 |
New York’s Hart Island;
where unclaimed bodies are buried |
Pandemic
Log:
Sunday, 26th April 2020
Living can often be a lonely business
in New York City; especially for older people who never married, have no kids
or family members still alive. At the best of times this life can be cruel for
these older warriors but now Covid has made it even crueler.
We live in one of five buildings and
many of the apartments are rent stabilised, so quite a few are occupied by
these older, single tenants who have lived here since the early 1970’s. They
are retired teachers, healthcare workers and city employees. We share a building
superintendent and handyman, so over the years we have gotten to know many of them;
if not by name then by face, and through various neighborly interactions or
shouting matches with the building super.
Those of us who skew younger tend to
check-in on our older warriors that reside in our block. One of these warriors
died yesterday. He lived two buildings over but I had been introduced to him a
couple of years ago by another neighbour. His name was Richard.
I remember Richard vividly. I would
see him walk up our street on summer evenings carrying two heavy bags filled
with stuff. He always carried the same two bags. One a cloth tote and the other
was one of those old supermarket plastic bags, before they switched to the
cheap, flimsy plastic that rips by the time you get home. It was clear that both
bags had seen better days.
The bags looked very heavy and he would
pause numerous times, resting them on the ground, along the roughly two hundred
yard distance from the corner of the street to his apartment building. I once
offered to help him carry his bags but he declined, saying he could manage and
thanked me. I always wondered to myself what he was carrying in them; where he
had gone and where he was returning from every evening.
The neighbour who introduced us had
a dog, and our dogs were friends. So on summer evenings we would sometimes sit
on the steps into the building and talk about life and work, as our
dogs entertained themselves or scared passing dogs by ganging up on them.
It
was on one of these evening that
this neighbour introduced me to Richard. That evening too he had made
his slow
and precise journey up the street with his two bags and multiple rest
stops. Richard told me that he thought my dog was very cute and asked if
he could pet
her. As he enticed her to come over, I asked if he had a dog. He told me
that
he was a cat person but that he generally liked animals and found them
to be
kinder than most humans in this city.
After that I do not remember the
specifics of our conversation but we probably talked about how unfriendly
people could be in this city or the unusually hot spell we were having. But I
do remember one other detail. He wore the same sneakers every
day, but that day I noticed for the first time that his right shoe had big hole
around the toe area. I remember that it made me feel sad, and my instinct was
to offer to buy him another pair but I did not know how to make the offer; so I
never did.
After that day, we would greet each
other every time we met and he would put his hand out to beckon my dog over to
pet her. But we never had another real conversation.
It turns out that Richard had been
dead for over a week. The police and coroner had to remove his body wearing hazmat
suits due the possibility that Covid had caused his demise.
Last night when I was out walking my
dog, a police van suddenly zoomed up and parked in from of Richard’s building.
I saw three cops proceed into the building with masks, protective gloves and
long sticks. My neighbour informed me that they had come to round up Richard’s
cats.
It turns out that prior to this
pandemic about 20 to 25 people died every day in their homes, but since March
that number has increased to more
than 200 people per day. However, we know that Covid has been far more
deadly for those over sixty-five years of age and is likely decimating our old,
single warrior population that Richard was a member of.
It breaks my heart to think that at
the best of times these warriors are lonely, but now Covid has snatched from
them the one lifeline of human contact they had, at their local library,
supermarket or from greeting their neighbours on the street.
I wonder what is crueler; dying
during normal times and fading from existence because there is nobody alive
that knows you, or to be remembered as a statistic of a global pandemic.
