Stories of COVID-19: Connections, Part 2

In Part 2 of Connections, we share two more stories about finding new ways to connect during the pandemic. Our first story is from psychologist Shreya Varma, who is based in New Delhi, India. In her story, Shreya struggles to connect with her patients in the same way when she's treating them over web video.

Our second story is from storyteller and comedian Ivy Eisenberg. When Ivy's father enters hospice during the pandemic, her family must find a new way to come together to say goodbye.

If you missed Part 1, you can listen here!

Story Transcripts

Story 1: Shreya Varma

I work as a clinical psychologist in a hospital in Delhi in India. I remember when COVID was declared a pandemic. I used to actually still take the public transport. And I remember on the day that it was declared a pandemic by the UN, I was taking the public transport and I was surrounded by people. And I was thinking, “Okay, I definitely shouldn’t be getting close to them. I should probably stand up, sit down.”

Shreya Varma is a clinical psychologist practicing in New Delhi, India. She has an extensive experience in the healthcare industry and primarily works with adults in her private practice.

So I’m thinking, “Should I sit down? Should I stand up?” And I’m thinking, “Okay, my father told me that this man who tested positive who takes the same route so I’m thinking I definitely can’t touch anything right now.”

I somehow survive that Metro ride and I get to the hospital and then I’m thinking, “Okay, now I need to touch the door handle.”

Then I open the door and then I greet everybody. I quickly go up to wash my hands. And I've been told that singing Happy Birthday twice covers 20 to 30 seconds so I’m singing, “Happy Birthday to you.” and I’m washing my hands.

Then after that I go to my room and suddenly I’m sitting in my room thinking what if I catch COVID and pass it on to my family members? Or what if I catch COVID and pass it on to my patient? Or what if my patient catches COVID from the hospital? Or what if they catch it and then they end up infecting, like the clinic just fell septic and I just did not know how to do this anymore.

So I quickly called up my clinical supervisors and I told them, I asked them what do I do? I don't know what to do. Both of them suggested that I move my practice online and that I start practicing remotely.

So I decided to send all my patients a message. I told them that we’ll be doing this online and that I'll send you a Zoom link. And that was a sense of relief because I didn’t have to go to the hospital anymore.

But suddenly I was thinking how will I practice online and how will this turn out to be? I had no idea. And I am somebody that really uses my room in this setting a lot. To give you an example, in my room on my table I have like a tissue box and I have a pen stand and I have a lot of figurines. Generally I ask my support staff to keep a water bottle.

Like this one time, one of my patients came in. She came in and immediately she started drinking water right out of the water bottle. That really caught my eye so I was thinking what made her do this. It’s something that stayed with me while I worked with her.

Another time, I had a patient who messaged me and said that she’ll arrive late and she’ll reach by so-and-so time. But when so-and-so time came she actually did not enter. So I went out. I asked her to come in. Then as soon as I did that, I was thinking what made me get up and go outside and ask her to come in? And what kind of a person does she evoke in her relationships?

So these are the two questions that I work with that why does the patient say this and do this and why is the therapist saying this and doing this? So there's a real tangibility to my clinic. There's a real sense of holding two objects that we use.

Shreya’s office, featuring the infamous water bottle.

Suddenly when I was practicing online, I just felt like I don’t have my senses anymore. And I’m somebody that’s always liked to observe things. I've always liked to look at things. When I was really young, when I was like 13 years old, we used to have poems in school but we only used to have half of them. Like Ode to the West Wind was one poem that we had but we only had half of it. We didn’t have the entire poem.

So me and my friend we actually printed out the entire poem. We skipped lectures to read it, to think about why was the wind being personified? Why was the winters wind being spoken of? Why was the spring not being spoken of?

So when I was practicing online it just felt hard. I actually remember one day when I was ready to do these Zoom sessions, I asked my supervisor, “How am I supposed to say can I put my chair at an angle? Do I not sit straight?”

She said, “You sit however you want to.”

I remember one day, one of my patients used the link, came online. And I’m staring at the screen, so it feels funny because I feel like I’m staring at a 2D image. Then she comes online and she tells me, “I don’t want to be here.”

I’m thinking, okay. Firstly, I’m staring at just an image and then this image is telling me I don't want to be here. Then she just kept staring at me. So initially in the session if my patient says something, I just try and process it. I try and think about it without like before saying anything.

So I’m trying to stay with her but I can see that her piercing vision is seeping into my skin and I feel like this is really scary. So after some time passed, I actually decided to tell her this is disturbing. Right then the call dropped and I realized the screen was frozen and I was going crazy thinking, “This is disturbing. This is scary. I don't know. She must be so disturbed.” You know?

But I think that’s the thing that it is really disturbing that we’re doing this online and it’s not the same.

But it’s interesting because when I've started working online, I started to notice some things that really stand out for me. I remember once, I had a session with one of my patients. He came online and, again, he used this Zoom link, came online then we speak for about 10 minutes.

