Deferred hugs in a time of coronavirus
We’re all feeling the emotional toll. In the second part of his new weekly series, Trent Dalton takes the nation’s temperature.
Remember hugs? Wrapping your arms around someone you love and squeezing the life out of them because you haven’t seen them for three weeks or four days or five hours and you want to show them how happy you are to see them in a way that’s stronger than words. The Macquarie Dictionary remembers: “To clasp tightly in the arms.”
Drive to Mum’s flat to hook up her new computer and she bursts out of her front door, all giddy smiles because her son is at the door – a human is at her door – and she instinctively leans in for a hug. I reel away from her.
“Mum, you can’t be doing that.”
“I know,” she says. “I knowwwwwww!”
“What if I’m carrying this thing?” I say, dismay rising in me like a virus curve. “If you catch this thing…” And I don’t have to finish that sentence because every woman in her mid-60s knows how that sentence can end right now. Then she cries a bit and I kick myself for being too indelicate, too urgent, and not realising what it might mean for a grandmother who lives alone in a flat in Brisbane’s northern suburbs to hug her youngest boy during a global pandemic. So I grab her shoulder with an outstretched arm and try to somehow transmit my feelings and thoughts through the sleeve of a cotton T-shirt. This will end. It gets good. It always gets good. Remember? You taught me that. You’ve lived through shit that would make soldiers crumble. You’ll live through this, too. But I know I could say all that better by clasping her tightly in my arms.
Toni hasn’t hugged her kids for weeks. She tested positive to COVID-19. Toni’s not her real name; she asks me to change it because there’s a stigma connected to this thing and some people in her inner-city community are just plain nasty. Turns out global pandemics bring out the best and the worst in us.
“The weekend before we kickstarted our isolation we had a last hurrah at a family friendly dinner with friends,” she says. “Many wished us well – some thinking it weird, others thinking it wise. Fast forward a week and the Olympics were still going ahead and people were dancing up a legal storm in nightclubs. As the NRL commentators debated how to move the game north we got the call. Someone from the dinner had returned a positive corona test. Within an hour we were tested and back into our bunker. Gross doesn’t begin to describe the COVID-19 test but needless to say we did our bit to stop the spread. Given our Amish social life I was sure we would be fine. The ping of my partner’s chirpy ‘you are negative’ text faded into silence while my phone stayed silent. The ‘No Caller ID’ filled my black screen and a voice from the hospital let me know I had this virus. No cough, no cold, no fever I could recall. Walking backwards in a contactless goodbye I waved goodbye to my kids and partner. Our master bedroom would become my ‘virtual ward’. I dragged a bucket in with some washers and closed the door. We’d just removed the shower head the day before for repair.”
It was hard for Toni to tell her friends and family. Her mum is a retired palliative care nurse. She has watched many people die in her life but she’d never considered watching her daughter die.
In the days since her diagnosis Toni has noticed this virus divide her circle of friends, and those she thought were friends, into two groups. She calls them the “angels” and the “demons”. The angels brought warm pasta to the house. Homegrown eggplant. Her front step filled with eggs, cream, pies and coffee. “My partner waved through the front window to each person who descended on us bearing gifts in a stream that continues today,” Toni says. “Our elderly neighbour mastered FaceTime in no time to ensure my son kept up his piano lessons.”
Then there were the demons. “It seemed the less people knew us the more they had to say. We had apparently been to Japan skiing. Or Chicago. Or New Zealand. We had it coming. We were reckless. We’d known we were infected and sent our children like landmines into school. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t travelled overseas and our kids had been at home.” This destructive gossip was quietly and carefully shared by concerned friends. But it paled in comparison to what had happened to the medical staff who treated her. Toni was admitted to hospital within a few days – she didn’t have a cough or cold-like symptoms but she was having trouble breathing. “I learnt the demons were targeting the frontline. Doctors listening to my chest shared stories of daughters left to sit alone at lunchtime because, ‘Mum told me your family will have the virus germs’. Or the nurse refused service at her favourite coffee shop on the way home from nightshift. ‘Do you mind… the uniform puts people off.’ Just today my nurse told me a patient had had old photos of them uploaded to social media by people who were presenting them as proof they were out and about and breaching their quarantine. All the while they were confined to bed. Spite in action as payback for God knows what by God knows who.”
Toni has a message for the demons. “Imagine it’s you sitting alone worrying about whether you will recover,” she says. “There’s no cure now and none in sight. Weirdly, you want to be alone. You’ve been physically alone since receiving a positive test result. You don’t want to keep reassuring people you are OK when it sounds like a lie in your head.”
She has a message for the angels, too. She’s recovering. She’s beating this thing. She estimates she’s three days away from being allowed to “walk into the sunlight”. A mantra of sorts keeps coming to her in isolation. It’s from that TV show Modern Family, delivered by the character Gloria in her mixed-up, mangled English: “You be the wind in his back, not the spit in his face.” That strange line’s been making Toni laugh and she keeps asking herself how she will be through the long hard global slog of this pandemic. Will she be the wind in someone’s back or the spit in someone’s face?
