I’m waiting for a woman to enter my waiting room. Doctors have waiting rooms. And vets. Dentists, too. Many more of us have waiting rooms now, virtual ones, and even all these months into the pandemic having one still makes me feel slightly important.
I angle the laptop on a sturdy pile of books, all the better to eradicate the very real possibility of double-chin action. I smear off the Ruby Woo lipstick I put on earlier on a whim. It’s not really a red-lipstick conversation.
Here I am on yet another Zoom call. Waiting for a participant to arrive in my waiting room.
Did the people at Zoom HQ make enough hay while the pandemic sun shone? Or are they hoping for another global lockdown that forces everyone back to their screens?
Every so often, like now, I wonder about the people at Zoom HQ. How are they feeling as things open up? Did they make enough hay while the pandemic sun shone? Or are they hoping for another global lockdown that forces everyone back to their screens? It’s worth remembering that some people have had an excellent pandemic. It’s just the way the plague cards fell.
I remember the first time somebody sent me a Zoom link. What is the zoom, I remember thinking as I clicked it. I might as well have been Joxer Daly in a Seán O’Casey play asking “What is the stars? What is the stars?”
What is the zoom? What is the zoom? The innocence of it. We know what the Zoom is now. We can never unknow it.
B arrives in my Zoom waiting room. I click the button to admit her. I ask her to unmute herself. I have a quick nosy at her office at St James’s Hospital, where she has been working long hours through the pandemic. She tells me about her job.
B is the end-of-life-care co-ordinator at St James’s. She takes care of the hospice-friendly hospital’s programme, ensuring that the culture and the structures, in relation to all aspects of dying and death and bereavement, are as good as they can be.
It’s not the main business of hospitals, end-of-life care. The main business is curing and treating people. But just under half of all people in Ireland die in acute hospitals, and people like B make sure they and their families have the best care experience possible in those circumstances.
B tells me about the Spotify playlists of the dying person's favourite songs, lovingly compiled by relatives, the soundtracks of people's lives playing in hospital rooms through their final nights
The Irish Hospice Foundation is gathering stories of caring in the pandemic, and it has asked me to talk to B. She tells me she originally came to Ireland from Berlin for six months. That was more than 25 years ago. She has been around death and dying for years and describes this as a profound privilege.
“I just see it as the other end of the journey. Childbirth is at one end and death is at the other. It doesn’t always have to be sad, but it’s very sad when there is no family around.”
For most of the pandemic there was no family around. And people such as B had to find ways to navigate that. At St James’s she quickly created a virtual visiting programme, something that in normal times might have taken years to introduce. She sees that as one blessing of the pandemic, the way it became easier to cut through all the red tape.
When a pandemic happens, previously unthinkable things become possible. The chorus of painful people saying “no” because “that’s not how we do things” falls mercifully silent. In a pandemic, good people are left alone to do good things.
B and her team did good things. She tells me about the tablets, the non-medical kind, that arrived at the hospital so staff could facilitate all those last family goodbyes. She tells me about the Spotify playlists of the dying person’s favourite songs, lovingly compiled by relatives, the soundtracks of people’s lives playing in hospital rooms through their final nights. She tells me about the times she watched people singing down phones to loved ones who lay dying. She tells me about the sweetness and joy, the pure love and dignity contained in those moments.
I'm crying. Not a photogenic, solitary Sinéad O'Connor tear but the loud, snotty, can't speak, sobbing kind. I apologise for being unprofessional
She tells me everything, and now I am wishing I didn’t put mascara on for this Zoom call, because I’m crying. Not a photogenic, solitary Sinéad O’Connor tear but the loud, snotty, can’t speak, sobbing kind. I apologise for being unprofessional. B says, “It’s not unprofessional, it’s human.” I try to explain that it’s the singing story that did it, the comforting idea that a familiar song sung by a familiar voice might be the last thing someone hears on this Earth. B waits silently with me for the crying to pass.
When I’m breathing normally again, I ask B how she switched off, how she left her work behind this past year and a half. She is honest and says it wasn’t easy. There were many sleepless nights. And swimming. B is one of the people who swam her way through the pandemic.
I ask her where she swims. She tells me Dollymount, which is on my side of Dublin town. So I ask her where she lives. She says North Strand, which is where I live. So I ask her what street she’s on, and she says the name of my street.
B came in through my virtual door to discover she only lives a few real-life doors down from me. My mascara tear-tracks are still running down my face, but now we're both laughing. Two neighbours on a Zoom call at the tail end of a pandemic talking about living and dying.
What is the stars? What is the stars?
roisin@irishtimes.com