Quarantine Daze

Grass is growing in Piazza Navona

It’s been a little more than three weeks since my last post, and now half the world has joined in the COVID19 quarantine protocol: stay home; wear a mask and gloves; wash your hands; don’t touch your face; disinfect everything. As the coronavirus hit countries in waves, so too did the harsh reality of the major disruption, despair, and sorrow it brings. Fortunately for us, Rome and its environs have been spared the devastating death toll in northern Italy, and as of today there are 2,340 positive patients; in the region of Lazio there have been 212 deaths due to coronavirus and its complications. 

Meanwhile, my mother has been making slow and steady progress in her recovery. It’s most easily measured in things like what she is able to do once a week with a physical therapist. Last week, it was managing to stand up from the wheelchair and hold onto the bed frame for as much as two minutes at a time, for a total of six times. This week, she held

Helping Maureen in PT

onto her rollator and walked several steps, first in her bedroom, then in the kitchen, also for a total of six times. This required a team of helpers that physically and emotionally supported her trajectory across the floor. She has also been using a mechanical pedaling bike out on the terrace for half an hour a day, helped by the patient nurses who guide her weaker left foot and encourage her to keep going.

Daily pedaling outside

Improvement is also noticeable in her transition from sippy cup to glass, and in the number of hours she can tolerate being out of bed either in the wheelchair or electric recliner. She’s easily managing 4-5 hours, some days even more than 6, with an hour outside in the afternoon sun on good days. 

We are fortunate that we continue to have excellent nursing care in afternoons and nights, although two of our regular nurses have been reassigned to COVID19 patients in hospitals. It breaks my heart to know they are putting themselves at risk of grave illness, but I also tell myself that those patients deserve and need the very best care to recover, and good nurses are their first line of defense in fighting the virus. 

Like others managing the quarantine, I pass the time

Yummy muffins

cooking, and even baking, and have discovered my gluten free banana chocolate chip oat muffins are quite popular with the nurses (muffins are just catching on in Italy). I got two Ottolenghi cookbooks from my sister, and with friends in California and one in New Zealand we share photos and recipe experiments in a WhatsApp group. I try to give Maureen tasty, easy to eat food, and balance her diet with fresh market vegetables, beef and chicken in small portions, and rice or potatoes. I make a fruit puree with apples, pears, ginger, honey and spices that she loves as a snack. Eating requires a lot of focus for her, as she carefully chews slowly to be sure everything in her mouth is safe to swallow, and sometimes if her eyes close and she gets sleepy she needs to be reminded to stay awake and alert. I leave much of the task of feeding her to my helpers as I’m usually still in the kitchen working on meal preparation. So far she has had minimal digestive issues and all her tests point to no more problems with diverticulitis or bleeding. I still make sure she has a daily probiotic VSL3 mixed in her morning brew with aloe and fresh orange juice.

For me one of the most remarkable things is that all of her medication with the exception of her asthma inhalers has changed. In addition to stopping the Alzheimer medications of donepezil and memantine, she is not taking previous blood pressure medications or montelukast for asthma. She takes a daily diuretic, Lasix, a beta blocker for her heart, an anticoagulant, and a blood pressure medicine. Her kidney function has improved, her blood pressure is stable, and her heart and lungs are working fine. There has been some notable decline in terms of Alzheimer’s symptoms, but some improvements as well, so it’s hard to say what will be the lasting effect of both her health trauma and suspending the two medications. To help her sleep, and to calm the agitation she experiences in the middle of the night, we use a low dose of Lexotan (we tried Xanax, but it didn’t work) in combination with natural sleep aids valerian and melatonin. 

Mimi helps me with my ankle magnet therapy,
now dubbed Mimimagnetoterapia

Like others looking for creative ways to pass the time at home, we listen to a lot of different music throughout the day: Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach recording;  Frank Sinatra from the late 40s-early 50s with the swinging Harry James Orchestra; Ella Fitzgerald’s live concert in Rome recording; Morabeza, a new recording by Italian singer Tosca (and we have tickets to hear her live in Rome in mid-May); in the evening to wind down, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, or Oscar Peterson. We also tried a collage activity exploring concepts of isolated, tangential, and overlapping led online by our artist and teacher friend Barbara Ellmann, offered through Lincoln Center’s education program, and hung our collages

My collage had a Roman theme

on the wall across from Maureen’s bed. We avoid the news now, and prefer concerts or classic films, limiting TV watching to less than an hour or two a day. There’s always daily chores and now we’re starting some spring cleaning and closet reorganization projects too. 

I know I am blessed to be spared the common hardships of the quarantine in that I don’t have to work from home and schedule online meetings or classes, I don’t have to homeschool any children, I am not ill, and I can get whatever food and medicine we need with relatively little effort and low risk of infection. Even my gyrotonics teacher is offering free classes through Skype, so I’m getting my weekly exercise. But I am blessed in another way, that fellow caretakers will probably recognize. I am used to this feeling of staying close to home, attending to domestic chores, slowly feeling the passing of time, because my mother is my number one priority. It’s been three years. I can handle whatever quarantine time is still to come. Every day with Maureen is precious. 

