Touch in the Time of Corona
Learning new forms of connection
Every afternoon for two years, my mother-in-law would push her walker down the long corridor of her nursing home in Washington DC to visit her husband, Bob. The Memory Care Unit at Thomas Circle Residences sits behind a locked door on the 2nd Floor. Behind that locked door is where Bob would await her arrival. Parkinson’s disease softened her voice and age had hardened his hearing, so they would sit side-by-side, holding hands as the sun moved across the sky.
“It’s funny,” Phyllis says, “but I felt more in love than ever.”
Touch. It is our first form of communication and, if we are lucky, our last. Touch is how we learn about the world. As babies, everything goes into the mouth or on the skin. Before we wire up our neurons and add stories and judgments to how we feel, we are pure sensation. Sensation without narration.
As our interface to the world, skin is the largest and most sensitive of our organs, calibrated so we can detect changes in temperature a fraction of a degree, a slight shift in the wind, the presence of a predator or prey. Our ancestors relied on these readings for survival. We do, too. We can detect the intention of touch from loving to needy to malicious. We read handshakes like we do a resume. We chose lovers by how they touch us and by our desire to press our bodies against theirs.
Touch is medicine. It decreases our anxiety and reduces pain. Even a light touch on the arm is enough to make us more generous towards each other or perform better on a test. All of it, even the way we wash our hands, can decrease our heart rate, lower stress hormones, and produce the cells that ward off bacteria. Touch connects us in ways that words can’t. Lions, after fighting over a kill, will sleep, bellies distended in a stupor, paw over hindquarter, limb over limb to re-establish their bond. Touch is how I fall back in love with my children after a day of heated tempers, or with my husband after a fight. We spoon, our bodies nestled together until we fall asleep and all is well in the world.
In the nursing home, Bob’s floor was the first to go on lockdown. The nurse on the afternoon shift would connect Bob and Phyllis via Skype. He was confused as to why she didn’t visit. “Tell her you love her,” the nurse would prod. His mouth shaped the words. The nurse had a dozen other patients to attend to. “Now say goodbye,” she would say.
Deprived of physical connection, many of us are seeking other ways to get the sensation of touch. One friend told me that she is laying on the floor to get all that skin contact. “Even better is when I can lay on the dirt,” she says. Another friend has been hugging trees on the way home from the grocery store and tuning into the tactile aspects of everyday life: the softness of a blanket; the taste and texture of food. Another friend told me she is listening to music with her whole body, feeling the beat on her skin and in her bones. After my Zoom dance class, we gaze into each other’s eyes. We are thousands of miles apart and yet the love is palpable.
At home, I have been looking for opportunities to increase our family’s touch quota. I see any request for a backrub is an invitation to connect. When I cross paths in the kitchen with my daughters, I ask for a hug - the kind that lasts more than 10 seconds.
What will the touch-legacy of the pandemic be? Will we return with gusto to the kiss on the cheek or the handshake or is the air hug now a permanent fixture like the way in some parts of Africa they now have “The Ebola”, a foot bump from a distance.
Covid took the lives of nine people at the nursing home. Bob’s floor got even quieter than normal. Phyllis was finally allowed to see him this fall, which gave her two weeks to be with him before he died on a sunny afternoon in October. Phyllis tells me that, at night, she feels Bob’s presence in bed with her. “It’s like I can reach out and touch him.”
Like bears coming out of hibernation, many of us will emerge ravenous for the press of bodies on the subway, embraces with friends on the street, limbs commingling on the dance floor. But perhaps we will emerge from the pandemic with an increased capacity for connection through non-tactile communication. It wasn’t that long ago that we learned to convey and receive love through letters delivered across oceans and, more recently, through the electrical pulses that send and receive the voices of our loved ones on our phones. Might it be possible that, despite our physical distancing, we are learning to be more in touch than ever?
From the Institute of Pleasure Studies
Have you seen this beautiful photo and lyrical essay from the NYT, We were born to be kissed in the dark? It is an homage to the days of old and the press of bodies in the dark. Remember when we danced?
Who knows more about skin hunger than people who are behind bars. Time is a gorgeous documentary that follows Sibil Fox Richardson who is fighting for the release of her husband, Rob, who is serving a 60-year prison sentence. Winner of the Sundance U.S. Documentary Directing Award, it is available Here.
Want a touchless way to feel connected to the entirety of humanity? The Tibetan practice, Tonglen, is a mediation that reminds us that we are all connected through suffering. In some ways, it is the pleasure of suffering. Pema Chodron guides this 11-minute meditation.
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