Then after about 10 minutes, he says, “Okay, wait. I'll just be right back.” Then I can hear him talking to his family members about tea and how many spoons of sugar he wants.

And I’m thinking, “Huh, this is unusual. Never something that would happen in my clinic. Am I supposed to listen to this? Am I intruding into his space?”

I can hear some conversation about sugar. This is salt. I don't know how to make sense of this. But suddenly I found myself thinking that it’s interesting. That within the realm of this new clinic there were actually two voices. One that belonged to my patient and one that belonged to the family member.

He came back and he also started talking to me about how during this pandemic he's also living at home and he's having to struggle with his voice colluding with other voices and how other voices at home are also demanding that they exist. This is something that he's struggled with but this is more prominent now.

I think we’re all kind of going through this. We’re all living at home having to renegotiate boundaries because we’re always home. But what’s really interesting is that we were having sounds. There were sounds to be able to communicate your inner world to the other person and I think we’re always doing this.

I remember another time, I had a patient who would always sit in front of like this painting and it was a really dark painting with dark blue and black strokes. She always sat with really light-colored clothes and this was something that was repeating session after session. The contrast of the light-colored clothes against the dark painting really stood out for me.

One day actually she came online and she started talking to me about when she was younger, she had painted this painting and it’s really a beautiful part of her life. It’s interesting because also in the sessions, we were beginning to go inside a room in her own mind where she felt unsafe, where she felt threatened, where she felt she entered some area she shouldn’t have and it was making her feel not safe. I think that’s the contrast that stood out that here was this beautiful painting outside but there was also this space which was coming from inside which felt really threatening.

I feel like now that I've been working online that this language, it almost feels like actually a new language. It’s like a whole new language with its own alphabets, with its own images, with its own sounds. Like when you read a poem in between two lines, sometimes there's a comma, sometimes there's a full stop, sometimes there's just like a gap. But that gap is called a caesura.

I feel like this language is also providing a caesura of its own. And I've become curious about learning this new language and I wonder if the connection is dropping a lot or if my patient has technological handicaps. I wonder what that translates into in this new language.

I think I’m realizing now that while we’re going through this period, this traumatic period of living through a pandemic where we’re having to watch people die, where we’re living in isolation and we’re really alone, what we cannot take for granted is the fact that we have this language at our disposal which is also helping us remain connected and stayed together. Thank you.

Story 2: Ivy Eisenberg

It’s February 29 of this year, BC, before COVID, and I’m off to New Jersey a hundred miles away to my dad’s 93rd birthday. He and my mom now live in my sister’s living room.

Ivy Eisenberg is an award-winning humor writer, storyteller and comedian who has performed comedy, solo shows and stories throughout the Greater NYC area and in Washington, DC.

My little sister is a doctor so they have basically built-in urgent care. My eldest sister is a project manager and shows up to family gatherings carrying a portable file box trying in vain to keep our chronically disorganized family aligned. And my brother, he's the prince among the girls. He's the only guy and he and my dad are like best buds. They worked together for something like 40 years. I have another sister who’s in Europe. She's an opera singer. She's the exotic one.

So me, I’m the middle child and I’m sort of the troubled one, the also-ran, and in the order of importance, I’m like fourth, maybe fifth, depending on how you count my sister in Europe. And we all call ourselves the kids even though we range in ages from 50 to 70 years old. We get along really well. We’re all visiting my parents all the time.

So today for my dad’s party, I bring the bagels, lots of cream cheese. My elder sister brings some nice spreads. My brother brings beverages. My niece makes homemade birthday cake like she always does.

My mom’s been under the weather. She has COPD and she's on oxygen. There may be fluid on her lungs. And my dad, he's also not well. He's got chest pains and he's been sleeping sitting up in his recliner.

My dad’s recliner sits right in the middle of my sister’s house. Right in between her former living room and her kitchen. And it’s this ugly, murky blue color, the kind of blue that goes with absolutely nothing in anybody’s house, let alone my sister’s house which is all earth tones. And my dad sits there all day playing with his computer, doing puzzles, reading books and just sitting there observing the goings on and with running commentary.

Next to the recliner is a stack of Walmart shipping boxes, which he uses as a side table to stack up his junk. He's got books. He's got puzzles, his baseball hats. God bless my sister for letting him live there because that pile around his chair is growing taller and wider every day.

I always work really hard to find a great birthday gift for my dad. I’m still seeking his approval even though I’m 63 years old. This year, I get him a chess set where the two sides are Republican and Democrat. We’re all hyped up on politics. Thankfully, we’re on the same side.

I also re-gift him a ratty book of my original parody songs from 50 years ago. And just like he did then and just like he does whenever I bring him my original parody song sheets, my dad at 93 years old sings all the songs with me in his off-key voice and his Brooklyn accent.

