In the spring of 2020, my mother Vida and the other residents of her Toronto nursing home were sitting ducks when the virus arrived. Close living quarters and daily, intimate contact with dozens of caregivers put everyone at risk for contagion. We didn’t understand exactly how the new virus was transmitted and researchers had not yet developed vaccines or reliable treatment for it.
On March 18, 2020, a Canadian air travel ban came into effect. Next, on March 21, 2020, the Canadian land border closed to all non-essential travel. What’s more, as of March 13, 2020, Ontario nursing homes had banned visits, including from family members, except in end-of-life circumstances. Seven years earlier, I had accepted a rare faculty position at a large public university in Missouri, situating my mother a thirteen-hour drive and a border crossing away from my then home. Even had I been able to get to Ontario and self-isolate successfully (in a friend’s basement or in a hotel I couldn’t afford, for example), I still would have been barred from seeing my mother. She and I were stuck on opposite sides of the border. So, I stayed put. From a country away, I worried about Vida, while also trying to create a safe and healthy space for my own family of three. My husband, son, and I cooked, exercised, and scheduled entertainment together every evening. The child attended class at the kitchen table, while I taught graduate seminars and writing workshops from my home office. We hoped it would all blow over by summer.
But soon, things worsened significantly. My mother’s longtime doctor called with news that Vida had tested positive for Covid-19. Aside from fear, what I most clearly remember feeling after that phone conversation was a sense of confusion. By then, my mother had been widowed for some thirty years. She was also an orphan; her parents having long passed. Only my brother and I remained for her. What do I do if she dies? I asked. Doctor G. paused. What do you mean? he said. I mean…what happens? Who will take care of her? Even now, I’m not sure what exactly I was asking, but the idea of my mother dying alone and so far from me felt impossible. I couldn’t get my head around it.
Looking back, I find I can no longer place precisely when the doctor’s call came, so I search my email for his name. I find a message I wrote on April 18, 2020, a day after his call. My message records the sense of rage and helplessness my brother and I felt as we inquired after our mother’s well-being from afar. He and I talked about the terrifying possibility of her going on a ventilator. We worried about pain. I had nightmares about her gasping for breath.
More than nineteen years ago, I collected a series of boxes from Vida’s storage locker in the basement of her Toronto condominium building. She was still relatively young then, but her multiple sclerosis had progressed beyond what we could manage at home, so it was time to move. After four years of touring facilities and joining waiting lists, she’d accepted a spot in her first choice of care homes. Almost everything in her already pared down apartment now needed to go. For days on end, I boxed, tossed, and piled her belongings for donation to the church bazaar. By the end of it all, I’d developed a case of stress hives and no longer had the strength to sort through her trove of old photos and documents. I taped up what was left and moved it all to my Montreal apartment, unsorted. It was early in my career, and we academics must go where the jobs are, so for more than a decade, the sealed packages moved with me from apartment to house to house. I finally opened them one Missouri pandemic-era afternoon in 2021, once I’d run out of things to bake and plant.
In one box, I found a record of my grandfather Vincas’s journey from East to West. Vincas was Vida’s father, and his name is pronounced “Vintsas,” [ˈvʲɪntsɐs] with a c said like tsar. The documents included his passport, issued in 1922 by the Republic of Lithuania, during the country’s first modern-era independence period (1918–1940). Next, I found a wage booklet from the Tuberculosis Dispensary in the city of Marijampolė, where Vincas had worked as chief physician between November 1943 and February 1944. At that time, the country was under Nazi occupation, so the booklet is printed in both German and Lithuanian. I found a German driver’s license, issued in 1946, and tucked inside it, a stub from the Medical Council of Canada. It seems to be a receipt of sorts from an exam that Vincas had taken in 1951, presumably for his Canadian medical certification. Finally, I came across a yellowed CV, where he had reproduced the October list of successful exam candidates. His name appears among them.
A lung specialist, my grandfather spent the bulk of his career treating tuberculosis patients. He’d studied medicine in the interwar capital of Lithuania. A photograph shows him with eight other young men and three women gathered around a table. My grandfather stands in the right-hand side of the photograph. He is the only one of the eleven who looks directly at the camera. Before them lies a cadaver. Almost nothing remains of the body except bones. Those seated appear to work on it with scalpels, though I suspect the image was staged. On the back, a label reads, “Kaunas, 4-III-1926.” So, Vincas is twenty in this photograph and finishing his first year of medical school. His training then took him to Vienna, where he specialized and learned x-ray diagnostic skills in 1938 and 1939, during Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, and finally back to Lithuania, just in time for war to arrive there.
