, but she didn’t seem to be. She seemed more suspended in some unknown realm, floating, just like she was when the sling gently lifted her from bed to chair. 

I was asked to keep my PPE from day to day, to save resources. I learned that, even if it was 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside, I should wear a tank top under my clothes and strip down before putting on the gown. The paper-plastic material didn’t breathe and sweat immediately soured whatever clothes I wore underneath. The nurses and nursing assistants were all wearing tank tops under their gowns too. They worked 12 hour, 16 hour shifts. The whole team was trying to avoid hiring agency staff, who work across multiple facilities, and could introduce COVID. I bought them cans of lattes when I made my curbside pickup order from Target. I ordered bottles of wine from the liquor store next door to Target and opened them alone in my hotel room.

When I arrived at the nursing home, they had successfully kept COVID out for the first nine months of the pandemic. But soon the first case settled into a resident’s lungs. Day by day the number grew. The staff wouldn’t talk about it; when I asked questions, they just shook their heads. But it showed on their strained faces, in the whispers between them, and in the flashing red lights that shimmered on the frosted window of my mother’s room as ambulances came and went. It was, we know now, looking backward through time, the first deadly winter surge. 

My mother’s mind was a veil. I played music and didn’t know if it was annoying or pleasant. I talked. She squeezed my hand. She held my gaze. She communicated with her eyes, but the meaning was open to interpretation. In the background there was an endless, mechanical sighing and clicking of the inflating and deflating mattress, specially designed to prevent bedsores on the papery skin of the old when they are bed bound. I took an audio recording, because it was the soundtrack of the last days of my mother’s life next to me.

Before we moved my mom out of her home, we attempted to sort through the accumulations of 35 years. In the crammed drawers of an old wooden desk, I found the yellowed, typewritten pages of a small memoir my grandmother wrote. I sat down amid the piles and read it through, absorbed in a sudden intimacy across generations. She was a good storyteller, the language vibrant with scenes from her life as the youngest of 13 Irish kids in a small town in Connecticut. 

And then another pandemic appeared in the pages–the Spanish Flu. She wrote of an older brother sick in bed. Every day the priest came and prayed. The doctor came and whispered. After the doctor left,  her mother would cry. Her oldest brothers were sent home from military training to sit at his bedside and hold their mother’s hand. My grandmother’s brother, fevered and suffering, called out for his mother, although she was right there beside him. 

After her brother died, as my grandmother told it, her mother gathered her remaining children around her and promised they would never take another family photo, because their family was irrevocably changed. Nothing was the same. Nothing would ever be the same. 

In the midst of my own pandemic, listening to the click and sigh of the mechanical bed holding my mother, I could see, in my mind’s eye, my grandmother a hundred years ago, her little child self, watching, waiting, quietly keeping a record. I sat next to her, with my mother, in that strange room, the thin December light filtering through the window. Watching. Waiting.

I can’t remember the name of the nurse who, on my mother’s last night, came to check on us every hour, squidging little vials of morphine into my mother’s open mouth until the rigid clenching of her hands and shoulders eased and she breathed more quietly, without the ragged edge of pain. She was balancing her care for my mother with the rise of the deadly outbreak around us, but I felt nothing but her gentle focus. 

In the early morning hours of our night vigil my brother and I broke the rules. I crept to the back door and let him in. We stood together, holding hands over my mother, as her breath slowed, telling her how much we loved her, how grateful we were for her.  The night nurse saw that we were both there and said nothing. 

My mother died and we buried her on a cold day. A small portion of the people who loved her scattered six feet apart as light snow fell in impossible beauty over the rolling hills of the cemetery.

A death of COVID and a death during COVID are not the same thing. But neither is the same as a death without COVID. 

My home in Seattle was across the street from a big hospital. I could look out my living room window and see people huddled, families gathered around cars parked on the street or in the parking lot. They lingered there, outside. One day, a man got down on his knees on the sidewalk, face turned upward toward the brick building.

For the first two years after my mom died, I only allowed myself to feel grateful. Grateful I had been able to touch her, talk to her, hold her hand, wait for her last breath. I was grateful. I am grateful. Because I was with her, and because in those strange and frightening months in the first year of the pandemic so many people had to say goodbye on a screen, through a window, or not at all. 

Late at night in the months after she died, I replayed the hours alone in the room with her, trying to remember what I’d said or not said, done or not done, worrying myself into a terror that I’d failed at something essential in those stretching, awkward, lonely days. Then I’d shudder and shake my head, reminding myself I was lucky not to have been on my knees on the concrete. My grief stunted and clenched in my chest.

On the second anniversary of her death, I took myself to the wild, empty Washington coast in winter. I plunged myself into the frigid ocean. I spoke to my mother, sitting on the damp dunes in the cold gray mist. I apologized for all that I couldn’t explain, that I couldn’t fix, that I couldn’t resolve for her or for me. For the way my mind wandered when I sat alone in that room for hours, and how I played solitaire on my phone sometimes. For the way I never was sure what to say and worried about it instead of just lying down next to her, afraid of bruising or bumping her frail body, invading what remained of her personal space. I remembered the way she, in her advancing years, grew into a stunning clarity of knowing what mattered and what didn’t, and that she laughed often and freely. I remembered the way she loved me, the cool smoothness of her hand as she brushed my hair back from my face, how she would leave the room shaking her head slightly, lovingly, when I said or did something she couldn’t make sense of, or disapproved of. 

The clotted river of grief under my rib cage softened and broke open. 

My great-grandmother speaks across 100 years from one pandemic to another. Nothing is the same. Nothing will ever be the same.

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