The first week of March, I travel down to DC for my day job and by the next weekend, pandemic panic has exploded. The world has shut down. I stopped going to visit my parents. I stopped going anywhere. Everything is canceled. At the end of March, I get a fever and it lasts for 12 days. The family is terrified, texting me nonstop for updates. I get a COVID test and it comes back negative.

I try to organize Zoom meetings with my family but nobody is interested. It’s too chaotic. My mom, at 93 years old is in denial that she's gone gray and doesn’t want to see herself on screen. And my dad just has no patience to fiddle with the Zoom app on his Chromebook.

My parents are both hard of hearing and they refuse to wear their hearing aids. So my only communication with them consists of phone calls where I have to shout maybe three sentences and then my sister sort of interprets what’s going on.

On April 23rd, my dad is checked into the hospital. Now, in any other time, we’d all be running down there 13 or 14 of us filling the hospital room, taking over the family waiting area, messing up the lounge with Chinese food. But with COVID, no one can visit. My brother has had to leave him at the front and he has to go into the hospital by himself. All we can do is take turns bothering the nurses at the nursing station by calling in. It’s ridiculous.

We’re texting each other updates, his blood pressure reading, his chest x-rays. Luckily my little sister actually works at this hospital on the weekends so she can give us a little bit of insight.

My dad tests negative for COVID-19. We’re surprised and not surprised. He does, they think, have pneumonia and he has chronic heart failure, which is very serious. But he's bounced back from far worse. I mean he's had strokes and loss of his kidney function, five or six operations, always bounced back. And of course now, it seems he's starting to improve. He wants out of there. He feels really guilty that he's escaped COVID-19 and he really feels guilty that he's occupying a hospital bed that other people really need.

A photo of Ivy’s beloved dad, dancing in happier times.

Now, he's not picking up his phone. Then my dad calls my brother at home. Dad wants the nurse to come into his room and she's not answering his buzzer. So my brother calls the nursing station. “Oh, good, Dad’s complaining. He's on the mend.”

But the next day my dad tells my sister, the doctor, that he wants to die, and he checks himself out of the hospital. I didn’t think he would ever die let alone ask to die. But on Sunday he calls me up and he's called each of us to say, “Eh, I want to die.”

What do you say? What do I say? I can’t say, “Nonsense. Snap out of it, buddy. You're getting better.” I can’t say, “Well, okay, let’s get to it.” All I can say is something like, “I hear you. I honor your feelings. I’m on my way.”

Fuck COVID. I pack up my face mask, my hand sanitizer, wipes, paper towels, nitrile gloves. I pack up Tylenol and acid reflux meds. I put on a rain poncho from a whale watch and I wear plastic bags to cover my shoes. And I make the hundred-mile trip to my sister’s.

The New Jersey turnpike is eerily empty of traffic, like it’s the end of days. There's nobody on the roads.

I arrive at my sister’s in my makeshift hazmat getup. Everyone’s there. My dad hasn’t changed his mind, although he thinks that the next step is for us to just take him to the doctor to die and, poof, it’ll be all over. Because when Louie Eisenberg says he wants something, we are supposed to snap to and make it happen.

We set up my dad an in-home hospice. He's in a hospital bed in my sister’s former dining room. I take a hotel room nearby. The hotel is hermetically sealed behind Plexiglas and plastic and I have to pass my credit card and my ID through this long tube to the reception desk. All the common areas are shut down.

Our charge is to keep my dad comfortable and the hospice organization gives us lock box that’s called the comfort kit. Cynical people would call it drugged up.

What an incredible gift that dad is home with all of us, except my sister in Europe who couldn’t get over. My doctor sister dispenses the medicine. My older project manager sister arranges paperwork and signatures. And I spent as much time as I can by my dad’s side on the tan couch just watching him breathe. Though that might not seem like a sacrifice, that tan couch is so slippery that when I sleep over one night, I have to hold onto the back all night so I don’t slip off the couch and crash onto the hospital bed.

My dad was never much for words. He usually grunts, and we would know what he's saying. Like a single grunt, like “ruh-ruh-ruh” means pass the salt at the dinner table or “en-de-den, you did good.” that means you'd done good. Now, he's not talking at all. He's not even criticizing. He's not cheering us on. He's not clowning around with his grand kids. He's just inside his own head making his own peace with whatever it is he needs before he passes.

I’m the middle of five kids and it’s hard for me to get a word edgewise, but now at 63 years old, I feel like I have not left anything unsaid. I have no regrets about how we honored my dad in his fight to stay alive all those years, or how he has chosen to die at this moment.

He passes away on May 7th.

My dad’s ugly blue recliner chair sits idle right in its spot. His Chromebook, baseball caps, books, puzzles, all still stacked there on top of the Walmart box. The chess set I got him leans against the chair unopened. My mom walks by, sits on the chair for a bit, surveying the house, catching her breath on her way to her chair in the kitchen.

I like to think that my dad is still there, directing traffic, telling his kids they'll be all right and filling this world with hope and life.