Daughter wants to visit mom in nursing facility
After mom moved from Homewood residence into nursing facility, pandemic has prevented visits
Pandemic has prevented in-person visits between mother and daughter at the nursing home.
Julia Erdely turned 16 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
She was one of the few members of her family to survive the Holocaust. Later, in her home country of Romania, she became a nurse, a mother and lived for years under a communist regime before immigrating to the United States as a political refugee in 1982 with her daughter and her family and eventually settling in the Chicago area.
Magda Roth is proud of her 92-year-old mother and has rarely lived apart from her. She cared for her mother in their residence in Homewood as long as she could, until she had to place her in a Skokie nursing home in 2019. Though her mother’s life has been difficult, Roth, 71, is grateful that her later years have been peaceful.
Then the COVID19 pandemic came and prevented in-person visits between mother and daughter at the nursing home. Roth is desperate to begin those regular visits with her mother again.
Though Roth, her husband and her mother are fully vaccinated, the nursing home where Erdely lives is not yet allowing visits. Officials there told the Tribune they are working on protocols with the hopes of soon allowing outdoor visits.
Like many families anguished about losing time with aging family members, Roth is wondering when she can regularly see her mother in her room.
Visitation policies vary widely at area nursing homes. Some facilities told the Tribune they have opened their buildings for family visits with some restrictions and safety rules, following guidance from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Others, such as Lieberman Center for Health and Rehabilitation where Erdely lives, are taking a more cautious approach. “She is very much a fighter,” Roth said, growing tearful when she talks about being away from her mother during a time of great peril when the virus swept through many nursing homes across the country.
Roth understands the need for caution, but she wants information about what metrics nursing homes are using to decide when and how to resume visitation. She has written to the state and local health departments but received no clear guidance.
Long-term care facilities were part of the state’s first vaccine rollout after more than 10,000 people died in Illinois facilities.
“There is a lot of variance in the practices about visitation among the nursing homes,” said Dr. Lee Lindquist, chief of geriatrics at Northwestern Medicine. “Much of that comes from conflicting (state and federal) guidelines.”
Lindquist said visitation policies are a tough line to walk right now. Though many facilities have high rates of vaccination, some are accepting new residents who may not be vaccinated yet. The facilities need to be sure to protect those people, she said.
But doctors have also seen health and mental acuity declines during the pandemic, so safely returning seniors to some normality is important too.
“Visitation is important,” she said. “We’ve seen the ramification of isolation, losing weight, getting depressed and lonely.”
Family members, meanwhile, don’t want to miss some of their last years with their parents.
“Is she going to be alive by the time they open the doors?” Roth asked.
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At her split-level suburban home, Roth points to her favorite picture of her mother, which hangs in the family room, just off the bedroom that was Erdely’s when she lived with her daughter.
The black and white photo shows Erdely at 14, with a long, dark braid down her back, smiling and holding a bouquet of white flowers.
“She was a gorgeous woman,” Roth said with a smile.
It was 1942 in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, and now located in central Romania.
In a 1995 interview for the Shoah Foundation’s visual history archives, Erdely described her childhood growing up during World World II, and her experience during the Holocaust. She spoke of happy evenings with aunts, uncles and cousins who surrounded their table for holidays before the war. She remembers wishing she could ride her bike on Shabbat, the holiest day of the week.
Erdely also described her school, where only a few slots were allowed to be filled by Jewish students. She could only answer questions from teachers if none of the Christian students had the right response, even when she knew all the material.
After the Germans occupied the area, Erdely, her parents and three siblings were forced from their home to a ghetto by the Nazis, and then taken by cattle wagon to Auschwitz, she said in the Shoah Foundation interview. She remembered the confusion of arriving there on May 29, 1944. It was the last time she saw her parents. She and her two sisters were separated from her father and brother. Her mother was taken directly to the gas chamber.
Each day they were forced to wake up for roll call. Erdely estimated that they were given about 600 calories of food a day.
On her 16th birthday, she and the other women were forced to kneel in the rain when a person was missing from roll call. The woman was found washing herself, Erdely said. She was taken directly to the gas chamber, she said in the Shoah interview.
