Angels in Our Midst
One day in the early winter of 1993 I brought a camera into my studio. David Kennerly, a Pulitzer prize winner, gave me a few lessons. I experimented. And, before long, I was taking real pictures.
Four years went by and on a warm September afternoon in 1997, I finished the Foreword to a book containing photographs and stories of caregivers in the American AIDS epidemic, a book entitled Angels in Our Midst.
I met the people in that book all across America. The Reverend Fredelia Kristof who led the Samaritan Women’s Prison Project at Rikers Island and her colleague, Reverend Maria Lopez, the prison’s chaplain. The amazing Kate Ryan and soft-spoken Manny Souza in Boston, joyful Louis Jones in Harlem, courageous Ellen King in Kansas City, incredible Dr. Charlie Garfield in San Francisco…and the list goes on and on. And on.
Meeting hundreds of extraordinary people, caregivers and those receiving their care, was a fabulous experience. But the path to a final book was emotionally wracking even before our editor, the brilliant Jennifer Moyer, discovered mid-project that she couldn’t outlive her breast cancer.
Even before my diagnosis with HIV, I’d often volunteered time at Connor’s Nursery in my Florida neighborhood. “Nothing in life is as hard as losing a child,” I’d been told. “And every caregiver at Conner’s who loves a child with AIDS is setting out, consciously, to endure that pain. Caregivers here know, from the moment they lift the first child to their breast, where the road will lead. And, one after another, time after time, they choose to love.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought Americans face-to-face with dying on a staggering scale. A half-million of us will be dead by the month’s end. We can be angry about the lack of national leadership that let this fire turn into a roaring inferno, but it’ll do no good. We need to accept where we are, and who we’re losing, and hold on.
“Entering the room of someone wrestling with death,” I wrote in Angels in Our Midst, “is an act of invasion. These are intimate places shrouded with vulnerability and mystery. …But the overwhelming sense of these places is less of illness than of heroism, displayed by those who’ve come not as chroniclers but as comforters: the father who held his stranger-son’s hand as it grew cool…the grandmother who whispered away the fears of the grandson she adored…the doctor who loved, and did not leave, those he could not heal. Compassionate caregiving is almost beyond imagination, even after you’ve encountered it first-hand.”
The unrecognized angels in the COVID pandemic are everywhere. They’re volunteers packing food boxes for hungry families. The bicycle delivery man who brings our dinner through rain, heat, or snow. The cop in Washington DC crushed by an insane mob who went back to work the next day. The neighborhood grocer who’s terrified by shoppers lacking masks. Some swab noses, some clean hallways, some care for abandoned dogs. We are indebted to all the angels.
And then there is that special class of angels we call caregivers. They hold the hands of strangers in hospitals, hospices and make-shift clinics across the nation. Infection control prevents the families of elderly patients from gathering at their bedside to sing, pray and whisper good bye. The shy wife, longing to hold the hand of the husband she’s loved for 60 years, is held out, separated by distance and glass from the hand she trembles to touch. Over and over the story is repeated: We are first isolated to prevent the illness, and we are then isolated from those who are sick and dying. And who stands in for us then?
We’ve used terms like “front-line workers” and “healthcare professionals” to describe people who staff our ICUs and COVID wards. While we languish nearby, they go to our loved ones in our stead. They do not just fill the role assigned by some distant policy. They are angels who, day after day, respectfully, lovingly, gently ease the loneliness of the dying. At risk of their own lives, and with a stunning assault on their emotional health, they carry messages of love, offer what comfort they can, promise to be there and end their 12- or 14-hour days bent against a cold wall, sobbing. This is what it means to be a caregiver.
Caregivers I profiled some decades ago taught me stunning lessons of heroism. They did work others feared, found ways to tug laughter from those who seemed beyond joy, and asked for no recognition. Believe it or not, they genuinely thrived on being able to extend care to others. They embodied — literally, they carried within themselves — compassion, hope, vulnerability, passionate kindness, and endless selflessness. They lived not for themselves but for The Other.
When the numbers grow large, we may lose sight of the individuals. As I’ve said here before, we’re not living one story of a half-million people who’ve died. We’re witnessing a half-million unique stories of mothers and fathers, sisters and neighbors, brilliant artists and vicious abusers, the famous and those whose names are lost. For each, there’ve been caregivers — members of an army performing miracles of grace every day.
Care is not always easy to give. This isn’t Hollywood. Pain can bring anger; the inability to breathe makes us cry out in fear. It’s not always an easy or gentle passing. And, still, there are caregivers who uncomplainingly lift the burden of angst and sooth the fevered brow. They go home, change soiled clothes, nap, and come back to do it all over again.
Caregivers are the archangels in our midst. I cannot name them all — but I’m going to call Mike, a physician, researcher and my caregiver extraordinaire. I need to thank him again.
Do you know one of these archangels? If so, I hope you’ll reach out to tell them what they mean to all of us. In the darkness of this pandemic they are our brightest angelic lights.