How We Play

In our family, we have always valued the arts. I grew up dancing, acting, singing, playing music on both piano and flute, going to live concerts and performances, and visiting museums. During her studies at Teachers College, my mother took courses with the renowned educational philosopher

Maureen, me, and Maxine

Maxine Greene, and they became lifelong friends. It seems appropriate to quote Maxine who repeatedly reminds us in her work that “we do not engage with artworks to find copies of an objectively existent world but to experience the artworks’ capacity to enable us to see more, to discover nuances and shapes and sounds inaccessible without them.” (p. 102 in Releasing the Imagination, 1995).

New York is a unique hub of creativity, and when I think about the privileges I have enjoyed, the concerts, shows, exhibitions, performances of all kinds that I have seen, it seems I have had more than enough riches for one lifetime.  I resolved years ago that I would never turn down an offer to attend a concert, or go on a creatively-minded outing because these experiences continue to enrich  and surprise me with their gifts. Here in Rome the first performance we attended was at the Teatro Olimpico, next door to where we first stayed when we arrived and hadn’t yet moved into our apartment. The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio was performing their version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with a woman in the lead role. I first learned of the Orchestra when they formed in 2002 and a documentary about them was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. They sought to create a musical group from residents of Rome’s Esquilino neighborhood with its rich ethnic mix, to bring those multinational musicians and their talents out of sociocultural marginalized contexts, and create something exuberant and new. In 2007, they began work on Mozart’s Magic Flute, through 2009, and more recently, in 2014, performed their interpretation of Bizet’s Carmen. Under the leadership of founders Mario Tronco and Agostino Ferrente, they have toured the world giving more than 800 performances to enthusiastic fans. (You can get a quick sense of the opening number from the video linked here). 

I got tickets for center orchestra seats for a 6pm show on Sunday, November 12^th, when my sister was going to be visiting us. The stage used minimal sets as musicians occupied a group of scaffolded platforms, and one side of the stage was taken up by a large screen with video projections. Cuban trumpet player Omar Lopez Valle was sick, and his understudy was announced from the stage before the show began. The androgynous Don Giovanni, expertly played by opera singer Petra Magoni, swaggered in and out of a white leather Chesterfield armchair that evoked both the past and contemporary times. The trio of other female performers, Simona Boo, Hersi Matmuja, and Mama Marjas used similar dresses and mic stands to great effect when singing back-up style circa 1970s, but they also sparkled in duets and solos that highlighted their musical ranges. Zerlina and Masetto’s

Mama Marjas as Zerlina and Houcine Ataa as Masetto
(photo courtesy Mama Marjas' Facebook site)

wedding scene had a pumped up party vibe, singing “dai balliamo e cantiamo e godiamo” until Don Giovanni intervenes with the famous “la ci darem la mano” and off she goes, unable to resist. The dramatic and dark tensions in Mozart’s opera were given less prominence than moments of tenderness and regret, but the light comedic touches were irresistible, especially the full company, minus Don Giovanni, singing “tutto, tutto, gia' si sa” at the end of the first act. A finale following Don Giovanni’s descent into hell gave us a pumping 1977 Donna Summer anthem I Feel Love, giving new meaning to the lyrics “fallin’ free.” I so loved this production, I bought more tickets for the last performance and went with two friends, so that I could see Omar Lopez Valle as Leporello. It is a testament to the enduring art form of opera that such a wacky and wild production could be so entertaining and musically satisfying, while straying a good deal from the original material.

Opportunities for engaging with music are particularly important for those suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. One need only think of stories from Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, or the riveting 2014 documentary hit at Sundance, Alive Inside. The groundbreaking work of my friend Anne Basting of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in her organization Time Slips suggests that creativity and imagination provide ways to meaningfully connect with a loved one suffering from memory loss. She has developed a program to engage communities in storytelling as theater, shifting the focus from one of loss to one of creative engagement. A 2016 MacArthur Fellow Anne has recently critiqued the Alzheimer’s Association for a depressing advertising campaign that she argues is “stealing hope” with a slogan that suggests Alzheimer’s steals one's imagination.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We intentionally play to engage our imagination. We went to see a Picasso exhibit that included video of theater sets and costumes he designed that are playful. We went to a concert of the King’s Singers at Rome’s Auditorium, and appreciated the exquisite musicality of six men singing in elaborate harmonies, taking us through centuries of a cappella music. (You can catch them on this Gold World Tour around the world). Their mission to “spread the joy of ensemble singing” is hard to resist as they take you on a musical journey that manages to be both sacred and playful, catching you in a wave of musical pleasure.

So, go play.