With restrictions, one woman fears she’ll never see her mother again

How quickly it happened. How quickly we lost the chance to touch certain people we love, to hold a hand, to give a hug, to wipe away a tear. Suddenly this new virus named COVID-19 marauds across the land, and, just like that, everything is changed. Trips to see friends and family are canceled. Weddings are postponed. Funeral gatherings are called off. Jobs vanish. This too shall pass, we tell ourselves, and it will. But before it does, many people will face losses that had never crossed their minds and that may never be repaired? Sue Markgraf is among them. On Saturday, Markgraf went to visit her 81-yearold mother, who is a memory care patient in hospice in Joliet, south of Chicago. For the past 2\u00bd months, Markgraf has driven from her home in Mundelein almost every evening to sit by her mother's side. She helps her mother do the crossword puzzle, tucks the afghan around her mother's shoulders when it slips off, chats with her mom about kids, grandkids, ancestors. The facility — Sunny Hill Nursing Home of Will County — is excellent, Markgraf says. "It's clean, it's fun. The care my mother gets there is good." But a few days ago, Markgraf learned what she had feared: With the coronavirus spreading, visits would be restricted. Saturday's would be her last one for a while and maybe, given her mother's condition, forever. Befuddled. That's one word she uses to describe her response to the decree. Another word is mad. "It would be so much easier for me if there was somebody to be mad at," she says. "There's nobody to be mad at. No one is responsible for this. It's a virus. I'm mad at a virus that's dark and scary." Markgraf knows she's not alone. Many facilities for the elderly — the population most at risk of dying from the virus — have enforced similar restrictions in the past few days, and while those restrictions have good reasons, they've left Markgraf and many others afraid that they'll never see their elderly parents again, and fearful that their parents will feel abandoned. "I understand the restrictions," Markgraf says. "But it's heartbreaking. I don't know what the right answer is. I just know that she's my mom. In our hearts, we're all children. We suffer anyway when a parent is ill. But add this restriction ..." Her voice trailed off. "I have never felt pain like this in my life. This is a grief." Markgraf's mother, Wanda Johnson, is a vivacious woman who married her husband, Jerry, 60 years ago and raised four children, all of whom visit her regularly. In the 1950s, she worked as a private secretary at Argonne National Laboratory. Later she managed the books for her husband's grocery stores. It wasn't so long ago that she liked to sit on her seated walker in her own apartment folding laundry. But a stroke, followed by complications, changed her life. Now her legs don't work and she spends her time in the nursing home either in a big wheeled chair or in bed. She has trouble remembering things, such as her daughter Sue's phone number, which she'd known for years. "My mother was a wizard at accounting," Markgraf says. "But now if you were to give her a mobile phone, she wouldn't know what to do with it." On Saturday, Markgraf, along with one of her sisters, sat with her mother in the nursing home. Her dad was there. They told Wanda they wouldn't be able to visit for a while. "She wanted to know why," Markgraf says. "She's a memory care patient so she's not understanding the true why. We told her it was a virus worse than the flu. She just looked stunned. She said, 'So I'm not going to see my family at all?' We told her we'd be in touch with her. She said, 'Do I have a say in this?' And we said, 'No, none of us do.' "In the time since, Markgraf keeps thinking of her dad saying, "I just want to hold my wife's hand again." She keeps wondering if there's a better way for nursing homes to handle this impossible situation. She doesn't know what it is. (I left a couple of messages at Sunny Hill, hoping to discuss the challenges they're facing, but didn't get a call back.) Markgraf runs a strategic communications firm and believes that communication is vital to managing this crisis. At the very least, she believes, care facilities need to focus on communicating, thoroughly and often, with the families of the people they care for. They have to find ways to ensure that patients stay in contact with their families. In her mother's home, she says, landlines are in short supply, but many people, like her mother, can't handle a cellphone, much less figure out a FaceTime call. Markgraf wants to make it clear that she knows her loss and frustration in this crisis aren't unique. She knows there are no easy answers but she's convinced that, in every realm, institutions need to find better ways to communicate. "What we are going through with my mom is grief," she says. "What we're going through as a nation is grief. Help us find a way."