One Tuesday in June, the care manager called as I was getting in the car.  I saw his name as I answered, so I said hello and explained that I was on my way to The Meadows with my laptop for a telehealth visit with the palliative care doctor.  The care manager said, “I’m calling to let you know that David has tested positive for COVID.”  It was too late to cancel the appointment, so we agreed that I would put on full PPE and stay only for the appointment.

The Meadows was in a full COVID outbreak.  Residents were being shifted to other rooms so that their rooms could be curtained off to create a COVID wing.  David had already been shifted because he was now immunocompromised and his room was too close to the COVID area.  Now he would be moved again, to the COVID wing.  All available staff were pressed into service, packing only the necessary items and boxing up all other belongings to store until residents returned to their own rooms.  Speechless, distraught, David gripped the arms of his wheelchair while people in PPE shoved his books and drawing supplies into boxes.  They said all the right things – but his world had contracted to his room, and they were dismantling his world.  The appointment gave us an excuse to send everyone out and close the door.  I don’t know how much comfort I was, gowned and masked and shielded and probably unrecognizable, but I do know that David responded, as always, to the quiet patience of the palliative care doctor.  Then I had to leave, and I wouldn’t see David again until he was out of the COVID wing. 

Maybe this is what we had braced for, Fiona and I thought.  Yes, he’d had vaccinations and a booster, but how well could his immune system cope with an omicron variant?  The early reports helped: he had only the symptoms of a mild cold.  Since the electronic device had gone with David to the COVID wing, I could also check in every morning in the usual way.  Because he was confined to his COVID room and had no books or drawing supplies, however, his tv was always on.  Neither of us could hear the other over the tv, and he hadn’t been able to use a tv remote for years.  I could see him, but conversation was impossible.  Still: I could see him. 

Later, after David’s death, the business manager told me that she’d looked down the corridor one day to find David strolling from room to room, chatting with the other residents confined to the COVID wing.  There was no keeping that man in his wheelchair.  There was no keeping that man in a room with nothing but a tv. 

Though David weathered that second round of COVID remarkably well, the upheaval unsettled him.  Hallucinations spiked.  He told me about conspiracies among fellow librarians who were “up to no good.”  He told me about driving to the Twin Cities and seeing a car that had been slammered.  I still struggled both to hear and to understand, and I was just barely tracking one morning when I saw a head glide behind David’s head.  Oh, no, I thought.  He’s having a hallucination while he’s telling me about a hallucina- Oh, wait – I’m the one who’s seeing this —  the head glided out of the frame.  The water turned on, then off.  The head glided into view, then grew smaller, and for just a second I glimpsed a resident in a wheelchair rolling himself out of David’s room.