His wife, my grandmother, was Verutė, pronounced [vɛˈrʊteː] or “Veh-ruh-tay,” but with a flat final vowel sound that’s hard for English-speakers to reproduce; it’s a diminutive form of Veronika, her full name, which she hated and never used. She, Vincas, and my mother Vida, eight at the time, fled Lithuania in 1944. They ran ahead of the Soviet front, escaping an occupation that would last until 1990. My grandmother once told me that she had buried a piece of precious clothing in a chest behind the back door of their home, believing they would return soon. She was mistaken. More than four decades passed before she made it back to visit. My grandfather, however, never returned. To my surprise, I discover that immediately after the war, he’d worked for the Allies, overseeing the treatment of displaced tuberculosis patients in the Munich region. Among the papers were letters of recommendation he’d carried from Germany to Canada.
It was Verutė who impressed on me just how much the world had changed in Vincas’s and her lifetimes. Both had been born under the Tsar, and both had been children (she seven and he twelve) when Lithuania finally shook off the Russian Empire. Growing up, she said, cars had been rare and central heating nonexistent in Kaunas, a city known today both for its elegant and impeccably preserved art deco buildings and for a humorous grass-roots campaign that its citizens waged in 2014 to lobby for pothole repairs. (Kaunas residents, photographed themselves in all weather, lounging by water-filled road craters. They wrapped themselves in beach blankets, perched at puddle edges, as if about to dive in, and sat by the grimy water with fishing poles, looking expectant.) Verutė had met the dashing young doctor Vincas, at the Kaunas hospital, where she’d worked as a nurse—they’d met in the venereal disease laboratory, she’d specify with a laugh.
One of a few concrete memories I can conjure of my grandfather includes fishing on Ontario’s Little Lake Papineau, where our family spent weeks every summer. My parents had bought a tiny off-grid cabin on an equally tiny island. My brother, parents, and I all slept in one room. Vincas and Verutė had beds in the boathouse down by the water. From our rowboat, we sometimes caught big fish—bass and pike—but our bounty was mostly sunfish, too small and bony to bother with normally, but Vincas let us keep our catch. We’d bring them back to the island where Verutė cleaned and fried them up for breakfast.
Cottage days were languid. My parents sunbathed naked on the sand, while I ran around in my mother’s old t-shirt worn as a dress belted with a piece of rope. We swam, read books, and picked the wild blueberries that blanketed our island. My mother baked pies. At night, my father would take out a shortwave radio by the big stone fireplace, and we listened to Radio Vilnius, whose signal reached us over the Iron Curtain and across the Atlantic. The Soviet-era cadence sounded strange to my ears, so unlike my grandparents’ gentle speech. I could barely discern where familiar words began and ended. We were safe, healthy, and strong. At least for a while. A few years after that fishing memory, my parents sold the island along with its cabin. They did so against my brother’s and my pleas to reconsider. I still mourn its loss. Nothing was ever the same again.
The documents made me long to talk things through with Vincas. I wondered what wisdom he might have to offer. What parallels would he draw between the lungs he’d treated and ours? Between the infections he’d known so well and this new, mysterious one? Had people been more used to and therefore somehow sanguine about losing loved ones to contagion in his day? Was the protection of social isolation worth its cost?
Miraculously, or so it seemed to me, my mother survived her April 2020 infection. As far as any of us knows, she was only infected that once. And although she survived, the pandemic lockdown changed my mother irrevocably. For more than a year, her home’s social activities, communal meals, religious services, physical therapy sessions, and visits from families and friends ceased entirely. Vida and her fellow residents were isolated to their rooms and cared for at arm’s length, with minimal human touch, scant laughter, and no common life. Though we met by video call regularly, our encounters were hit and miss. Sometimes Vida appeared smiling and bright; at other times, she looked listless or fell asleep.
