To counterbalance the weather, the COP, the Botox-promises of our “officials” and the scandal of toast stolen by health care workers, here is a Christmas chronicle at ground level, for young and old.
There are stories that stick with us longer than others. And from which one day we must unburden ourselves. This was experienced by friends.
At the start of the pandemic, a mother and her son decided to volunteer to help out in a CHSLD on the island of Montreal. Every day on the news, for a few weeks, we repeat that it is the carnage in these long-term care centers and in private residences for seniors (RPA). Patients are dropping like flies, and the staff shortage is glaring.
Charlotte and Marc (fictitious first names, at the request of Charlotte who does not want light) decide to go to the front. They are trained quickly, they put on uniforms and become assistant orderlies.
Volunteering lasts for weeks, full time, under the neon lights and in the particular smells of these places. Charlotte often chats, and befriends, an elderly patient on her floor who we’ll call John. John, an Anglo by origin, has only one sister as an acquaintance in the whole world. Her sister is in another CHSLD. Before, they saw each other from time to time. Since COVID, they have been confined. Sometimes they talk on the phone.
The only outing John did before the virus was to go to the local convenience store to buy junk food. Chocolate, chips, sugar. With the little check from the government.
Each time, the conversation is familiar. John is always happy to see Charlotte. His mood is sweeter with her than with the other attendants. He seems to know her. Since the health instructions, he no longer goes out. Charlotte and Marc have the evening shift. Over the evenings and conversations, Charlotte reads between the lines and ends up buying and bringing stuff from the convenience store to her patient. John is happy. As if they knew each other.
Something unites them. We sometimes like to believe that there are invisible links that bind us to others and to events. And that’s sometimes true.
To work in the health services, one must then put on protective clothing. Long coat or jumpsuit, gloves, mask, visor… On top of the plastic visor, a piece of type with their first name written in Sharpie, so that they can be identified by other staff members: nurses, department heads, support staff and other attendants. Here, the majority of the staff are women from North Africa and a few Haitians. They are the ones who “watch over” our sick and our elderly. Still today.
Charlotte first said to herself that if John seemed so familiar to her, it was because she sometimes answered him in English, whereas her colleagues from Algeria, Morocco or Haiti spoke this language less well.
Then an evening like the others, John, always smiling and happy when she starts her shift, in the course of a conversation, ends up thanking Charlotte for having thought of sending him a card for her birthday. All the link comes from there. John recognized him. A little feeling of existence through a shitty life. “Thank you for the wishes”, as they say.
Charlotte has never given the man a birthday card, not even the printed, generic one that wishes John a Merry Christmas every year. The “Charlotte” who signs is the employee of the public curatorship assigned to the “John A file”. John receives no other greeting cards from anyone. Never. She understands her patient’s happiness, but she is also disturbed by the sadness of the situation.
And then Marc, in his hallway. He too was assigned for weeks to “his” patients. One evening, an old man dies. Still hot, it has just expired. Marc tells the nurse that the family must be informed quickly. The nurse replies that she has been taking care of this patient for seven years and that he has never had a visit. There is no one to notify.
We got out of a virus with a mixture of benevolence and science. But another kind of confinement – soul isolation – doesn’t seem quite in check. There will never be a vaccine against the feelings it generates.
It is elsewhere.