REVISITING AUNT JANE

Several months ago, I wrote about being unable to visit my Aunt Jane during the Scamdemic. I had last seen her in her Shamokin, Pennsylvania senior housing tower in November, 2019. At that time, we talked for hours. I thoroughly enjoyed the visit. A few days after I got home, Jane sent me a lovely handwritten note telling me she also did.

In the four years since then, I sent Jane some cards and told her that I wanted to visit her again. She didn’t say “Yes” or “No.” So I reached out to her several other times via her two over-70 kids, my cousins, Sharon and Richie. Over the past three years, they had told me Jane was afraid of being virally infected and thus, wasn’t taking visitors. She only allowed Richie inside her apartment to drop off food or meds and to help with cleaning.

After reportedly having been “in remission,” Sharon’s cancer re-emerged in late 2021. I’m all but certain Sharon had vaxxed. She couldn’t walk much after she got sick and therefore, couldn’t enter Jane’s building. Sharon would pull up alongside the building in her car as Jane stood on the sidewalk and talked briefly with her through the car’s open, passenger side window. Sharon died in July 2023.

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In mid-February 2024, I reached out to Richie again and told him I still wanted to visit his Mom. He told me she was still afraid of The Virus; that she only let him visit for 15 minutes at a time. But he said he’d see if he could talk her into making a similar exception for me.

She did. Thus, Richie and I set up a two-day Pennsylvania road trip during the second week in March. On Sunday night, the first night of that trip, I got to see Jane. I’ll get to that later.

But on Monday morning, we drove an hour-plus to visit another, married uncle and aunt, Johnny and Paula, who live in a bucolic, hillside, over-55 community near Hershey. Johnny and Paula, now 80, have been married since they were 21. When I was a kid, Johnny and Paula used to take me to fun places like swimming/diving pools, amusement parks, skiing and night-time basketball pick-up games. Johnny also let me ride his Honda Mini-Trail. He was my youngest uncle and had multiple interests. Now he has Parkinson’s and walks with a cane, though he’s retained his mordant wit.

After spending three-plus hours with Johnny and Paula, Richie and I headed west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike through 40+ mph winds to spend the afternoon with our widowered uncle, a retired coal miner/welder/pipefitter/rigger nicknamed Monk, who lives, at 88, on a hillside farm near Bedford. Monk purchased the farm with money he made as a well-paid, overtime-working tradesman during Saudi Arabia’s late 1970s-early 1980s petrodollar construction boom.

When I arrive, Monk always greets me warmly, and quickly, strategically grasps my hand—mostly my fingers—so he can outgrip me. I usually forget it’s coming, laugh and request a fair rematch, hands fully locked together, which he grants and which ends differently. For 88, he’s doing great. But there’s a difference between 88 and 66.

Monk still has a sharp mind and strong memory. He tells interesting stories of his Army days and of growing up in the same coal town as did my parents.

Monk is a well-informed, right-wing hippie with a great sense of humor. When we arrived and I asked how he was doing, he said, “When I wake up in the morning, I move my elbows to the side.”

Then he moved his elbows to the side.

He continued, “If I don’t hit wood, I sit up and get out of bed.”

Monk used to have an acre blueberry patch that we spent hours harvesting during summer visits until it recently wore out. He still grows a big garden, picks fruit from his small orchard and forages mushrooms, which he cooks into omelets if you stay overnight for breakfast. When we left, he gave Richie and me bottles of homemade wine from wild-harvested chokecherries. He told us that chokecherries were higher in antioxidants than any other food. How many ex-miners/welders/riggers do and say stuff like that?

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On Sunday night, Richie and I had visited Jane. On the drive in his SUV to her building on Sunday evening, Richie told me his Mom had told him she only wanted me to visit if he brought me there. Lowering my expectations, he said she wouldn’t want me there for more than 15 minutes. Too many germs flying around after that.

While Jane is a very pleasant person, she always struck me as appropriately skeptical and instinctively countercultural. On visits when we were all younger, she would wave her hand to dismiss stuff about which other people got excited and even make fun of it in her folksy twang. On the ride over on Sunday night, Richie agreed with this assessment of his mother.

I asked him why, then, she uncharacteristically bought into Coronamania. Richie was also mystified. He said she wasn’t afraid for the first few weeks. But then, as if someone had flipped a switch, she suddenly got spooked by a thing she called “CO-vee.” I suspect her fear derived from the histrionic TV Covid coverage, or from something the people in her building saw on TV and told her about.

After the fear set in, Richie said, Jane only went outside for those drive-up meetings with Sharon. And she’d only let Richie inside briefly to deliver stuff and run the vacuum.

