10: Nora Filmore
Home Care
Nora Filmore lives by herself in Morgantown with two cats. She is retired but has a part time job about 20 hours a week, which she performed from home before COVID. That made it easy to change her hours when the pandemic hit, and she needed to step up to help a neighbor in need. Nora is very involved with her church, and one of them members, a woman named Janet, was using a wheelchair as the result of a stroke. Janet wasn’t able to take care of herself or the house like she used to, so Nora started out by taking care of her and just spending some time with her. But since Janet’s granddaughter who lived with her needed to work more as a result of the pandemic, Nora began to come over about three days a week since for eight hours a day. She would take care of the house, making meals, cleaning, and doing laundry. She also helped Janet to write letters and do her physical therapy.
As she took care of Janet, Nora also doubled down on the work she was doing for her church, knowing how much people needed that community in such a hard time. On top of assembling the weekly bulletins, once COVID hit, she started what she calls “Card Ministry” by sending cards to the congregation’s shut-ins every month and for holidays too. Every other month she will also go through the church directory and pick out some people she hasn’t seen or heard from in a while and send them a card just to let them know that she and the church are thinking of them and hope that they are doing well.
Though Nora never contracted COVID herself, the virus painfully impacted her and those around her. Her son-in-law’s grandfather passed away from COVID in his nursing home. Her daughter’s family was incredibly close with him, but they were unable to visit him as he was dying and were only permitted to have ten people at his funeral service. Over the course of a month, her daughter, son-in-law, and two of her grandchildren all tested positive for COVID, though they fortunately were not hospitalized. Nora’s sister, who works at Walmart, also contracted COVID. Nora’s pastor also passed away from COVID. Four members of Nora’s family also work in healthcare and, while she is incredibly proud of the important work that they are doing, she worries for them every day.
In her day-to-day life, Nora has become much more aware of what she touches and who she is in contact with. She is also keenly aware of the moments of contact or freedom which she took for granted before. One the rare occasions that she was able to see her loved ones, it was in a socially distanced context with masks on. While it was nice to see them, was very hard for Nora to be so close but to still maintain such a separation. She is dearly looking forward to returning to a point of being able to be close and comfortable with one’s own immediate family. But she is still mourning the loss of moments she will never be able to get back. She was unable to attend her grandchildren’s graduations because of attendance limitations on the events. While this was a loss for her, she feels so bad for graduates in this situation because they worked and studied so hard and under such arduous circumstances and were unable even to share their moment of recognition with all of their most important people. But even with all of the losses and tragedies, Nora is still grateful for the time she was able to spend with those important to her and the work she could do to bring some light to people’s lives. She doesn’t know if she would have ended up spending so much time with Janet were it not for the pandemic, so she is glad for that friendship she was able to forge during such a difficult time.
