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One Door Down : Profiles from a New York City Apartment Building During the COVID-19 Pandemic Main Menu About Our Profiles George and Kathy Profile Sonia and Paul Profile Mary Profile Leeat and Uwvie Profile Jo Profile Tyler Profile Methodology and Background

Ygritte's Impact on Kathy Transcript

Kathy: I had two jobs, one of my jobs, pretty solitary, I did that by myself without the rest of the department. The other half of my job was seeing employees who were ill, who came in, or just who needed a vaccine, whatever. So I had that interruptions all during the day. One thing that was funny, that I found over the months was, I couldn’t talk that long. It’s like my voice felt funny! It’s li- it sounds like such a strange thing ‘cuz I mean I would talk with George, but once he would go I thought “I probably haven’t said a word to anyone in ten hours.”

George: Well… Not that long I call you every day while I’m at work just to…

Kathy: Well, that’s true to kill some time, so. (Tyler laughs) (George, chuckles: To kill some time) But I mean other than…

George: We’ll have a little half hour conversation while I’m on lunch.

Kathy: One good thing that helped a lot, and this was shortly after Mary died, when I started going part-time, was, one of our neighbors left for a period of six or seven months, so I took care of her cat while she was gone, and the funny thing was our cat had just died like two months before, and I had told him I don’t want another cat because it’s just too much to deal with. I said I’ve had a cat or a dog…

George: Well, since you were a kid.

Kathy: Since I was a child, I always was responsible for something.

George: Right, but we, but we’ve always had one too.

Kathy: But we’d always had a cat, yanno, since the early-nineties. And so you have the cat box and everything to take care of so I told him “we’re not gonna have a cat box, were not gonna have to worry about cat food on the floor” and everything and this came up. And I, I felt like, I said “ahh I just yanno I want to help, I want to help this person,” so I took the cat in. And that was actually something that was a positive, not the cleaning part but, having the cat there. She would come over and sit in my lap and be with me, and just like getting to know this other… thing that was in the house with me. And so, she was there with me all the time even when George was at work. So she was uh actually a really good companion. And I could see why a lot of people were talking about adopting a cat or a dog during the pandemic when they were stuck at home basically. (Tyler: Yeah.) And so that was uh, uh actually ended up being a positive for me as well as the owner and the cat. And uh, it still didn’t make me want a cat again … (Tyler: (Laughing) No?) once I gave her back, no, no … But uh that was a good thing. And actually yeah I did talk then, ‘cuz I had to chitchat with the cat on and off during the day.

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George and Kathy
George and Kathy have lived and rented out apartments in this building for decades. The entire time, George’s older sister, Mary, lived in the unit above them. In recent years, Mary had been diagnosed with dementia, and required care that entailed the assistance of her brother and sister-in-law. In an effort to both make her happy and get her blood flowing, they would take her out to restaurants and treat her to other outings that did not require too much effort on her part. Theirs being a close-knit family, George and Kathy stepped up to the plate when Mary needed them most.
In the early months of the pandemic, Mary developed symptoms that seemed very similar to those of COVID. Unable to get a proper diagnosis due to no doctor being able to come see her, she was diagnosed with complications from heart failure, and after a two-week illness, died at home on March 29th, 2020.
In this clip, George and Kathy recount their experience after Mary got sick, and their role in taking care of her before she died. They go on to talk about the difficulties they experienced after she died, and how it impacted them.

Transcript

During the pandemic, both George and Kathy continued to work, but for Kathy, under much different circumstances. She had been employed in a hospital for over 20 years delivering vaccines to workers, among other employee-centric care duties. She became concerned about acquiring COVID from one of the workers that she would inevitably treat. Kathy had been considering retirement before the onset of the pandemic, but this made the decision simple. She signed all the paperwork for retirement, but was offered an opportunity to continue working part-time in a remote capacity; she accepted.
Taking on this new position placed Kathy within her own home, all by herself while George continued to go to work. Her biggest concern during the transition was facing issues with her computer; at the hospital she could just have the I.T. department fix it, but at home, she depended on a more tech-savvy George, accessible only through a phone call. She began to miss her friends at the hospital, but couldn’t visit on a social call; it was far too busy.
In this clip, Kathy talks about how she made the transition from working in the hospital to working from home, the loneliness it entailed, and how taking in Jo’s cat while she stayed in Austin, Texas helped her to cope with it.

Transcript
George began working at the post office in Queens as a mail carrier, but desired a job working in maintenance or engineering. Carrying mail proved to be a short-lived enterprise, as he worked his way up the ladder to achieve his goal, now handling maintenance for automated processing machinery. He takes pride in his job, as he views the mail service as an integral part of public services. When COVID hit and people began depending more and more on the delivery of packages of varying degrees of importance, from an Amazon impulse buy to life-preserving medications, George and his team were there to ensure that they were delivered.
With the stay-at-home order in place, George recalls the monotony of going to and from work and nowhere else. He was never very concerned by crowded situations as he never came across them; each shift’s crew would give time and space for the previous one to clear out so as to prevent transmission between groups. George’s crew made a heightened effort to ensure they wouldn’t spread the virus, spot-cleaning their work stations before they went home.

Recently, one of Kathy’s friends who remained working at the hospital reached out to her and said it feels like it’s been years since they’ve seen her. Kathy, who claims a distorted sense of time after the pandemic, responded, “For me it’s felt like two months.” She feels as if her mindset right after leaving the hospital has remained with her. George also admits that he has not seen some friends in two years, citing the pandemic as the main cause. George and Kathy’s friends shared an annual Christmas card exchange that saw the two send out close to one-hundred cards a season. Now, they say they’ve only received around twenty.
While their friendships may change, the bond that they share remains strong. On Kathy’s working from home, George is happy to have her around more often. When they both worked in person, they rarely ever crossed paths for more than a few waking hours. Now, they have much more time to spend together.
Vacation-goers, the two have traveled the world together. COVID derailed any plans for them to continue doing so, but they’ve acclimated. In this clip, Kathy recounts how COVID altered her retirement plans, and how they continued to experience exotic places from their couch.

Transcript
From now on, George asserts, any vacation will have to be a road trip.

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