March 12, 2020 I had 22 high schoolers crashing in my basement, including my daughter Genevieve, as the world began to shelter in place amidst a budding pandemic: one that lacked a cause, a cure or even a formal name.
Hours before Lane Tech decided to shut down indefinitely, these kids enrolled in the Japanese Club were preparing to celebrate International Days. They were psyched. They had worked for months to prepare a dance routine as part of a week-long festival celebrating the multicultural heritage of Gen’s huge Chicago high school—over a thousand students in her grade. For the dance competition that day, these kids were ready to show up at 6 a.m. Our house was six blocks from Lane and with expectations running high, the whole club stayed over that night. But that same evening, Chicago Public Schools canceled all events throughout the city. For the foreseeable future, classes would take place online.
When the news broke, anticipation turned on its head. Some students sat stunned and cried; others vented their anger. And so a kind of grief descended over our basement as the celebration was cut short. Such demonstrations of grief, whether they started small or astoundingly large, would only grow in months to come as never before.
Winging It on the Floors, Changing in the Garage
There was little if any time to process this; I had to report to the hospital even as the world around me began to shelter in place. Once there, I saw that the hospital had stopped all visitors from entering the building. ER patients were dropped off at the door without anyone to wait with them; Exceptions were made for pregnant women and those with language barriers, but the vast majority of patients were alone. Marooned.
Meanwhile, my pastoral care work of visiting new patients took a sharp pivot: we had to call into their rooms, a pale alternative at best. Many left their phones ringing and the new patients with this strange and terrifying disease – COVID, it would soon be called – were too short of breath to talk. And so I entered uncharted waters. My work in spiritual care centers on face-to-face conversation, while bereavement care requires sitting with someone in silence—being present with a sense of patience before finding the words of comfort to share. And now—this?
I couldn’t sit and wait for a phone call asking for assistance. Here is where my “Dutch-ness” went to work: I donned a face mask (a strange action in and of itself) and went out to talk to staff. Many times, they asked for “drive-by prayers,” as I call them. “Please just pray for us, Amy,” they’d plead, then rush off without even waiting for me to begin. Or I listened to their angst and concerns for family members. “I don’t want anyone in my family to catch this illness when I get home,” they said. More uncharted waters, the first of successive waves—each darker than those before.
We improvised strategies to keep us and our loved ones safe:
- Change out of work clothes in the basement or the garage.
- Bathe in bathrooms separate from other family members.
- Or, on the extreme end, stay completely separate from older members of the household. Before the days of “six feet apart,” this meant staying in separate rooms.
Some staffers shared folk remedies: bathe in vinegar, gargle with salt water.
Days later, nearby North Park University offered dorm rooms for staff members who didn’t want to stay at their homes in between shifts. The symbolism of being in school and taking a test we weren’t ready for wasn’t lost on us.
Enter the Tele-Chaplain
No hospital visitors? No family. Patients on regular medical floors could call loved ones, but ICU patients who were sedated with breathing tubes couldn’t. Physicians found their work so intense they had to sprint through bedside visits; they couldn’t update families regularly, let alone hourly (as many would have preferred.)
Thus began my work calling family members of the ICU patients. What started as a handful grew to a logjam of about 30 as the ICU reached their limits in April and May 2020. I started with regular calls to those I affectionately dubbed “the wives”: five women whose husbands were intubated and sedated in the ICU. All but one of those husbands would die in the coming weeks. During my daily check-ins I listened to their concerns, their angst, their reminiscences. Some eventually came to terms with the inevitable; others did not, as I would learn the hard way.
This was grief ministry on a different level, a literal battlefield baptism. On the one hand, I had such conversations regularly in the hospital. But the wives forced to isolate at home craved connection and contact. Mine might be the only call they’d receive that day.
The work felt meaningful and deep; I treated these women and they treated me as though we belonged to the same family. I too was isolated; I could not visit patients. This phone work was the best ministry I could manage and a service to doctors and staff who had no time to spare.
Yet the effort of every hospital staff member to extend themselves beyond their human limits had to fall short at times, just as the grieving couldn’t always hold back their exasperation. In one instance, one spouse I tried to help the most delivered one of the most heartbreaking shocks of my career: a story I will tell in my next blog.
Great story telling Amy. Eager to follow you through all of this experience.