“I want to leave this bitterness behind in this room,” she says. “I want to be a warm tomato sauce maker. A deliverer of macadamia caramel pies or McDonald’s Happy Meals. I want to go out and be the wind in someone’s back.”
First name in The Book of Deferred Hugs: 10 or 20 long hugs for Mum. Second name in The Book of Deferred Hugs: our friend, who’s a tireless nurse in an oncology ward in Brisbane’s south. She says some bloodsucking leech visitors to hospitals across Brisbane are stealing hand sanitiser bottles stationed outside patient rooms. Some of those patients are fighting cancer. Special place in hell for cancer ward hand sanitiser thieves.
Run to the bunker. Take succour from the kindness of strangers. Open that email account I’ve established for this ongoing and evolving Tales From the Bunker series. And there are stories there. Profound and sad and inspiring and hopeful stories. Your tales from the bunker, dear readers. You dear beloved bunker dwellers. I asked for your help and you gave it in spades and buckets. All these beautiful stories. You shared the light in the dark.
Rachel from Brisbane is thinking about her parents Margaret, 86, and Brian, 89. They live in Graceville in Brisbane’s west. They’ve been married for 62 years and raised six daughters. Margaret lives with dementia but she’s still at the stage where she can recognise family members and recall events from a life lived well and full. Brian resisted his bossy daughters’ persistent requests to move into a nursing home and now the family is grateful he held the line because it means Brian and Margaret are safely isolated in their own home.
This is where Rachel’s eight-year-old daughter Kate comes into the story. Kate’s the youngest of Brian and Margaret’s 16 grandchildren. She loves her grandparents and she heard how vulnerable the elderly are to this despicable and merciless virus. It was natural for Kate to want to see them, to hug them, but her mum told her how important it was to stay away and Kate thought about what she could do. So she went to her room and made a sign that her grandparents could display at the entry to their house. “STOP!” she wrote. “VIG! Very Important Grandparents!” Under those words she wrote, “First class grandparents. Please wash hands.” The whole suburb now knows that Kate is a “VIG” as well. Very Inspiring Granddaughter.
Friends. Family. Connection in disconnection. Comfort in isolation. “I dropped our sweet dog, Josie the dachshund, off to my dad tonight by attaching her leash to the gate,” says reader Liz. “I waved at my dad through his kitchen window and it made me a little sad, but happy that Dad, 78, now has a flatmate to share his biscuits with when he watches crime shows.”
Chris on the Gold Coast is relishing time at home with his 16-month-old daughter. The other day the family sausage dog bowled her over during an enthusiastic face-lick. Chris watched his daughter respond by biting her dog on the nose – “just a little nip” – in the same way she sees the family cat respond to such well-meaning assaults. Then Chris and his daughter had a yelling contest, seeing who could make the loudest scream into an ice-cream bucket. “I wouldn’t get to participate in any of this stuff if I was working normally from the office,” Chris says. “I’m cherishing the small glimpses into her every day that I would otherwise miss.”
Cherish. That’s the song my daughter keeps playing in the car. Kid wakes up dancing. I watch her every morning. She’ll go to the pantry then slide back to the kitchen bench doing some kind of Latin funk dance move, all rolling arms and legs. No amount of global panic and fear will ever steal that girl’s hip-hop moves and that makes me so happy and optimistic that I message my mate, Brian, whose wedding plans were scuppered by the virus, and suggest a Zoom virtual buck’s night to lift his spirits. The lamest buck’s party I’ve ever been to but maybe the most meaningful. Eight blokes drinking beers and answering trivia questions via an online meeting app. Question: how many Australians died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19? Answer: 15,000. We keep one eye on the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre map. We used to follow rugby league scores online on Saturday nights. Now we watch that dreaded red figure – “Total Confirmed” – in the corner of the map do battle with the figure in green – “Total Recovered”. A battle for the ages.
Clare sends through a story from a vet and pet emporium in Brisbane’s western suburbs. A vet must end a dog’s life while its beloved owner stands on the other side of a social distancing window. All the owner wants to do is hug the dog as it dies – but is allowed only to reach through the window and rest a finger on the dog’s paw.
Jess from Brisbane has been worried for her friend in Charters Towers, northern Queensland. She lives on a remote cattle farm with three children. “I text her to see how she is going,” Jess says. “Her response: ‘Social distancing is easy when it is your everyday. But we haven’t been able to get basic groceries for about three weeks’.”
Moments. Thoughts. Reflections. A global pandemic crystallised in a visit to a northern NSW park. “Last week I realised Sydney was no place to be in a crisis as a self-employed person,” writes Bronwyn Birdsall. “I packed up my life in a few days and had the extreme fortune that I could come home to my mum’s place on the Northern Rivers of NSW. On Wednesday I ventured out from her suburban house, wanting to walk off the nervous energy after such a radical shift both in my life and the world around me. A council worker pulled up in a ute by the children’s playground. Meticulously, he measured out pieces of chain... What seemed like maintenance I quickly realised was, in fact, a shutdown. This, in itself, is poignant, however, there was something about the care with which he did it that struck me. Without fuss, with a few key snips, the giant swing was down. A heave of the chains and the flying fox was suspended and out of action. A quick nod of the head in my direction as the seesaw was tied up. A nod back and I walked home. No more play, at least not for now, achieved with a calm and efficient precision.”
Anita from Sherwood, in Brisbane’s south-west: “I’ve been watching this scene from my balcony. Across the road from us there’s a simple brick house with a front yard that features a trampoline. Three little kids live there. And this week they’ve been at home having a great time bouncing around and playing games. We noticed that a woman, their grandmother I guess, has been sitting on a plastic chair on the footpath, on the other side of the slatted metal fence, babysitting them from a safe 1.5 metres away, while she knits. Today it started raining but she kept guard and continued knitting. She was wearing one of those yellow plastic ponchos. A portrait of love in the time of social distancing.”
So many people thinking about their elderly parents. So many of us thinking of the ones we’ve lost, so many wondering if it’s wrong to be glad they’re not alive to see all this. All this hurt. All this loss.
Amy Denmeade is thinking about reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It was a gift from her late mother and when Amy did a cull of her books late last year the only reason War and Peace survived was because she was sentimentally connected to her mother’s handwriting on the inside page. “I’ve never been so grateful to be a reader,” she says. “Time away from screens and absorbed in other worlds are going to be even more essential than usual.”
Marguerite Berkeley’s parents, Pam and Jack, live in The Gap, north-west Brisbane. Mid-80s, married for 62 years. “They were children during World War II and their early lives were shaped by that horror,” she says. “Now in their twilight years a new horror for them to cope with. An invisible enemy that’s causing anxiety and stress and changing their well-worn routines. No daily Mass at various local churches for Mum. No bridge or mahjong games. No knitting group. No coffee with her widowed friends on Sundays. For Dad, no tennis games with his old mates, no visits from grandchildren to borrow his tools. No walking over the back to his neighbours. And how do we keep him at home? Suddenly he’s got urgent business at Bunnings, the newsagents, the chemist, the mower shop. Not even the threat of just 10 of us at his funeral can keep him home. He’s been through a lot including a recent cancer diagnosis and has been sober for 50-plus years but this new threat is really testing him. He’s a natural storyteller with many stories and loves nothing better than to come for dinner and sit with my family and hold court. I’m not sure when or if that will happen again.
“I’ve taught them how to FaceTime, which is helping them feel less isolated. Three weeks ago they met their first great grandchild. A beautiful little girl who made them both cry. Mum sang to her as she held her and Dad said it was the best day of his life. My prayer is that they will both hold her again and meet many more of their great grandchildren.”
Strip it all back: the parties, the financial security, the jobs, the Friday night football. Human contact will always be the first thing on our minds.
A late message from Dawn in north Brisbane. She writes about how much she misses her mum, who was brilliant in a crisis. Her mum was a teenager when her family lost their home in the 1944 bushfires in the NSW Hunter Region. “Mum would be reminding me that times have been tougher and to stop whingeing and get on with it,” Dawn says.
Dawn’s in her early 70s and has never been more grateful for technology. Online shopping. Social media. FaceTime that lets her talk with her granddaughters from isolation. Her granddaughters have been compiling a list of “first-world problems” and sharing it with their grandmother. Anything can make their list. Vacuums with cords that twist around their legs. Home-schooling. Slow NBN. Dance classes shutdown. Stubborn lids on Vegemite jars. And their grandmother’s message is clear. Be thankful for what you’ve got. All you need is a heartbeat and the ones you love. All you need is fresh eggs from your grandparents’ chook run. All you need is a grandmother who will clasp you tightly in her arms the first chance she gets. Dawn says that this is their story now, just like her mum had her story of the bushfires that burnt her house down. They’ll be telling the story of the 2020 pandemic for the rest of their lives and, like any story, it will have an ending. It might not be the happiest ending and it might not be the saddest, but it will have an end.
I shout from the bunker to my daughters upstairs. Dawn is, in fact, my mother-in-law. She’s writing to me about my girls. “Girls, come have a read of this.” Footsteps down the stairs. “That’s so beautiful,” they smile, before rushing back upstairs to continue binge-watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix. “Hey, wait,” I say. “We’ve been locked down for a fortnight now.” The girls nod. “I think it’s safe to give you two a proper hug.” And the girls roll their eyes, step reluctantly into the arms of their old man. First-world problems of the highest order. Hugs from Dad.
To share your bunker tales, email Trent Dalton at thebunkertales@gmail.com