In North Vancouver, in Lynn Valley  Seniors Care facility we heard it first. First sample of what was going to come. Covid-19 infections among staff and residents. Later came other Homes like that. In Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec.  Vancouver was first, before the epidemic spread all over Canada. We were still innocent, still reading about far away places. Life was to a large extend normal. Comparing to today—life was as nothing was happening. We were still innocent … .

People at the end of their long life. People, who’s life expectancy, at best, was maybe three years, maybe five. If they were lucky maybe 7 or 8. A lot of them wouldn’t last even the three years.

We all are going to die, if we are lucky at an old, ripe age. But for some of us, increasingly more, as society evolves, that wont be the worse. Some of us will not only be old and weaker. We are going to be in a state of health, mental and physical, that will rob us of independence. We will become dependent on others, not only in tasks but also in decision making. And it will rob us off a large portion of our dignity. And it is a lie, that those of us who will have dementia, advanced Alzheimer, will not feel it, recognize it. They will. And they are. In different way, but they are.  They know that they are constantly being told what and how to do, being washed, dress, undressed, whether they want to or not. They are being moved to places and spots they don’t want to be moved at that moment.  I know that. My Mom was one of them.  I spent  most of my free time with her at a Home like that for almost five years. That’s a long time.  She wasn’t abandon or ‘dump’ in there. I couldn’t provide her the absolute care and safety, she needed.  Even if I was a very rich person, it would require a non stop 24 hours care, special facilities.  She wasn’t a nuisance in my life, nor inconvenience. To the contrary—she enriched our life every day.  There was just no other option. And it was a right decision. She felt almost right away safer and comfortable . I could see it in her eyes. The fear disappeared. The fear that that she needs to go and do something and wont be able to find her way back.  That there were people around her all the time. And there was no demands on  her to do anything, to remember anything. Somehow she sensed it and it must have been a relief.  She didn’t have to pretend anymore  that she is OK. She knew she wasn’t.  And that was OK. Of course, her situation was very different from many other residents—we still were spending many, many hours together. I was almost a resident there, myself. We used to go still for long walks, long drives, to familiar parks. Sometimes, as in older times, we wouldn’t come back until very late, as she used to laugh about it: ‘in indecent hours’.  A lot of dinners, suppers were still at my place were she felt comfortable.  She even slept sometime in our home. But she didn’t like it too much. She preferred to go to ‘her place’, back to the new Home, were she always had a separate room and everything become very familiar. Home.  It become her home.  And, after years in this new home, her time has come to say goodbye.  I was with her the last few days and nights constantly. Touching her, talking to her.  I don’t know for sure whether that made a difference  for her in the last hours. I would like to think it did. She seem to be relaxed while I touched her, she tried to squeeze my hand, open her blue eyes.  I didn’t see any panic in her, paralyzing fear. But that is what I think. She wasn’t able to communicate with me anymore.  What I know is that it was extremely important to me.  That I couldn’t leave her in that moment, that she shouldn’t be alone. 

That was in a different world. That was a time before the pandemic.  What would I have done today? I don’t know.  It is a horror. Horror to try to think about it.  A time when we, as a society, allow ourselves to make such a terrifying decisions.  And we find for it every possible rationale, every lofty ideas. But it doesn’t make it right. We know it doesn’t.  Yet, our safety mechanism  tries to protect our sanity and our sense of morality by invoking such explanations, such excuses.  Few for the benefit of entire group; individual for the good of society.  This heroic choices we read about in books, in myths, in legends.  Sacrifice.  The word does have a powerful, uplifting, albeit tragic, feeling.  Except … except when someone else makes that decision for us. When the sacrifice is given as an order, as a decision taken not by the individual, but by some mysterious collective.  Society. As in the case of this pandemic.

I listened the other day to a doctor, who was commenting standing in front of one of these Senior Care facilities, where the virus spread. She was sad,  and probably uneasy about it.  And simply stated: “I hope they will not all die’.  That was all she could offer: I hope they will not all die.  The way she said it, the entire situation and a way we comment about it, report it, struck me. It sounded like we are all standing in front of burning library, we are all resigned that there is nothing we can do but just let it burn. And with a natural sadness we take a sigh and say: we hope that not all of the books will burn.

Yesterday it would have been, I think, possible to expect that someone, one of us, maybe even entire group of bystanders, would rush to the inferno trying to safe the books. Risking their own life. And that would have been seen as a nobler action.  Not common perhaps, but noble nonetheless. These thoughts, this ideas about society and individual are becoming the silent victims of the new world in pandemic. They are very disturbing victims.  It will take a while to assess the impact of such actions, such permissions.  I would rather not have been a witness to these choices, these re-evaluations of human condition and humanity. 

There were crazy times in Western (not only) Civilization, when the common motto was a Latin saying ’memento mori’. Remember about death. Remember that you will die.  Sort of apotheosis of death. More important and more powerful than life, which had no other meaning but to lead us to that threshold. Recent centuries led us to abandoning this concept. To the opposite. Remember that you are living. Life is the most precious thing.  The new omnipresent god. Are we starting to burn on the altar of this new god new sacrifices?  Have we given it a deep thought and ethical exam?

These are the disturbing thoughts that have given me first sleepless nights since the pandemic begun. The lonely, tragic deaths in facilities that are being call “Seniors Care’. Care.  Is it  always in the new world? Or the meaning of ‘care’ become ambivalent, not set in stone, changing? How far are going to change these notions? At what cost to the society? What is decency? Sacrifice?

I don’t know the answers. But it makes me very uncomfortably, when the answers are provided ad hoc, as an edict, by some Administration Body, some centre of local administrative power. No matter how good the intentions are. Because I am not sure that the Administration knows the meaning of the word “good”. It is  much more than ‘good car’ or ‘good dinner’.  The word has immense value, is a cornerstone of our foundation.