Chronicling the Days – Maureen Marovitch

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

This piece is by Maureen Marovitch, writing on April 12, 2020.

It’s the fourth day in a row that the phone rings eight, nine, ten times with no answer.

A week earlier, the head nurse Debbie had called my husband. My mother-in-law Martha had a fever and cough, she reported. They were testing her for CoVid-19. And they were sedating people on the floor to keep them in their rooms. It’s necessary, she explained, in the Alzheimer’s unit. It’s the one where people wander into other people’s rooms at all times of the day and night, where they mistake the startled occupant of the room for their dead spouse and try to kiss them, or lay down on a bed that isn’t theirs and go to sleep – sometimes with someone already inside it.

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic