Covid-19 Can Kill Seniors Without Ever Infecting Them
“So Teach Us To Number Our Days…..Psalms 90:12
My wife tells me that we have been in lock down for 13 weeks. One part of me feels like it has been an eternity and the other part wonders how it went by so quickly?
Time has always fascinated me; maybe because I am Jewish. I live with 2 calendars, one secular one religious. They are not identical, which is why the High Holy Days are always said to be either early or late but never on time.
The time of sunset is important to me because it tells me when to introduce Holy time like the beginning of the Sabbath or a festival. My fast on Yom Kippur consists of a fixed amount of time. My prayers have to be finished by a certain time. My dining is time affected because I have to wait 3 hours after my steak to eat an ice cream. Time really matters in my life, yet time is so enigmatic.
Isn’t it funny how one hour seems so long when we worship G-d, and so short when we watch a ballgame?
A great Rabbi of the the 19th and early 20th century , Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, known as the the Hafetz Hayyim, once compared the average person managing his life to an individual on vacation writing to a friend on a picture postcard.
On the top of the card he writes the date, the salutation, and the usual formal introduction. Before he gets around to writing the message, he realizes that he has no more room. He’s come to the end of the card. Desperately, he begins to write in tiny letters and even writes in the margin. He asks, “Don’t we do the same with our lives? In our early years we scribble away so much of our time in trivia. Suddenly we realize that so much of our time is gone and so little is left.”
I was reminded of this time dilemma this week in an op ed in the NY Times by Dr. Louise Aronson, who talked about how the virus is adversely affecting seniors without ever infecting them.
In early June, a colleague of hers who heads geriatric services at a hospital observed, startling numbers of suicide attempts by older adults. These attempts she writes, “ turn out to be the most extreme cases of a rapidly growing phenomenon among older Americas as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic: lives stripped of human contact, meaningful activity, purpose and hope that things will get better in a time frame that is relevant to people in the last decades or years of life.”
Imagine if you had worked hard all your life and lived it in a financially conservative way. You have now retired with safe investments that guaranteed you a comfortable if not luxurious living, and with something left over to leave to your children. A year later you learn that someone has stolen your identity and has accessed your savings and is depleting a certain amount every year. For some reason, this person was undetectable, and you could not stop the drain. You have no idea how long this will continue, or how much would be taken, or how much will remain for you?
How do you think you would feel when every month your statement arrives and you see your balance continue to shrink? I could only imagine the emotions. There would be anger, fear, frustration, despair and finally depression. Now substitute time for money and a rising suicide rate is not so shocking.
As many of you know I just turned 70. If I live to be 90, this lost summer is 5% of all summers I have left. If I live to be 80, I will have lost 10% of all summers and in all likelihood, this is the most healthy summer I will have and there is nothing I can do about it.
Dr. Aronson cites a septuagenarian who wrote her and said, “If there were some end to this that I could look forward to, it would be more bearable. I look ahead to a year or more and I am devastated … Those authorities seem to have no indication of what such a future means for some of us.”
A friend of Dr Aronson told her, “My mother thinks my grandmother died of a broken heart.”
When the value of time is high and the future uncertain, loneliness and despair will creep in. When the next time you see your children or grandchildren is unknown but not around the corner darkness chases out the light, so what can we do?
We can’t do anything stupid when we are at the highest risk, though signs of that are beginning to appear with the lessening of the lock down but do something we must. Human beings are social creatures. They need to interact with other humans. The miracle of Netflix et al, is like being at a high end all you can eat buffet. It is mind boggling great on day one. By day seven we have sampled everything. By day fourteen we have feasted continuously on our favorites. By day twenty-one we are satiated and bored and sadly see the buffet as a symbol of our confinement. So here are a few suggestions.
Find a way to reopen the shules. Not everyone can do this but most Conservative and Reform synagogues do not use the majority of space in their sanctuaries, especially if they are designed with removable doors for High Holy Day services. My synagogue Temple Beth Am, in its hey day could seat 1800 people in the opened sanctuary. Before Passover after the snowbirds left, we averaged a little over 100 people on Shabbat morning. We could open the synagogue for Shabbat morning in a High Holy Day set up and every person or couple could have their own row. We could enter through one door and exit another. The prayer books could be placed on each row 2 days before services so that if in the unlikely chance that someone on staff touched them who had the virus it would have died in the 2 days. I have ways of structuring the service so that there would never be more then 3 people on the bima and no one closer than 6 feet to each other, and of course everyone would have a mask. Finally, in the courtyard outside, those who wanted to socialize could stand 6 feet apart and masked and could schmooze.
Similarly, we need to start inviting people to outdoor, 6 feet apart, bring your own beverage and food gatherings. ( you will need space and a fan). Maybe we can have live classes with 10 people in a very large room. We need to interact in real time with real people.
None of this will make time move faster, or bring the vaccine quicker. It will not allow us to get on a plane and hug the grandchildren. Zoom is great to connect, but you can’t squeeze a tooshie on zoom, but planned out physical proximity will give us a reprieve from our loneliness. It will stop the sameness of every day; it will restore a sense of different kinds of time and it will bring back some light to chase away the darkness.