Around 2010, I interviewed my mother about her life and her illness. We talked in the library of the nursing home. She was still sharp and lucid then. My son was little, so he played on a blanket on the floor as I recorded the conversation. “It started one day at work,” Vida told me. She had been a high school science teacher, and one day, as she was eating lunch in the staff room, half her face suddenly went numb. Many MS patients tell horror stories of endless tests and misdiagnoses, but Vida was the exception. Her diagnosis came without delay. “When they told me what it was,” she said, “I thought, well, at least it doesn’t kill you.” She went on to describe effects that emerged over the years: double vision, fatigue, imbalance, and unresponsive limbs.
My mother lived with MS for some forty years. Curiously, she was, at once, both the illest and most robust person I’ve ever known. In addition to her long—what? I hesitate to say “battle”; it was more like a cohabitation, so yes—in addition to her long cohabitation with MS, she had breast cancer, osteoarthritis, Ogilvy syndrome and, eventually, dementia. But despite countless falls, she never broke a bone. Despite being wheelchair-bound, she had great blood pressure. And weirdest of all, my mother appeared to be almost immune to colds and flus. She never seemed to get sick, even with the bugs that circulated in the nursing home. Vida had a theory about why this was the case. She figured that MS had sent her immune system into overdrive and that it had become overzealous in its protection of her. For a long time, I accepted this theory without question and considered it a reasonable explanation for how she’d survived the virus so well. By contrast, other residents on her floor had died in the same wave. But Vida hadn’t just survived; she seemed to have barely felt any Covid effects at all. When the nurses set up a videoconference link for me to talk to her back in that terrifying spring of 2020, my mother laughed and shook her head when I asked her if she was having trouble breathing. “I’m fine!” she said, and she looked it.
But as I’ve read and learned more about multiple sclerosis and its interaction with Covid, I’ve found that our theory falters. Medical consensus appears to posit that MS patients are more, not less, vulnerable to Covid mortality. But while digging into Vincas’s life and career, I started to formulate a new hypothesis about my mother’s apparently miraculous survival.
Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection that most commonly affects the lungs. It’s been around for centuries and spread to epidemic levels in Europe in the eighteenth century. Before the advent of antibiotics, London was the global epicenter of tuberculosis. It was called variously the white plague (for the pallor of those who suffered its effects) or the storytellers’ illness, because of the vast number of writers who contracted it. Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Maxim Gorky, Jonas Biliūnas, Walt Whitman, Paul Éluard, Simone Weil, Alfred Jarry, and the Brontë sisters were all tubercular. Although tuberculosis has not been completely vanquished (in 2024, for example, some 10.7 million people fell ill with TB worldwide) nor is it part of our everyday lives the way it was for Vincas and Verutė. This is especially the case in North America, where we enjoy a very low incidence of TB.
At my kitchen table in Missouri, and more than ten years after my grandmother’s death, I was surprised to learn that Verutė had been tubercular at some point in her life. Among the documents in the carton, I find a German medical attestation dated 1948. There were lesions in my grandmother’s lungs, it says. Signs of previous infection, but no indication of active disease. So, perhaps it stands to reason that her daughter Vida showed positive results every time they gave her a TB skin test at the nursing home. “Just send me for an x-ray!” she’d say, knowing that their worry was for nothing. Her explanation for this was that, even though she’d never had an active TB infection, she’d often visited Vincas at the Ottawa Sanatorium, where he’d worked and where she’d surely been exposed to TB bacteria repeatedly. It’s also possible that she had been exposed in the DP camps or even on the ocean voyage to Canada. In any case, such exposure resulted in her turning up positive in skin tests even in the absence of symptoms. I’d never thought much about all this until recently. My mother was never easily alarmed and appeared wholly unconcerned about the test results, so I always followed her lead and didn’t worry either.
But the body keeps the score, Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has told us. In his case, he refers to trauma, and how the body remembers disruptive, violent, abusive and otherwise destructive experiences even when the mind cannot hold on to details. But the body remembers in other ways, too. What’s more, it learns. Immunologists and epidemiologists use the term “immunological memory” to describe how the body responds to pathogens it has encountered in the past. But not only does “adaptive immunity” remember such encounters; it learns to recognize new pathogens and build a response to them. Such adaptive immunity was first observed by Swedish doctors in 1934 among infants treated with the Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, whose primary purpose is to guard against tuberculosis, and which is still in wide use across the globe today. A 2024 study (the BATTLE trial) suggested that BCG might reduce both the incidence and severity of long Covid symptoms by up to 30% in patients who had recovered from the virus. What’s more, some researchers now believe that a latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) may offer even greater protection against severe Covid than does BCG.
