I called Michaela, who was at Brown, and she said she had just been with her mother the day before. While Cara was adamant that she was fine and this was all unnecessary, Michaela went the other way. COVID, in many ways, is a Rorschach test: Different personalities respond differently. It turned out that after Michaela had been with her mother, she had five other friends over to her apartment for the evening. She was worried that maybe her mother infected her and that Michaela had infected her five friends. I tried to calm Michaela and tell her that her mother was being tested and we would know in two days and then we would decide what to do.
Michaela did not want to wait two days, so she contacted all five friends immediately and told them to assume that they had the COVID virus. The five friends then got on the telephone and communicated with all the people they had been in contact with. They were college students and attending class, so I’m sure those calls involved dozens of people. Michaela was distraught and said she would stay in home quarantine and wait for the results of her mother’s test.
I then called Mariah. Her reaction was to be upset that she had been subjected to the situation through no fault of her own. She was surprised by the randomness of the circumstances and was not happy. Mariah wanted to get tested immediately and have definitive answers. The fear of the unknown and the loss of control this virus spreads truly wreak havoc.
The person I was most concerned about was Cara because she had direct contact with a positive person. Given the incubation period, the fourteen-day quarantine was the smartest path. I would talk to Cara a couple of times a day. She watched my briefings because she had little else to do and was literally a captive audience. COVID now had her full attention. It felt so unnatural for me to have a daughter in distress and not be able to do anything to help her—to not even be with her, not be able to see her and hug her, and to know that she was alone.
Meanwhile, my mother, Matilda, is eighty-nine years young and in a vulnerable population for the coronavirus. I hadn’t been able to see her since this started. Although I’m careful, my job puts me in contact with many people, and I would never want to infect her.
She had been living on her own since my father passed, with home health aides coming to help out, but that became a risk in itself, because the aides could bring the infection in. So starting in early March, she alternated going back and forth staying with my sisters, Maria, Madeline, and Margaret, a doctor.
Every day I called her, and every day she asked, “When is this going to end?” It’s not that she didn’t like staying with my sisters; she just wanted to be in her own home. She wanted her independence. Like so many people at the beginning of this crisis, she had a hard time comprehending how serious the threat was.
My sisters would tell her, “Andrew says you can’t go home yet, it’s too dangerous.” I understood why they would blame me: I wasn’t in the room!
My mother would say, “I’ll be careful. I don’t have to be here. I want to go home.”
I would insist, but I had to strike a delicate balance. In her book a son doesn’t have the right to tell his mother what to do. Nor is she that impressed with the concept of a “governor” as having any special authority over her, be it a husband or a son. My mother can still be very tough. I learned New York tough from her and my dad.
I knew many people were having similar conversations with their own parents, and I communicated that in my briefings. It was another way we were all in this fight together.
This is the cruel torture of COVID. Patients alone in hospitals, seniors alone in nursing homes, disabled people alone in group homes. Yes, it was for the best, but it is a terrible human toll. Can you imagine being in a hospital emergency room not knowing whether you will live or die, no family around you, and the nurses and doctors you see are wearing so much protective equipment that you can’t even make out their faces? Terrifying, but that’s what so many people experienced and continue to live through.
Because I grew up the oldest male in an Italian house with my three sisters, my instinct is to protect. My father was not around much; he worked all the time. And I mean all the time—seven days a week from when I was a child. He left in the morning before we woke up for school and came home after we were asleep. Sunday evenings he was supposed to be home by seven to have dinner. Even that deadline was often missed. Because of that, I was always rigorous about making time for my kids. When they were with me, I would be home by 5:00 P.M. I’d often drive back and forth from Albany to Westchester in a single day to see them.
My mother and my sisters relied on me. With my three daughters now, my natural orientation has never changed. I have to be careful how I express things because my daughters are always setting traps for me to fall into so they can accuse me of “paternalism,” which is totally impolitic now. In my family, the line between parental responsibility and female empowerment must constantly be navigated.
While Cara is twenty-five years old, a Harvard graduate who has traveled the world and is smarter than I am, she is still my daughter. Cara is independent and resourceful. She is a strong, principled personality and has a great, dry sense of humor. I would
