Alone again, naturally

MY MOM is in a hospital in Ohio battling covid19. She’s 91, unsure of what is happening and she was unable to talk for a few days because she had an infection in her saliva glands. She’s frail and on a good day, when I asked, “Do you ever get out of bed in the hospital and walk?” she answered, “Yes, but then I get tired and can’t walk.”

It’s hard to imagine my mom alone and helpless in a hospital. Until recently, she never stopped moving. In the last 40 years, she swam, did water aerobics, walked, practised tai chi and rode a stationary bicycle. Last year she gave up most of her exercise and deteriorated quickly.

I know I should be focusing more on my mom’s current battle, and I do when I push aside the rage at how irresponsible and selfish so many Americans have been in this pandemic, but mostly my mind drifts to the past. Lately I have been piecing together the stories of my mom’s life.

I think about how many crises she faced all alone. In Timisoara, Romania, where she was born, my mom was an only child who lived with her grandmother and waited most of the time for my Grandma Josephine to return home. My grandmother worked her job and my grandfather’s to earn money for bribes to free my grandfather from the endless cycle of being drafted by the Romanian army.

My grandfather finally devised a plan for his family to sneak out of Romania. He went to Germany, where workers were needed before World War II. My grandmother got caught at the Romanian/Hungarian border trying to escape with my mom, and Grandma Josephine was sent to prison. Alone again, my mom visited my grandmother to talk to her through a wire fence.

My grandmother and mother finally escaped with the aid of a smuggler. For a time, my mother travelled by herself with this stranger, who she insisted turned out to be a kind man.

My mom and grandparents settled in Lehrte, just outside Hanover. In Nazi Germany during World War II, they became displaced immigrants. My grandmother worked long hours in an underground munitions factory, so my mom stayed alone again.

One day, my mom headed home from school to write letters. Her friends talked her into staying to play games with them instead. She remembers running through the forest trying to outrun American planes dropping bombs. The bombs flattened her neighbourhood. Finally, my mom managed to identify the rubble of her house. My grandma ran home and found my mom digging through the rubble for anything she could salvage.

About two years after World War II, my grandmother migrated to the US, because she had been born in St Louis, Missouri and taken back to Romania when she was a baby. My mom waited in Germany for her papers to come through.

In the US, my mom worked in a knitting factory, cleaned houses and met my dad when she couldn’t speak English. When they got married, he worked long hours as a plasterer.

My dad, who worked as a radio operator on aeroplanes for the US Army Corps, wanted nothing more in life than to feel grounded after the war so he bought a dairy farm in a most remote place. Again, my mom found herself alone all day and most of the night because of his long commutes to work. She felt dismally unhappy on that farm. I never understood why, but I realise now its remoteness symbolised all the loneliness of her life.

My reticent dad, contented in walking the fields and forests of his farm, died of encephalitis at 67 and my mom, only 61, was alone once again.

My mom and I rarely got along. She always seemed angry and joyless. It’s only since she’s been in the hospital battling covid19 that I have begun to understand how being alone defined her life.

I resent that she is alone in a hospital now because of careless, uncaring people who have ignored simple covid19 protocols like wearing masks, physical distancing and keeping away from crowds.

As the number of people fighting covid19 in hospitals mounts, I just want everyone to understand that these people all have a story and no one wants to feel alone.