Ma’am, we’ll be shutting down the senior care home in a month’s time because a majority of our staff are refusing to return from their hometowns and villages on account of the pandemic. We request you to please make arrangements in a fortnight’s time to take your relative. We are sorry…” That minute-long phone call in early May of 2020, was the manifestation of my worst nightmare. Months into the lockdown, and the residential space where I had moved my father to [he was afflicted by Parkinson’s and related mental health issues] was forced to end operations. I had to hit the ground running in extremely hostile conditions to find another safe, dignified, cooperative and well-equipped senior care home. It almost felt as if I was asking for the Moon, and then some more, given the inexplicable scenarios that we were all trying to survive in at the time.

I returned to my Excel data sheet for options that I had meticulously created from over six months of research, when I had begun to explore the option of finding a senior care home to cater to my father’s needs, given his medical condition. To buy time, I immediately reached out to a reliable caregiver [bless her] from a previous stint at my home, who agreed to stay full-time given the strict movement restrictions during the first lockdown. Most other centres had also met with similar fate of being forced to close. The ones that were operational, refused to take in patients with mental health issues. It was a gloomy scenario in an already gloomy world. Then, a godsend emerged from nowhere and I could move my father into a reliable space in the neighbouring suburb.