Memories of quarantine, search for comfort today

This post was published in the March 28, 2020, Wilson Times.

Having experienced quarantine once before has not helped me through this pandemic we’re experiencing, but it has given me some perspective.

I was 3 or 4 years old when my older sister, four years my senior, was diagnosed with Scarlet Fever. County health department nurses came to our rural home and nailed a menacing-looking sign onto our front door, warning visitors not to enter the house by order of the local Board of Health. The seven members of our family were not allowed to leave. My memories are faint on this episode of my early life, but I clearly remember my mother opening the bedroom door just a crack so that I could see my sick sister in the bed. I was allowed only a brief look before the door closed.

I also remember my older brother, at the end of the quarantine period (typically 21 days, some epidemic websites say), tearing the quarantine sign from the front door when the quarantine expired.

Quarantines used to be issued for many diseases, including polio, smallpox and diphtheria. Vaccines and new treatments have eliminated quarantines as the standard response to several diseases.

What the world is experiencing now is not an enforced quarantine but a plea for sensible actions to reduce the spread of a disease, COVID 19, which has neither a cure nor a vaccine at this time. We are urged to stay home, to avoid crowds, to keep a six-foot zone between ourselves and other people. The rules have been especially hard on restaurants, churches, theaters, schools (now closed) and concert venues. Ceremonies, from baptisms to weddings to funerals, are being canceled or postponed. Streets are emptied as people stay home.

At a time we want to hold loved ones close, we’re told not to do that. Our need for human contact is genetic. It is as essential as food and water. We have found ways to work around the rules. Video chats are possible for people with computers (or smart phones) and internet service, and we’ve taken advantage of that, just as many schools have begun holding classes online and organizations have moved meetings online.

These changes, which are distortions of our basic need for human contact, are changing our society. The impact of this pandemic, however long it may remain infectious, will have a long-term impact. Already, isolation and restrictions are frightening people. We are accustomed to getting through darkness and dangers by sharing our worries with others. Limits on human contact make emotional recovery more difficult.

One of the times we attended church via the internet, the Psalm of the Day was the familiar 23^rd Psalm. “Yea though I walk through the valley of death …” seemed eerily appropriate during a pandemic. But I was struck by another phrase in that Psalm: “I will fear no evil, for though art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me …” Notice that the passage does not promise recovery from illness, safety from harm or death to viruses. Its promise is “comfort.” That should be enough.

My search for comfort in bleak times led me to a devotional by Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry, who read a poem by Lynn Ungar titled “Pandemic,” written March 11. She suggests that we treat our pandemic restrictions like Jews consider the Sabbath, the most sacred of times: “Cease from travel / Cease from buying and selling / Give up, just for now, / trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those / to whom you commit your life.” The full poem is on her website, lynnungar.com.

Remembering the time when I was quarantined

Talk of quarantine for Ebola-exposed people took me back to the early 1950s, when nurses in white uniforms from the Anson County Health Department posted a QUARANTINE sign on the front door of our modest farmhouse.

My older sister had scarlet fever and lay in a darkened back bedroom, so the other six members of the family were forbidden to leave the house. Our term in home detention was a week or 10 days, as best I remember.

The year was 1953 or '54, I think. I was small enough that when I peeked inside the bedroom where all the children, except the youngest, usually slept, I was looking upward at the bed, where my sister's silent, feverish body lay. My mother shooed me out of the doorway promptly. One sick child was enough.

My memory recalls only a couple of scenes from that period of quarantine. My father could not go to work, and the children could not go to school. I could not play with my sister, four years older than I, as I usually did. We could not even go to church on Sunday. My parents could abide missing school, but not missing church. So we all got dressed in our church clothes on Sunday morning, and Daddy preached to the little congregation sitting on the cedar chest and ladderback chairs in our parents' bedroom. We sang hymns and read Scripture.

When our time in quarantine expired, my oldest brother went out the front door and tore the sign down. My sick sister recovered, only to die less than a decade later in a tragic car accident.

About 20 years after that quarantine, my wife called me to say our toddler daughter, our only child, had a raging fever. I rushed home and we took her to the hospital. The diagnosis: scarlet fever. She received a prescription and medication to bring her fever down. She recovered quickly. We were not quarantined.

Medical care had improved, much for the better.