Just when you need to be touched
The feeling of desolation that has engulfed humans due to the stay-at-home quarantine, and lockdowns, has been devastating, especially for those who live alone in small studios in condominium units, or far away from loved ones.
While decluterring my household mess to keep busy and brush away my sadness during the initial quarantine period, I came upon a column I wrote for the Philippine STAR dated April 11, 1989.
How strange that 31 years later today, I would feel the same desolation stemming from just the thought of becoming unable to touch, and be touched, by people I love. But there’s a difference between what life was like before, and now.
The disheartedness I felt three decades ago was due to what now seems so simple as a predictably week-long bout of conjunctivitis, but now it’s due to the uncertain deathly blow that would be dealt on myself, and friends, and the millions of people by the COVID-19 pandemic.
I, like you, I suppose, have become paranoid about visitations. A knock at the door makes me rush for my mask and cell phone and switch onto AyeSee, at the CCTV device my son and his wife had given me last Christmas, to see who is at the door. And I motion to the guest, that his/her mask has not covered his/her nose, and tell him/her we should keep a distance away from each other, and then I wipe my hands with a disinfectant when he/she has left. And I can be so unpolite by pressing a handkerchief to my mouth and nose when speaking to someone I suspect is carrying a virus.
Let me share that column of long ago.
Just when you need to be touched
I am just about to come to the end of my week-long bout of conjunctivitis, or, more popularly, sore eyes or pink eyes. With this affliction, I have learned two profound lessons: one, that the healing of physical suffering is progressively longer as one ages, and two, that from having to stay away temporarily from the human race, one can understand the feeling of sadness of people who are dying or afflicted with modern-day diseases for which science has yet no cure. (My take today: how could I have known about the descending on planet earth of COVID-19, the vaccine of which is still unknown, baffling the world’s best scientists, would occur this year?)
Knowing how excruciatingly long it takes one to get rid of the conjunctivitis virus or bacteria, people shun being in the presence of others who have it, refusing to touch any object they’ve touched, hugging a pillow right next to the pillow of somebody, and breathing the air the patient breathes.
I can understand why my friends treat me like a pariah; I do the same with my friends who have sore eyes.
The irony is that like many very feeling persons, whenever I am sick, I like to feel loved, to be pampered, touched, hugged, sent flowers to, fed porridge by caring hands. Now, even my kid and my best friends dare not touch me with a 10-foot pole. They say, “I love you, but . . .”
These past four days, only my sweet little maid has shown extreme loyalty by serving me hand and foot, with nary a trace of fear (of catching the virus that hit me) on her face. I tell her not to touch her face and eyes. Thankfully, she shows no sign of infection. I should give her a raise.
Indeed, it takes such a long time to recover from an imagined or real affliction as one ages. A brief word on that is that the middle-aged simply don’t bounce back to health as quickly as they did ten years earlier. What they, or we, do is simply clutch on to memories.
What is so dreadful about having the pink eye is that one can’t read (the likely thing to do when one is on a sick bed). Now I am talking to my orchids like I never did before. I try, but fail, because of failing eyesight, to study recipes, like cheese cakes, strawberry shortcakes, and preserving tomatoes. Now I hanker for those pastries as I write this piece. But I have been trying to write letters to friends I have not written to for years, but not telling them what compelled me to do the task. If I do, they might spray my letters with a disinfectant, or worse, toss my unexpected missives onto the trash bin.
There are people who suffer from diseases that keep them permanently off their friends’ lives. These are the AIDS victims. Not only do they do not know that they can be cured, so they need not mourn their dying as a certainty, but accept their past moments of indiscretion for contracting the disease. No amount of literature or lectures will convince some in the audience that they cannot be infected by touching the AIDS patient’s hands, but by actually sleeping with another person who has it, or using the same syringe used by a patient. (My take today: imagine the loneliness of COVID-19 patients who know – or do they? – about the uncertainty of cure, that they cannot even see their loved ones and touch their hands from their sick bed, and that those who die would be tossed into the crematory machine.)
The loneliness of the sick is severe when he/she does not feel loved by anyone. The poster of a little girl illustrates this anguish dramatically. The girl is shown waving a placard with the words, “I am an AIDS victim. Please hug me.” I think I cried, as you might have, too, when I read the poster. And yet I will be scared to hug her, or a prostitute, or an erstwhile friend who has AIDS.
I remember my lolo, who had tuberculosis, and was secluded in a room on the second floor of our house —being secluded from the rest of the family, with windows closed, as was the practice decades ago. We kids would take a peek into his room, and when he saw us, he would beckon for us to come near him, but we scampered away, as we had been told that TB was contagious. He had been a handsome man, as his pictures showed, now he lay in bed, emaciated, and coughing at most times. He needed for just a grandchild to come near him, how he needed to feel loved. Which we did not make him feel.
I am, like you, I suppose, afraid of becoming contaminated by people who have leprosy (although we know now that that disease is not transmissible the way sore eyes or venereal disease, measles, chicken pox and some skin disease are). We are afraid of touching these people, just when they need to be touched, to be told, “You’re okay, you will become well, you are not alone, we will pray for you.”
I suppose the pariahs will be with us so long as there is no real compassion in our hearts for the least of our brethren.
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