'We are not meant to be alone. That state of alert, if it is prolonged, puts wear and tear on our bodies.'
For some, like Edward Watson, it took a while before the isolation really started to hit. A self-described introvert, Watson moved from Florida to a small town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in northeastern Georgia four years ago to find a more tranquil setting to enjoy his retirement.
He has no TV, he shut down his social media accounts years ago, and he has few friends in his new home of Toccoa, Georgia. Pre-COVID, he would occasionally visit a thrift store, sit down for a burger at the country club, go to the gym or visit the city clerk's office to pay his utilities bill in person. Now, he works on his garden, reads his books, renovates his house and tries out new cooking recipes — his latest experiments are with Middle Eastern dishes. But even for Watson, 54, the near-total shutdown has drained him. He can't go visit his parents or his grandmother in Florida, terrified he will contract the coronavirus and pass it to them. His thrift stores are closed, the flea market is shut down. And most of the storefronts that encompasses Toccoa's tiny downtown are closed up.The stay-at-home orders came at a particularly hard time for J. Denise Kulick. The retired grandmother lives alone in a 600-square-foot home near Harveys Lake in rural Pennsylvania, and she had just endured a long, cold winter that forced her to stay inside most days. She's losing her eyesight, meaning she can't walk more than a quarter mile without worrying about her safety. And the new safety regulations meant her already limited ventures out into society become even rarer.For Martinez, the grandmother in Texas, her first attempts to Skype with her grandson showed how difficult the quarantine would be. He would approach the screen, then quickly lose interest and run off. "He would get on there and smile at me and wave at me, but only for a few seconds," she said."I ended up just talking with my daughter."One by one, and in their own ways, Martinez, Watson and Kulick have found ways to battle their extreme isolation.On May 10, he got into his truck — a 2004 Nissan Frontier with 179,000 miles that he calls"Maryellen" — and drove up into the mountains. He stopped for a Cuban sandwich in a mountain town, took winding roads he hadn't taken before. After crossing into North Carolina, he found what he was looking for: an idyllic bend in the Cullasaja River that called to him. "I walked down the embankment, took my clothes off and swam," he said."Just hearing the roar of the waterfall, I was bouncing between some of the rocks. That's what I needed, that spiritual swim in that gorgeous setting.Kulick thought of her grandmother who lost her first husband to a flu epidemic in 1907. Then her house burned down. Then she lost her second husband to another flu epidemic in the 1910s. But somehow, the Polish immigrant who only spoke a few words of English managed to raise nine children and one stepson in a one-bathroom apartment in Kingston, Pennsylvania. "She's my hero," Kulick said."When I go through difficult times, I think about her. Who am I to complain when you look at what she went through?" Kulick's second solution has been her writing. The 77-year-old has been working on a book for eight years, even taking online classes at a local college to figure out how to structure a novel and improve her dialogue. Somehow, the added isolation of the pandemic proved the inspiration she needed to finish. Kulick describes her book, called"The Chairs Are Jealous," as a lighthearted cross between fantasy and mystery: "Beauty and the Beast" meets"The Maltese Falcon."In Texas, Martinez realized she was running out of ways to keep herself sane. Then one day she read the story about theAfter long talks with her daughter, little Hendrix came over and spent the weekend at her house. "I told my daughter, 'Things are just getting worse. What am I saving myself for? I want to be able to leave him some memories of me, and I don't want those memories to be me hiding in my house,'" she said. That reprieve will be a short one. Martinez's son-in-law is a bartender, so he was preparing to go back to work over the weekend as Texas reopens its economy. That means he'll be exposed to large groups of people every night, some wearing masks, some not."I don't think I'll see Hendrix again," she said.
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