When nursing homes began barring visitors to keep the coronavirus out, Jack Eccles decided to move in.
Hillcrest Convalescent Center in Durham, N.C., had turned him away on March 12 when he arrived as usual to spend much of the day with his wife, Gerry, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.
So he returned the next day with a suitcase of clothes, books, medications and his computer. Hillcrest had agreed to rent him a single room in its assisted-living area so that he could care for Gerry, who is 91.
Dr. Eccles, who is 93 and a longtime Baptist pastor, remains under lockdown at Hillcrest. For five months, he hasn’t left and has rarely seen the sun—the window in his room faces a brick wall.
He isn’t allowed to walk around the 154-bed facility, except to Gerry’s room, where he feeds her, and sometimes to the lobby, where he can see family members through the windows. Meals in the facility’s spacious dining room and its festive monthly parties remain paused.
Hillcrest sometimes feels like a prison, he says, but he won’t move out and leave Gerry until it reopens to visitors.
“We’re married. I want to be with her. She took care of me for 70 years, and now it’s my turn,” he says.
The coronavirus cut a deadly swath through senior-care facilities, with more than 70,000 deaths so far, according to a Wall Street Journal tally of state and federal data. Hillcrest has seen two cases of Covid-19, both in patients who came from a hospital in late April. One died.
The couple celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary in the lobby on July 16.
A less-obvious toll is the tens of thousands of lonely residents cut off from relatives and other social interaction. In mid-March, in addition to closing to nearly all visitors, nursing homes nationwide ended group activities and largely confined residents to their rooms.
Some states have begun permitting more family visits, generally with strict limitations including bans on physical contact. North Carolina has not.
The impact is particularly acute for residents with memory loss. Federal health officials estimated at least 15,000 more Americans died from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia than otherwise would have this spring, many of them in senior-living facilities.
Doctors believe the disruption of routines and disappearance of familiar faces in many cases led to health declines among fragile nursing-home residents.
“There are public-health consequences of loneliness, isolation and loss of connection to a beloved person that may be equally devastating” as Covid-19, said Lisa Gwyther, an associate professor at the Duke University School of Medicine. For those with dementia, “the greatest fear is the fear of abandonment in a world that doesn’t make sense.”
Jack and the rest of his family say they believed Gerry would fail to eat without one of them nearby. Jack also feared he would never see her again. Though their children were nervous about the risk, they agreed with their father’s decision, one nursing homes hardly ever encounter.
“They were never apart,” says Genece McChesney, one of their nine children.
Three times a day, Jack arrives at Gerry’s room, which is shared with a roommate and decorated with pictures of their family and a big photo of the couple.
She sometimes resists eating or dozes off between bites. Wearing a mask and goggles, Jack spoons cereal and purée from a tiny plastic spoon, meticulously checking that she gets the required 40 ounces of liquid a day, and wiping drips so they don’t stain her clothes. He positions her head and neck carefully to be sure she doesn’t choke.
Months ago, Gerry stopped saying “I love you” to Jack, or any other words, and she no longer smiles in recognition of him, he says. But “there’s some radiance about her….That personality still comes through.”
Jack typically takes a nap after feeding Gerry a meal.
When she refuses to eat, he often sings songs like “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” pausing to exhort, “Chew, Gerry!” A meal often takes about 90 minutes.
Hillcrest staffers say his efforts have made a huge difference in his wife’s health. “That’s something we can’t do. We haven’t been with her for 70 years,” said Olivia Jacobs, a Hillcrest dietitian. She and others working at the facility say Jack never complains, and is unfailingly gentle: “He’s always having a good day, he’s always happy to see her.…He’s with his love, and that’s where he wants to be.”
Jack, who uses a walker and has a history of heart trouble, says the sessions aren’t easy, and he has sometimes struggled to be patient as he accepted what he believes is God’s plan. A couple of times, he lay down on the floor during a meal, so frustrated he had to take a break. After the meals, he typically needs a nap. “I just have to flop. I’m exhausted, it’s an emotional thing.”
A smile
John R. Eccles first spotted Geraldine Knobel in 1949, outside the dining hall at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash., where they were students. “She smiled, and that was all it took,” he says.
Gerry, a serious-minded 19-year-old, wasn’t immediately smitten with the 21-year-old Merchant Marine veteran. When he invited her to a basketball game, she replied that she went home on weekends. “For a less persistent person, that would have been the end, but not Jack,” she wrote in a wedding album.
Jack and Gerry in 1950, leaving for their honeymoon and on their wedding day.
Photo: Eccles FamilyHe won her over with gestures including the gift of a carton of vanilla ice cream with a heart-shaped strawberry core going down the middle. Soon they were driving around in Jack’s black Chevrolet Fleetline. Both were from small Washington towns and were committed to their Christian faith. That spring, when he said he wanted to marry her, she was surprised.
“I told him I didn’t feel that way about him, but to wait awhile,” she wrote in the album.
The following April, Jack gave her the diamond engagement ring once worn by his mother, and on July 16, 1950, they were married at Gerry’s family church. “Unspeakably happy,” Gerry later wrote about that day in the wedding album.
After college, Jack went to a Baptist seminary. Gerry soon became pregnant with their first child, a daughter named Susan. She was followed by eight others, a total of six girls and three boys.
The family moved every few years, as Jack went from church to church around Washington and California, sometimes working at radio stations or teaching for extra income. He got two different doctoral degrees from theological institutions, and Gerry painstakingly typed his dissertations.
