"Love in the Time of Corona" by Lorraine Martin Bennett
– an interrupted farewell
Shut out and shut in, new barriers separate a daughter longing to touch her centenarian mother.
Lorraine Martin Bennett is a print, web, and broadcast journalist who grew up in Murphy, North Carolina. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, she began her career on the Atlanta Journal, writing features and covering news. She became the first woman to head a domestic bureau at the Los Angeles Times. She joined a fledgling CNN, completing her career at CNN International. She retired to Murphy in 2006, building a farmhouse on family land at Martin’s Creek, where she has finished her first novel, a psychological thriller, and is writing a sequel.
Author’s Talk
I am a professional print, web and broadcast journalist who had the misfortune to lose both my mom and my husband in 2020. My mom was a tough survivor of that “Greatest Generation” – the very last in my large extended mountain family. Mom caught the virus and was quarantined in her nursing home for about 10 days. She overcame the virus and returned to her regular room, but she later developed hallucinations and some of the Covid “brain fog.” She asked for relatives we never knew or people we had never met. Finally, she stopped eating, or talking, or responding to us at all before she slipped away. “Congestive heart failure” was the final diagnosis.
After her facility went on Covid lockdown I could visit her only through a closed window. I wrote “Love in the Time of Corona” just after one of those window visits. I was playing a Mozart CD in my car and I remember crying all the way home.
Lorraine Martin Bennett
I have spent my life writing about breaking news or developing in-depth stories and personality profiles, but I find now I am writing only about events that touch me deeply. A couple of years ago I lost my beloved golden Cocker, a constant grounding companion through my husband’s long and challenging illness. Mac was nearly 14. I had owned him since puppyhood. When I wrote a poem about my feelings it won the Cherokee and Clay Counties Silver Arts competition.
“Love in the Time of Corona” was another attempt to address feelings I could not really put into English any other way.
Two months after Mom’s passing, my husband, who had bravely battled severe congestive heart failure, anemia, and pneumonia, died of respiratory failure. We had just celebrated our 54th anniversary.
Now I am embroiled in the largest adjustment period of my life. My husband and I had built a farmhouse on family land to take care of aging parents, including my mom, and assist his healing process after open-heart surgery. The house is almost as much a part of me as were my mom and husband.
Finally, I have been able to write a poem about my husband’s passing. Perhaps I will be writing a poem or essay about the farmhouse as well. Writing is helping me through this shattering adjustment.
