A month of confinement in the city of ponds, in Aulnay-sous-Bois. My sister, a nurse, avoids the family home so as not to contaminate us. His cardiology department at Bichat hospital (Paris-XVIII) has been handling Covid-19 cases for a few weeks. Anyway, she still goes on the sidelines to fill up the parents’ pill box and drop us a batch of pastries.
She recently received the announcements for her wedding: it was scheduled for June 20. And before President Macron’s announcement, that of April 13 announcing a start of deconfinement on May 11, she hoped that the marriage could take place. But the impossibility of meetings of more than 50 people even after May 11 made him abandon the idea.
No wedding this year for my nurse sister
We discussed it. My first advice was to postpone it until next year. She replied that it was too far. A cruel question arising in these times of pandemic: will our parents still be alive in a year?
She calls me the next day to tell me of her decision to extend the deadline by a year. And for good reason: no date is available until the end of 2020 for the room. At the same time, his interlocutor informed him that in addition to the economic damage linked to the pandemic, several relatives of the staff members died of the Covid-19. Enough to put the sadness of a report into perspective. And remind me of the professional difficulties – I am an insurer – that I will face, like others, during the coming months.
“My parents often ask me for a press point”
But what worries me most is that she started coughing quite dryly on Saturday, with no other symptoms yet. Hopefully she is not the new victim of her service, which no longer counts the Covid-19 positive cases among the nursing staff. Like her colleagues, she sacrifices her family life, hoping not to have to sacrifice her life.
My parents, in their 80s, often ask me to give them a… press point. I have to translate and summarize what is said on the home screens. However, it is difficult for me to explain to them to what extent the newspeak to which they are accustomed – a word invented by Georges Orwell in his novel “1984” to define the agreed and rigid language intended to distort reality – is undermined by social media.
“All we know is we know nothing”
Because there is a gap between what I hear in the neighborhood and what our leaders tell us. The government’s paternalistic and changing communication hardly conceals the shortage of medical equipment from which the population suffers. They seem high up.
My parents already know that times will be tough because they have experienced other crises and have always lived in need. At the time, I remember that receiving administrative mail was an obsession. In their eyes, these hardly decipherable hieroglyphs can only be bad omens.
So I prefer to summarize the situation for them as follows: “ All we know is that we don’t know anything! They then say prayers. And my sister completes the picture by giving them news from the front.
Some good news
My father, who has Alzheimer’s, is passionate about dishes. He wants to be useful and not just go around in circles. So as soon as he sees dirty dishes, he tackles them. He often asks me to see his work: I confirm that it shines! This week, he got into the habit of listening with me every morning to a radio program telling episodes of History against a background of classical music. For some reason I don’t know, it does him good.
