A few weeks into the outbreak, the nuns started getting sick. Kortenhof and three other sisters went into isolation, leaving the residence with even fewer hands. She found it “torturous” to get messages about residents dying while she wasn’t there. “If you don’t have a strong faith, this thing would just succeed in crushing you,” she said.
Holy Week passed heavily. The deaths had become a drumbeat, and the sisters and staff were exhausted. Volunteers from the nearby Christiana Hospital came to help with equipment and care, visiting residents to take their temperature and measure the oxygen in their blood. Alone in their rooms, many in the home tuned in to channel 50, a live feed of the facility’s chapel. Each morning and afternoon, sisters who were not sick would come in to pray the rosary or recite the Divine Mercy, kneeling far from one another to maintain social distance. The channel was a small thread connecting residents in isolation, a way of being together in days of solitude.
In her room on Saint Joseph’s, Flo would often stay up until 2 a.m. trying to finish her prayers. For a while, she had run a fever, suffered from diarrhea, and kept coughing, but her symptoms didn’t last long. Surrounded by statues of Jesus and Mary, beneath pictures of her six kids, 23 grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren, Flo prayed for courage, for the health of the staff, for everybody who was sick in the home. She especially prayed for Karen, her friend from the dining hall. “I was really worried about her. We have different things wrong with us,” Flo told me this week, her voice quiet over the phone. For weeks, she didn’t have much information about how her neighbors were doing, even those who lived just feet away. After a month of separation, toward the end of April, Flo finally left a couple of messages on Karen’s phone.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member