Listen: Life in a continuing care retirement community right now
Joan Rauch featured in an episode of the "Life Under Coronavirus" podcast. Credit: Mark Chiusano
Episode 19 of "Life Under Coronavirus" goes inside The Amsterdam at Harborside, a continuing care retirement community in Port Washington (click to listen).
One day last week I parked in The Amsterdam's largely empty visitor parking lot. The well-manicured lawn was empty, as was the picturesque gazebo. The lobby was quiet too other than employees at the entrance desk, who checked my temperature. But once inside, Joan Rauch was waiting for me, checking the fit on a multicolored mask and clutching two copies of the Overlook, the resident newspaper.
Rauch, 88, had just written an article in the Overlook headlined “You’re Never Alone at the Amsterdam.”
For Episode 19 of “Life Under Coronavirus,” Rauch gave Newsday a tour of The Amsterdam last week to show some of the ways life has changed inside--happy hours replaced by Zoom classes and discussions, meals delivered to rooms, and masks and hand sanitizing stations all around.
She says she and other residents are taking it in stride, as best they can: “Everyone's complaining about their hair going gray because there's no hairdressers.”
Nursing homes across Long Island have been hard hit by the coronavirus, with families becoming frantic and facilities closing themselves off to the outside world. The Amsterdam has experienced fewer cases than other places where Long Island’s elderly live. Still, life has changed.
“The virus has isolated us to our apartments where we continue to have the necessities,” Rauch wrote in that article, “but where, oh where are the people?”
Mark Chiusano is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