When Richie and I arrived, we climbed the stairs to Jane’s third floor unit. Jane opened her door. She gave me a long hug and began to cry. Richie and I went in and sat on a small sofa facing Jane as she sat on a chair.

Jane is 98 now, four years older than the last time I saw her. She’s still remarkably, almost unbelievably, sharp. I was especially surprised that she still had social skills, given all of that isolation. She also hears well, unaided.

Fifteen minutes came and went without anyone noticing that it had. We ended up talking for two and a half hours. Jane was fully locked on the whole time. She responded immediately and appropriately to everything Richie or I asked or said. In return, she intermittently asked us a bunch of fitting questions. She shared the conversation flawlessly and never repeated herself. Jane is more conversationally adept than are most people much younger than she is. Though she says her balance isn’t so good anymore.

Jane dropped out of school in the sixth grade to raise her siblings. Even as an adult, she never had much money. But here she is, outliving 99% of Americans and being more coherent than are many people in their seventies and eighties with college degrees. I’m sure Jane never did any aerobics or ate any sprouts.

When I asked Jane how she’d been since I last saw her, she said she stays in her apartment all day, every day. This isn’t how she used to be. Even at 94, she used to walk down hilly streets to buy food and go to church, and not just on Sundays. And then back up those hills.

Before the Scamdemic, she also used to go each day to a common room in her high-rise to hang out with other tower dwellers. Two of Jane’s sisters lived in the building, though one died last year. She doesn’t go to that gathering place anymore to see her surviving sister or anyone else. She has seen her beloved adult grandchildren and their kids, i.e., her three great-grandchildren, only once or twice in the past four years. They all live with seven miles of her building.

I didn’t ask Jane why she had become reclusive or directly try to talk her out of hiding. I just wanted to accompany her for a few hours. I only mentioned, when it felt appropriate, that the virus wasn’t so bad, that I didn’t hide from it or take the shots and had been fine. I hoped that saying so might help to put her mind at ease.

Jane’s apartment is nice enough and very neatly kept. But it’s very simply appointed, with neutral-colored walls. And it’s tiny, with an eight-foot ceiling and insufficient window area. It’s a place to shelter, cook and eat food, read, watch some TV and sleep. It’s not a place to be 24/7/365.

But for four years, Jane has never left except for the odd doctor’s appointment. It’s downright painful to imagine this.

It’s been deeply cruel for the government and newscasters to scare the elderly into such isolation during the past four years. Even at her age, Jane was 95+% likely to survive infection. More to the point, infection or no, at 98, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. Nor at 97. Or 87, Or 77. Or 67.

Life is too short to live in fear of dying. Under what conditions does life become not worth living?

It was great to share that recent time with Jane. But it was tragic for someone who enjoys other peoples’ company to have spent so much time alone over the past four years. Her absence has also been a big loss to the others with whom she would have spent time if she hadn’t feared for her life. Being around Jane makes me happy. I’m sure she used to make others feel the same way.

When I left, Jane and I hugged and she teared up again. I concluded that her reaction to my arrival and departure showed how deeply, cumulatively she missed the face-to-face human contact that she’s been terrorized into avoiding.

Multiply her Scamdemic isolation by billions of people, old, young and in-between. Many insisted that lockdowns protected the elderly. But locking down took the limited time that the old had left and made their final years miserable.

There’s no punishment too severe for the evil opportunists who stoked such unwarranted fear and loneliness.

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All three visits and the dashboard time with Richie were great: well worth the 48 overall hours, and 500 miles of driving.

On the westward, Sunday afternoon trip from New Jersey to Richie’s house, I drove through intermittent snow squalls beneath an exceptionally dynamic sky. Before exiting Interstate 78, I saw the widest, puffiest, most highly stacked, white-with-purple-gray-contours-and-sunlight-reflecting clouds I’ve ever seen, superimposed on a deep blue background. I pulled into a parking lot and gazed skyward for ten minutes until the clouds shape-shifted and the sunlight changed. It was as awesome as any natural sight I’ve seen.

More spectacular than an eclipse. Just sayin.’

Such skies are unpredictable and localized. Thus, people can’t rent out Airbnbs, and TV stations can’t sell TV ad time, for cloud watching. Further, such skies provide no distinct climax/“totality” for newscasters to hoot and holler about.

As they did during eclipse mania, the media hype-meisters drove public sentiment and reaction during the Scamdemic. People love named, publicized events, process much of the world through an electronic screen and uncritically internalize mass media narratives. They fail to see the—often subtle—magnificence of daily life right in front of them and fail to decide for themselves what’s true and what isn’t.