MORALE BOOSTER To keep my sister’s spirits up during her self-imposed quarantine, my mother writes her cheery notes.
[Editor’s Note: Names have been omitted or changed to protect the identities of the writer and writer’s family.]
MANILA, Philippines — My sister was never fond of babies.
She often spent her time browsing Instagram pages of dogs from other countries and gushing about the way they tilted their head to one side. Then she would talk about how we would adopt a fifth dog.
Whenever we went out and saw a baby and a dog at the same time, we would immediately wave to the dog as it stared back at us.
We grew up with dogs playing at our feet. We knew them so well that we didn’t need to consult a veterinarian on whether our dogs were allowed to eat grapes, or what it meant when they dug imaginary holes on tiled floors before lying down to sleep.
But when Baby Amy came, our house was transformed from a dog haven to a makeshift nursery-slash-day care.
Titas of Manila
We were suddenly titas of Manila, and my sister and I were called upon to help look after our niece; our prior experience based only on looking after four dogs.My sister struggled to put Amy to sleep, arms often in a knot as she tried to figure out which position would turn the crying into soft snores.
There was a learning curve: Sometimes she would volunteer to care for Amy when the latter was in a good mood. Or if the baby was on the verge of tears, my sister would play “How Far I’ll Go” on YouTube and Amy would turn into a dance machine.
Before we knew it, my sister’s presence would almost always cause a laughing fit in Amy.
On March 16, the day President Rodrigo Duterte placed the entire Luzon island under an enhanced community quarantine amid a sudden spike in novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases in the country, my sister told me she needed to go into isolation.
Although I already had my suspicions, I still asked her why. Despite the number of deaths I had monitored daily, the lockdown we were under, and the fact that my sister often interacted with government officials due to the nature of her job, I had to hear it myself.
Bad news
“My boss told me I recently interacted with someone who tested positive,” she said, eyes darting around the house as if looking for a distraction from the weight of her words.
She was now a person under monitoring. She had no symptoms but she was a possible carrier.
My first thought was: “What would happen to Amy?”
My sister didn’t take care of our 7-month-old niece as much as the rest of the household, but the interactions were there. She had put her to sleep or fed her when the rest of us had our hands full. Amy was a baby who was still learning how to walk and building up her immune system.
Then: “What about our mother?”
Our mom is immunocompromised. She has asthma and a persistent cough. She would wake up beside me in the middle of the night due to a coughing fit and ask me to fetch her a glass of water.
And finally: “How will she cope with isolation?”
My sister isn’t used to being alone. She would make small talk with us at the table even if we were not in the mood. She would randomly tickle our mom and pester her about what she was cooking for dinner. She would call up her best friends for their “weekly support group video chat.” She would even talk to our dogs.
We found ourselves disinfecting anything she had touched, taking vitamins after breakfast and lunch, and drinking water as often as we could.
Since we read the news hourly and listened only to verified sources, we knew how to go about the 14-day self-quarantine.
It is a rule in our house that we always have to eat together at the dinner table. Work or petty sibling fights are not valid excuses.
So when my sister had to be isolated in a separate room in our house, we scrambled to change our routines.
Her meals were placed on disposable plates and she had to use plastic utensils because we couldn’t put ourselves, particularly Amy and our mother, at even greater risk.
I was tasked with leaving her meals on a chair outside her closed door. Although not fond of her own handwriting, my mom wrote short notes that I would place beside my sister’s plate to remind her we were all in this together.
We would make video calls even though we were just doors apart. She would ask me to put our dogs on camera, our mom as she cooked her merienda or Amy who was learning to stand.
“Amy, you’re so big already. I miss you. How are you doing there in Manila?” she once said in jest. We laughed, but there was a voice in my head telling me that it was probably her way of keeping herself distracted. It was her third day in isolation.
Virtual trainer
At night, we would hear her feet thundering on the floorboards as she exercised, guided by virtual trainers. She knew how to keep herself busy.
We always asked each other how we were doing, if we felt any symptoms that might need immediate medical attention. We knew taking vitamin C wasn’t enough to ease the gnawing worry in our heads.
“Why do you keep on asking how I’m feeling? You’re talking to me as if I’m about to die,” my mother said one morning. Even though she watched the news daily, she was still in denial about the COVID-19 situation in the country and the possible danger we were exposed to.
But my mother is also a senior citizen who lost her husband to cardiac arrest and diabetes. When my sisters and I got sick simultaneously in February, she cried in front of us and asked us why we had to go through such hardship.
The sudden spike in COVID-19 cases has instilled in us some sort of paranoia and denial, which are now taking up a bigger space in our heads than we would like.
There’s still 21 days left of the Luzon-wide lockdown and it seems as though we are all aware the pandemic may last longer.