Love in the Time of Quarantine
By: D. Emmet
Tags: Quarantine, Covid, Isolation, Cdc, Love

As good and abiding citizens — like one of the hand-holding families who walked calmly into bomb shelters in the public service announcements from my childhood — my wife and I had followed all the public health protocols for eight months. We assiduously tracked and followed all the CDC guidelines.

We masked up and remained socially distant from our neighbors. We avoided Uber and taxicab rides. We stayed out of enclosed public spaces, restaurants and bars and exercised our takeout muscles. Over the summer, I even once glared at the unmasked people gathered tightly together in a park. I saw their gathering as a germinating “superspreader” event.

Then, last month, having felt under the weather for days, my wife started to run a fever. Soon enough, her fever reached an alarming one hundred and three degrees. Our doctor told us to head to the emergency room immediately. A rapid test confirmed a COVID diagnosis. A chest x-ray also showed “COVID opacities” in her lungs — a terrifying and mystery label for an ailment, if there ever was one. Two Tylenol pills brought her fever down to a manageable point.

We were told to go home. She was wobbly on her feet, but she could walk through the room. I learned about this sharp little hospital protocol that night: COVID-positive patients are quickly evicted from ERs. You are on your own, good luck with it, the hospitalists will tell you. After spending three hours in the ER, near midnight, we drove home.

In the car, we both shared the same thought. COVID had crossed our door. The virus walked up our front stoop and barreled into our home. For the next two weeks, a full-blown COVID rage punctuated our lives. We had no idea what we were in for.

For one, we both had to endure a two-week quarantine in our home. During our isolation, my wife remained behind a closed door in our bedroom. Over the next three days, she endured wild swings in her body temperature. She had night sweats followed by dehydration in the morning. She was not able to eat solid food for four days. I checked to see if she had signs of the dreaded COVID cough. (Thankfully, no).

We talked to each other through the bedroom door. Her voice was distant and faint. She struggled to keep down a glassful of Gatorade. Still, I brought her soup, crackers, orange juice, and small Tapas-sized offerings of food — anything that we hoped she could stomach. I left the trays of food outside her door. I then returned to my corner of the house, hermit-like, a recluse.

At the worst of it, around the second day after the onset of COVID, I carried the car keys in my pants pocket. We were ready to make a dash to the ER at the nearby hospital. We spent hours phoning the doctor’s office, too. (Note to readers: if you want to hear conflicting, shaky information on the COVID-19 virus, call your doctor’s office for advice).

In Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, the story opened with the visits of the young doctor Aadam Aziz to the home of the landowner Mr. Ghani. The doctor was asked to examine Mr. Ghani’s young daughter Naseem. Within the constrained and hidebound codes of the times (before World War One), Mr. Ghani allowed the doctor to examine his young patient through a hole in a sheet held in front of her.

I thought about this scene in Midnight’s Children during our shared isolation. Rushdie wrote: “he [Dr. Aziz] was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman’s body.” (Naseem Ghani and Dr. Aziz would later marry). I had good reason to think about it. I couldn’t interact with my wife as we always had.

We talked through the closed door, which was unsatisfying for both of us…until we found a chink in the wall? We began to FaceTime each other, a dozen times a day. I saw her on my phone’s three-by-six-inch screen. It was a little opening to the other. It wasn’t a glimpse of her through a hole in the sheet. It just felt that way.

Because of this quarantine, when we were blocked off and isolated from each other, we suffered a loss. We had limited contact with each other — where my wife was there but not there for me, and I for her. We quickly lost a familiar rhythm within our relationship. The multiple Iphone conversations — the hole-in-the-sheet telephonic chitchats — were not the same as our everyday, before-COVID face-to-face conversations.

Over thirty-two years, we have built up our own language, sense organs, and inner ear for listening to each other. Our two-week COVID isolation shut it all down. For two weeks, no longer did we have our many easy and frequent one-word conversations. We missed out on giving each other silent hugs. We were like strangers on a bus.

Our half-finished sentences remained just that — unfinished and left for dead in the ether. I could not interject the last bits and words needed to complete her sentences. The same for her. Then there was the whole deciphering of the small bric-a-brac within our lives — you know, the packages to be delivered, the mail to be mailed, the slightly stale bag of coleslaw to be bought.

All that was lost when we were physically separated and isolated. We couldn’t read each other. Before our COVID isolation, it just seemed that everything my wife had been registered by me. (I mean everything, too. I had become an interpreter of her silence, frowns, foot taps, slumping shoulders, and hand waves). We missed out on — what I would call — the centering in our brains of the other. I don’t know a better way to call it.

I had only one reference point for our isolation. Back in the early phase of COVID, around March, I followed the self-isolation of the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo in his home. He remained in his basement isolated from his family for weeks. (For my acquaintances who have been COVID-19 positive, the preferred isolation choice for the COVID castaway is the basement).

I checked the news each day on his condition. I just wanted to know what his isolation felt like. I imagined his isolation, his struggles with the illness, the lack of daylight exposure, and his heavily shadowed basement — without a doubt, like all basements, his basement was shadowed, too. The CDC website helpfully notes that “[home isolation] can be stressful to be separated from others if you have or were exposed to COVID-19.” It had to be hard.

Like Cuomo, my wife and I isolated in our house. We were at home during our quarantines, where a lifeline of plenty was available. I believe the lifeline of plenty was more than food, drink and sustenance. (Still, for my wife, foods were indigestible and could not be touched.) The lifeline of plenty was just the easygoing interactions between us. Tantalus-like, we reached for the lifeline but could not bring it to us. It was like that for two weeks.

What stayed off limits in our isolation were the everyday words spoken to each other. In our home, we had no space for the swaggering back and forth of our conversations. No place for hugs. In its further guidance, the CDC duly noted that home isolation generated “the obvious emotions, fear, frustration, and anger over a loss of control.” How true that was.

After our two weeks of isolation, and after both of us were infection-free and not contagious, we were finally freed from our home. It felt as though we were the Apollo 11 astronauts stepping from their well-known quarantine. After three weeks in their quarantine trailer following their moon mission, they all looked supremely relieved at the end of it. From the sharp-edged newspaper photos from back then, they could not stop smiling.

I had the same feelings. At the end of our isolation, it was a good, uplifting, summit-topping exuberance, a killer feeling. For the both of us. The good feeling just came out when we finally stepped from our house. Duly masked, and more vigilant of the CDC rules than ever before, we walked down the street, hand in hand. My smile was hidden behind my mask — but it was there.

Walking along the street — the sun the brightest I had ever seen it — I thought about how illnesses carry stigmas. If so, maybe a close neighbor saw us as leprous, disease-spreading outcasts. I don’t know how to put it in any other way. Did they know about our ordeal of quarantine? Did they care?

I didn’t care what they thought. The good news was that my wife was back with me. Our lives were closer to normal (with due reference to the abnormality of wearing masks). I could read her again. We were back in the land of plenty after COVID.