I’m angry, too. My 98 year old dad was living in an independent living facility in Connecticut when COVID hit. He moved in in January (DH and I came in from LA to help). I had to cancel my March trip and never saw him again. He went to the hospital after a fall in early June (that didn’t injure him; but they wanted to be sure) and never came out. It was two weeks of hell for us as harried residents effectively dismissed him as an old man with dementia (he was old, but his confusion stemmed from not properly taking his thyroid medication) and one catastrophe after another ensued, culminating in watching him draw his last breath on a Zoom call. He was buried without ceremony and now the facility is on us to clear out his belongings because somebody wants his apartment. All from 2500 miles away with businesses running on shortened loads.
My dad was a physician (retired, but kept his license current) and I know that the MD part of his brain appreciated the seriousness of the situation. But he asked me on every phone call when I was coming to see him again (he lost my mother in 1973 and stepmother in 2018 to cancer so was desperately lonely). He had finally come into the light with a social life with the other residents and they continued to have lunch after the outside world was shut out. Then the facility told them they couldn’t do that (they were in a large room sitting 6 feet apart and only took of their masks to eat), so they were shut in their apartments without contact with anybody except for meal deliveries and health visits. That isolation was deadly to him and he slipped back into the grief from which he was just recovering.
He probably didn’t have a lot of years left, but they were set to be contented years, with new friends, activities galore and a gorgeous brand new facility. COVID robbed him of those years as surely as if he’d contracted it. I know that many COVID deaths occur in nursing homes, but there has to way for residents to maintain regular human contact.