Erdely grew tearful recalling the 16th birthday her mother once told her she could have, one that would involve a big party with dancing.
“I could invite boys and girls,” Erdely said, remembering her mother’s words.
Her father was able to send her messages etched onto pieces of wood. The messages begged her and her two sisters to try to get out of Auschwitz, to be sent to a different camp. Eventually, Erdely and her sister were transferred to BergenBelsen, and then a third camp, before they were liberated by Allied forces. The third sister was sent from Auschwitz to work camps in northern Poland and was liberated by the Russian army.
“(It) was the happiest day of my whole life,” Erdely said.
She returned home with her brother and two sisters, but lost both her parents. In a large extended family of more than 90 people, only nine survived. Erdely often spoke of her time at Auschwitz, fearing that if her stories weren’t shared, it could happen again. according to her daughter.
“To survive the concentration camp is an empty victory,” Erdely said.
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In postwar Romania, Roth lived in a diverse city with arts and culture such as opera, theater and the symphony in multiple languages. Her mother built a career as a nurse. But families were missing grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who were killed in the Holocaust.
Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power in the 1960s, and Romanian nationalism surged, Roth said. People knew not to say anything against the Romanian Communist Party. College graduates were told where to work.
Roth, her mother and their family made the difficult decision to leave their homeland. At the time, Romania allowed people of Jewish descent to move away.
“One does not leave ... roots for a car or a nice house,” Roth said. “We wanted to have opinions, to build a life based on our talents and work, be able to talk freely to our children about what we believe in and debate issues with our friends without fear.”
In her Shoah Foundation interview, Erdely also spoke of the joy of living in the United States with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons. Her daughter and her son-in-law worked as chemical engineers, and their family life was happy.
In 2019, the level of care Erdely needed exceeded what Roth and her husband could give, she said. And they hoped she would have more social stimulus at the facility.
But in a perfect world, Roth said, her mother would die in her arms at home.
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Still, at Lieberman, Erdely has received excellent care. Before the pandemic, Roth and her husband were able to visit often. During the past year, they have had weekly Zoom calls with Erdely.
Roth, though, is yearning to see her mother in her room. She knows the staff there keep it clean, but she wants to dust the spaces in the room.
Erdely’s own needlepoint artwork hangs in her room, and her daughter wants to make sure those aren’t gathering dust either.
Roth was able to get permission for a recent short compassionate care visit due to extenuating circumstances, but she hopes to visit regularly soon.
She wants to ensure her mother’s refrigerator is clean, and bring perishable food items.
“I’d like to bring her some raspberries,” Roth said.
When Lieberman begins to allow outdoor visits, Roth is unsure whether her mother will be up for getting downstairs, and she does not like hot weather.
The most up-to-date guidelines from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency that oversees the federal benefits, says facilities should allow indoor visitation for residents except in cases where there is a high risk of COVID-19 transmission, such as in cases where the nursing home’s COVID19 county positivity rate is more than 10% and, at the same time, when fewer than 70% of residents in the facility are fully vaccinated. The agency encourages testing visitors for the virus.
The Illinois Department of Health is working to update its website with new nursing home visitation guidelines that align with the CMS recommendations, a spokeswoman said.
The update will say that “facilities shall not restrict visitation without a reasonable clinical or safety cause.”
But visitation policies at local facilities run the gamut. One nursing home chain in the area, BRIA health services, is following CMS guidelines by allowing outdoor and indoor visits, but encouraging outdoor visits as much as possible, and limiting both the number of indoor visits per resident, and visitors in the facility at one time, said Natalie Bauer Luce, spokeswoman for BRIA.
Luce also said the industry is pushing Gov. J.B. Pritzker to reinstate legal immunity protections for facilities allowing visits under CMS guidelines.
A Lieberman spokeswoman said the facility must “err on the side of caution.” They are planning for more accessibility, but don’t have a date set.
For now, Roth is making the most of her video chats with her mother. She knows the risk COVID-19 poses to the nursing home residents and hopes for information soon about when it is safe for her to visit the room.
“I just want a chance to be there,” she said.