Behind the glass

A glassy reflection from our weekend on Orcas Island on our social-distanced sweet pandemic honeymoon

I finally married my love two weeks ago, and enjoyed a brief and sweet pandemic honeymoon last weekend. My husband and I got married in the middle of his work-week, and both of us went to work the day after our wedding because we had to — because he is a respiratory therapist and I am a hospital chaplain and there is a pandemic on. I’m proud to be doing important work, and I’m deeply grateful to have the opportunity to serve and work in a time when so many have lost their work to the pandemic economy.

So I’m grateful — and troubled — to have had this experience the past few days. I know I need to write to even begin to uncover and metabolize the emotion of it. I returned from a beautiful and peaceful and quiet honeymoon weekend to be at the bedside of several people dying of covid-19. For two days in a row, I’ve been in my covid ICU and had the opportunity (the blessing? the curse?) to go inside the room to be at a dying person’s bedside while their family members had to watch outside the glass door.
Different hospitals have different strategies to mitigate the risk of spreading the virus. Right now, one of my hospitals is allowing a visitor at the end of a covid patient’s life to watch from outside the ICU room as their loved one is taken off the ventilator — but not to go in. At this hospital, I am allowed into covid rooms as a chaplain. (At another hospital, I am never allowed in, but thankfully 2 visitors are allowed as their loved one is dying.)

So, yesterday and the day before, I was able to be with my patients and pray for them. Lay a hand on them in blessing. Stroke their hair if they seemed slightly to struggle. To hold their hand. Meanwhile, a family member was outside the glass. Perhaps sitting in a chair oddly set up in the middle of the hall — a one-person audience to a devastating and most personal show. Like watching your own nightmare play out in front of you. There’s an iPad with Zoom in the room and one outside. Maybe there are other family members tuning in. I’m getting familiar with the tinny sounds of wailing and sobbing coming through iPad speakers. The video set up so you can just see your loved one’s head filling the screen. Intubated and unmoving, no matter how loud you say you love them. No matter how loud you cry. Maybe your voice will reach them. I tell you it does. But that makeshift negative-pressure machine blowing air out a big new hole in the wall is pretty loud, too.
There is still so much humanity in that horrible little room with that too-small zoom screen. There are nurses who have worked for weeks to save their patients, holding their patients’ hands, trying to manage their own tears as they talk to family members through the screen. There are respiratory therapists, removing the machine they’ve tried so hard to save the patient’s life with, pulling out that long tube that used to connect that patient to hope. And then there’s me, trying to be the surrogate hands of family members who long to stroke the hair, to comfort, say the prayer, lay on a hand in blessing. Trying to be the hands of Jesus.
Meanwhile the spouse, the son, the daughter, the best friend, only feels cold glass against their hands as they lay both palms on the door, arms stretched out as far as they can reach — so close, but infinitely far.

I don’t have the bandwidth to reflect on this now. It’s Thanksgiving, and hundreds (of thousands) of people are hospitalized alone, and I’m working today, and I need to get up and shower and get ready to be with them. I can’t reflect, but I can write, and invite you to share this experience through my words, and provide your own reflection through the glass for yourself, if you can. May
peace be with you today, and may all manner of things, someday, be well.