We went nowhere except my house; we saw no one except each other.  That’s not quite accurate: David saw one other masked human every day: a staff member came by to take residents’ temperatures and check oxygen levels.  I was glad about that vigilance, especially because I worried that David could pose a risk both to others and to himself.  He often forgot to put on a mask before leaving his apartment, and he was unlikely to wash his hands for thirty seconds when he returned.  Even if he had been able to comply with the guidelines, there was little reliable information about COVID transmission.  Did masks prevent or increase the spread of the virus?  Did people spread it through touching shared surfaces?  Respiratory droplets?  Aerosols?  No one knew for certain. 

When the weather warmed in late spring, David occasionally took short walks outside, on the grounds of the building.  I wondered – as I always wondered — how worried I should be.  I spent as much time at the apartment as I could, and my sabbatical project was portable: all I needed was my laptop.  But I couldn’t be there all the time, and the staff discouraged visits to reduce COVID exposure. Also, David wanted some independence.  I’d also set up a device that allowed me to make video calls that he didn’t have to answer, so I could check on him at intervals when I wasn’t there.

I tried to calculate the risk of those walks.  He had never wandered.  When we walked those paths together, he seemed fully oriented in space.  On the other hand, there was that apartment identical to his that was across the hall, except when we went looking for it.   There were also days – many days – when he called from his apartment, in a panic because he couldn’t find his room or couldn’t find the door. 

David might get lost outside; he was already lost inside.  Fiona and I talked often.  She was wise and perceptive and worried.  Both of us knew that the assisted living situation was too precarious, but we didn’t know how and when to make the next move.  Another upheaval would unlace him again.  And where would he go?  Because of his hallucinations, one nursing home on my list insisted on a week-long assessment at another facility.   No matter what anyone learned from that assessment, it would require two upheavals.  What would happen if the results led the nursing home to refuse to take him?  Would that assessment become part of his medical chart?  Could it mean that no nursing homes would take him?  Other nursing homes on my list in that pre-vaccination COVID time either reported that they had no openings or never returned my calls and emails.