She drove church vans, led women’s groups, taught Sunday school, played the piano at services and accompanied church members on accordion when they went Christmas caroling. At home, she kept a hand-drawn grid of church members in a private notebook, checking off the names neatly as she prayed for them each day.
The church was “what their lives rotated around,” says Kathy Martin, one of their daughters.
Mementos from their seven-decade relationship.
At home, while Jack studied and wrote, Gerry ran the household. She tucked in the children at night and delivered home remedies like baking soda for stomachaches. She hand-squeezed the lemon juice Jack liked to drink and ironed his shirts. At night, she made sure all the kids were quietly gathered around the dinner table before Jack was called from his work to start the meal.
Their children say they don’t recall any arguments. But “if she didn’t like something, she said [so] very gently, and I took the hint,” Jack says.
Jack didn’t watch the birth of any of the children. When he tried once, he says, he nearly passed out before he even got to the birthing room. “It was more than I could handle.”
Jack and Gerry with their nine children in 2008.
Photo: Eccles FamilyHe still feels guilty about that—and other things, he says. “There are many times I didn’t pay attention enough to Gerry,” including her birthdays. “We didn’t do anything special. Now I can’t talk to her, and I thought, ‘Man, I’ve been missing this all my life.’ ” Some of his fondest memories are of quiet Monday mornings at McDonald’s for breakfast with his wife, he says.
Gerry also handled the family’s finances, which were often tight. She darned socks and made rag rugs. She sewed up vacuum cleaner bags and reused them.
In 1971, when Jack left a church in Spokane, Gerry took a job selling products door-to-door. Later that year, Jack got a new position at a California church, and the family moved again.
In the early 1980s, Jack went to a church in San Jose, where he stayed for more than two decades. Later, the couple started yet another congregation.
Fading
By 2015, the family could see signs that Gerry’s memory was fading. She groped for words. She burned tea kettles. Her fluid piano playing, which had long been at the center of family gatherings, became more halting.
That March, she lost her new glasses. “Jesus I love you,” she wrote in her journal, in jagged fragments unlike her usual perfect cursive. “Please help me. Please help Jack. He is really upset.”
The couple’s oldest son and his wife began bringing dinner to their house. The family affixed labels with names next to the photos lining the walls.
In October 2015, doctors confirmed a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. During the exam, Gerry couldn’t name all of her children or recall her birthday, but was able to write a sentence: “The person I love the most is a few jumps away.” Her family was sure she meant Jack.
For the first time in their married life, Jack cooked—simple things like toast and boiled eggs for breakfast.
On Feb. 3, 2017, just a few days before his 90th birthday, Jack broke his pelvis. After the hospital, he needed to go to rehab. The couple’s youngest daughter, Roberta Drewry, had offered to have them live with her in North Carolina.
Jack didn’t want to leave California, but he finally agreed.
Gerry and Jack.
Photo: Eccles family (2)He couldn’t seem to get started packing up his thousands of books, mostly religious texts, according to his daughter Kathy. His son-in-law, Steve Martin, says he told him, “Jack, you’ve got a different job. Your job is to take care of Gerry.”
Soon after he arrived in North Carolina, Jack sent his résumé to local churches. He began teaching a Bible class. Gerry continued her decline, and in 2018, she moved into Hillcrest. Roberta and Jack came every day to feed her meals. In the evening, Jack and Gerry would watch old episodes of “M*A*S*H” and “The Andy Griffith Show” in the lobby.
In March, after Roberta saw reports of families cut off from their loved ones in the Kirkland, Wash., nursing home that has been tied to dozens of Covid deaths, she spoke to her father. Jack didn’t believe Gerry could return to the house, and when Roberta asked if he would move into Hillcrest, he agreed it was the best option. Hillcrest gave him a room and charged a special rate because he doesn’t get staff care.
The Eccles children say they were scared for both parents. Jack says he wasn’t afraid of catching the virus. “I could kick the bucket any time. I don’t think about it,” he says.
The couple’s daughter, Roberta Drewry, outside Hillcrest’s window at the wedding anniversary celebration.
Jack says he never expected his stay at Hillcrest to be so long, because he thought the virus threat would subside. He never fully unpacked or decorated his room. “You really miss being outdoors,” he says. He misses preaching and he daydreams about a favorite apple pastry with hot chocolate. He has seen his newest great-granddaughter, born about a month ago, only through a FaceTime session.
But he won’t leave. He has been studying German and worked on a sermon he has posted on YouTube.
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On July 16, eight of the nine Eccles siblings and some of the couple’s 20 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren gathered in a Zoom session to celebrate Jack and Gerry’s 70th wedding anniversary. Roberta and her husband set up an iPad outside the lobby windows and held up an intercom device next to the screen so the family could talk to Jack and Gerry. Each family member spoke briefly.
Jack sat next to Gerry, behind the glass of the Hillcrest front lobby, waving and smiling, their wedding photo beside them. Gerry was quiet, impassive, her hands mostly in her lap. Jack fed her bites of gold-accented cake. He prayed, and led the family in “Amazing Grace,” conducting and singing through the intercom.
At one point he told them, “Mommie said something. I’m sure it was, ‘I love you guys.’ ”
After about an hour, nursing-home workers packed up the rest of the cake. Jack put on Gerry’s mask and his own. He told his family he loved them, waved good night, and slowly wheeled away Gerry’s chair.
‘They were never apart,’ says one of their daughters.
—Jon Kamp contributed to this article.
Write to Anna Wilde Mathews at anna.mathews@wsj.com
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