Miriam O’Callaghan

Miriam O’Callaghan ,in Florence, says now is the time for us to ask some uncomfortable questions about Covid-19

Quarantine is the time for us to ask and answer the uncomfortable questions

‘I’m lucky not to be spending quarantine on the front line —beitona till, or stacking shelves, or making hard choices about life support...’

LAST week saw a quiet death. A song-thrush taken by the cat died, warm in its rescue-box, in a dawn it saw but did not announce.

It was last Tuesday, the start of the third week of Italian quarantine, where, in the hills, the first light seems to amplify the birdsong, the city no longer stirs at the peal of the bells below. Over time, the quarantine silence has deepened, broken only by the sirens of the ambulances, the pots and pans beaten at noon, the national anthem blasted at 6pm, as people stand on their balconies, reeling from the abattoir figures of the daily press conference.

But at over 14,000 deaths, it seems the Slaughterer God might be appeased. At last, in Italy, Covid-19 is starting to peak. The storming of waiting rooms, wards, sub-ICUs, acute-ICUs by the gasping and suffocating is easing. The plateau is being reached. Across the north, doctors hope they are reaching the time when the unspeakable they have spoken to patients, families, each other, will be consigned to the past in its degrees: perfect, historic, remote.

In World War I, in the mountains to the north, Italians fought what they called a “vertical war”. A century later, their descendants are fighting a horizontal war. Line on line of anesthetised patients lie intubated, ventilated, defended from the invisible enemy, by an army of doctors, nurses, technicians, cleaners, porters, priests. As military trucks take the war dead away, among them high-ranking officers of that goggled, gowned and gloved defensive force, stripped now of their authority and defiance, of their uniforms of electric blue and green, a whole peninsula and its diaspora holds its breath. For a nation in respiratory failure, the action is apposite.

At this stage of quarantine, what’s losing four weeks to those of us who managed to lose a whole 20 years to parenthood? We blinked and our children went from first kick and breath and cry, to first tooth and step, then first day at school to first Christmas play, first date to first broken heart. Like many, I feel lucky not to be spending quarantine on the front line — be it on a till, or stacking shelves, or making urgent deliveries or impossible choices about life support. I feel luckier still to spend it with my adult children.

Friends who are separated from their sons and daughters in Spain, France and America describe their absence, the suddenness of the enforced separation, the uncertainty of when — or if — they will see them again, as a weight in the chest, dead and dread. In our 50s, with what we hope and imagine to be many good years ahead of us, the realisation is icy.

In Ireland, the mainstream and social media is crawling with advice on Getting Quarantine Done — redolent of Boris Johnson riding his mini-digger through a polystyrene Brexit wall. The country is alight with what are we doing right, what we are getting wrong.

I recall that in February, Ireland’s CMO Dr Tony Holohan went on Prime Time and predicted that Ireland could see “individual cases” of Covid-19. So now that we are at over 4,600 cases and counting, I wonder if this prediction affected Ireland’s virus readiness and planning?

But when quarantine becomes an episode to experience, as opposed to one to endure, the big and perhaps unwelcome questions come within both reach and touch.

With the world in hiding from a virus it cannot see, the real quarantine questions are about survival and mortality. Our helter-skelter existence of constant production and consumption encourages us to live as though we will never die. Death is a discrete event to be medically avoided, practically ignored. Accommodating death as a process in our lives? You must be kidding. Aren’t we down enough? Can we not have positivity? It doesn’t do to dwell, does it? Only it does.

If “dwell” is, as they say, to live deeply, then dwelling on, and with, death is something we can do, should do.

Quite a few people have told me that in quarantine they are thinking about their dead. I’ll admit to being among them. I’m thinking about my father, godmother, grandmother, aunts and uncles, am missing the comfort of a relationship, the security of blood, the certainty of knowing one’s ‘place’, in this time of sudden danger and confusion where anything can happen.

Chatting with the local pharmacist about family and the virus, I was surprised when this artist and skydiver brought up the movie Gladiator — specifically, where Russell Crowe is reminded that we must all of us die, the only question is when and how. But a starker line from the movie is this: “Have you ever embraced someone dying of the plague, Sire?”

In Italy and everywhere, it is the question of the moment.

In wards and ICUs, Covid19 is robbing us of the usual end-of-life kindnesses and gentleness, the human comforts expected and depended on, given and received. In the months and years ahead, the virus-load of PTSD in Italy’s doctors and nurses will be so off the scale as to be unreadable. ICU doctors breaching protocol, wrapping their own cell-phones in plastic, for patients to say goodbye, is about the most writeable or readable of the corona moral and psychological obscenities.

Quarantine, then, is the time for us to ask and answer the uncomfortable questions. With Covid-19, what is it that we want? Do we want to be hospitalised or do we want to stay home? Even if staying home involves the inevitable? If we get the “ground glass” in our lungs, do we want to be ventilated or do we not? And even if we do want to be ventilated, can we be?

In an ICU crisis, with ventilation decisions made not on the basis of age alone, but general health, benefit and likely outcome, it might not be possible. For people with existing conditions, especially lacerated lungs, that last question is sobering.

At 87, my mother is the sole survivor of her birth and marriage family. An avid reader and gifted writer, all week on the phone, she has been considering the virus and its implications for herself and her daughters. Never a woman given to emotion, out of the blue, she asks if I think we will see one another again. I tell her I think we will.

“I mean while we’re alive,” she adds.

With 2,000 quarantine kilometres between us, she talks a lot about the childhood walks we took with her and my father, up Fairhill, out past the Fair Field, the Gallaghers’s house to the right, the Small Shop to the left, on over to O’Sheas’s The Croppy, down on to the Blackstone Bridge.

“You started the hayfever then.”

I did, I say, and make her laugh, telling her about sneezing on a walk the other day, the masked woman coming towards me, diving into the hedge with horror.

“I miss your father,” she says then. I remind her he’s with her.

“He’s not,” she says, practical again. “I sent him over to you and the children.”

And there it is. Since his death, my father had been a stranger. But in quarantine he is making his presence felt. Often now, he’s there on the walks, or when we watch the daily press conference, or when we open the wine or when his grand-daughter announces there are 3.9 billion people under lockdown — half the earth’s population.

“The things we worry most about never happen,” he used to say. But in the quarantine evenings, as the dead man raises his glass with us, we know the trouble with the pandemic of Covid-19 is that we — the world — didn’t worry at all.