LTBI, it seems, might “train” the immune system, offering it tools to ward off the Covid virus. The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of the world’s population may have a latent tuberculosis infection. Although the studies I read are preliminary and their authors underscore the need for more investigation, some researchers believe that this may explain some of the curious discrepancies we saw in Covid mortality rates in the pre-vaccine stages of the pandemic. Regions with a high incidence of LTBI (like Southeast Asia) fared better than those with lower incidence of latent TB infection (like Western Europe).
I never saw my grandparents disagree or speak a sharp word to one another. In fact, Verutė once told me that they had only ever fought once. It was at a wedding, she said, and she’d just had her baby, that is, Vida. I can’t remember the exact cause for disagreement, but they talked it through and never fought again. Others have told me that Vincas had been a kind man. He was funny, they said. People liked him at parties. It’s a side of him I was never old enough to see and register. The documents from the box show, too, that he was trusted and knowledgeable. As kids, my brother and I called him Tėvelis, which translates not as Grandfather but as Daddy. It’s what Vida called him, and I suspect we followed her lead. A good father beyond his own lifetime, Vincas may also have succeeded in protecting his daughter until her final years. It seems that the family’s exile, his job, their closeness, and the fact that was the kind of father a girl enjoyed visiting at the office—all this unwittingly ended up giving her body a superpower, that is, both a physiological form of memory and a capacity for it to learn, and therefore to protect her decades into the future.
By the second half of 2022, I sensed that my mother might not have much time left to live, so I arranged to spend the fall semester in Toronto. My hunch turned out to be right and by November, it was clear that Vida was, indeed, finally dying. Doctor G. delivered the news again, but this time in person. As I sat vigil by my mother’s bed for weeks, I studied the oil painting of our island that my godfather had made after a visit to the cottage. He’d somehow managed to depict it from a bird’s-eye view. Just as I had done with the boxes, Vida had taken that piece from house to condo to nursing home room.
She died on December 6. I arrived late in the evening and sat holding her hand in the darkness. By then, she had stopped opening her eyes, eating, or responding to speech. Still, I kept talking to her. I noted aloud how cold her hand was and then got up to put on some music for us to listen to. Her favorite caregiver soon arrived to clean and change Vida into pajamas, so I stepped out of the room to give them some privacy. And then, almost as if on purpose, my mother died in my short absence. By the time I returned, she was gone. Resisting the panic and urge to run for a nurse, I sat back down. I took her hand again, kissed her forehead, told her I loved her, and said goodbye without hurry.
Finally, I walked over the window, and opened it a crack so her soul could depart.
Coda
It is 2026. I open a small box labelled “Mother,” in Vida’s hand. This item comes not from in the original condo cartons but from the filing cabinet in Vida’s nursing home room from when I cleared it out after her death. Inside the box, among bank records and tiny prayer books, I find a scrap of folded paper. On it: Lithuanian script in blue ball-point pen. On one side, my grandmother (Vida’s mother) has written two codes: one for a door and a second for an elevator. At first, I think these come from her Toronto condominium—for many years, she lived in the same building as my mother—but then I realize, no. I recognize the numbers as codes from the nursing home, where Verutė died at the age of 99. Then, I turn the paper over to read her words:
Our wedding
took place in
1934
————
He died in
1986
————
Calculated
1986
-1934
_______
=52 yrs. [this figure is circled]
And like a
dream, those
happy [days]
passed so quickly,
but I will never forget them
Verutė’s script is slightly shaky and corrected in a couple of spots, but otherwise neat. Her Lithuanian spelling and grammar are perfect. In my translation I add a word (“days”) that she seems to have skipped. What is this little text, I wonder. A poem? A simultaneous reminder and vow? I leave the scrap on my desk to contemplate for a few days.
Reading and rereading her words, I formulate yet another theory. This time, I posit that my grandmother was afraid of forgetting her beloved and carried the note in her pocket by way of protection—of his memory, of herself, of their life together. To me, this scrap she carried in her cardigan pocket, therefore, is both a thing of beauty and magic. Like all good writing, it’s a talisman, an incantation, a prayer, a vaccine and a fortification against forgetting. It is, in the end, a record of memory, immunity, and love more precious than a lost piece of cloth once buried for safekeeping.
