The last hug Judi Smith felt was from a nurse, in April, on the day her husband died.
“She probably would have incurred the wrath of her boss if he’d known she let me in to sit with him after he passed,” Smith recalled.
Ron Smith died April 20 in a nursing facility in Round Lake Beach, Ill. He suffered from dementia and advanced Parkinson’s disease. Smith, who was known as the “Tie Dude” for his large collection of colorful ties, was 82.
His wife visited him every day for several hours when he first entered that nursing home. After the pandemic’s social distance restrictions were ordered, she visited him through a window pane outside his room.
On Judi’s birthday, four days before her husband’s death, she visited him again through the window, holding up a large sign reminding him “I love you!” Ron replied to his wife of 43 years, saying, “Happy birthday, I love you.”
Due to his advanced Parkinson’s, Ron wasn’t normally able to speak. On that day he spoke clearly and loud enough for her to hear.
“Sort of a last gift from him,” Judi told me afterward.
One month earlier, on March 15, Judi visited Ron to adorn his door with St. Patrick’s Day decorations.
“He grudgingly accepted since he was Danish,” Judi joked.
The couple shared their last hug that day, just before the facility went on lockdown.
The same can be said for millions of people who’ve gone without hugs of any kind since March, when our country first went on lockdown. Or we’ve went without the social intimacies of casual touch, playful jabs, hearty handshakes or deeply-felt embraces.
I haven’t hugged my mother since March. Not even on her 80th birthday earlier this month. Or on Christmas Eve when I visited her to drop off a plate of freshly-made cheese-filled crepes, a Croatian tradition in our family.
She began self-quarantining her remarkably good health in March. And it has worked. But hugs with her instantly became a bittersweet memory, not an instinctive greeting. This is when I began realizing how important hugs can be in our lives. All different kinds of hugs — casual, emotional, obligatory, dutiful and dramatic.
My last dramatic hug took place Dec. 7 when my fiancé’s 19-year-old daughter, Sarah, left for the U.S. Air Force. We drove her to a hotel in Lansing, Michigan, near a Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS), where she left us for Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. She’ll be gone for several months for basic training, and then career training at another base out west.
We — my fiancé, Karen, and I — left Sarah’s hotel room, our hugs carried the emotional weight of knowing that our next hug with her would be weeks away, possibly months. We squeezed her tightly, together, the three of us erupting into tears from the powerful last embrace.
This is the power of hugs. They not connect us to others. They also connect us to an experience. A memory. A feeling. A moment.
I’ve given Sarah hundreds of hugs since I came into her life in 2010. None will ever compare with that final hug I gave her, and she gave me, in 2020.
Several years ago, when I drew cartoons for the newspaper, I created one for Christmas. It showed a young boy with a sad face sitting on Santa’s lap, telling him what he wanted for Christmas that year.
“How about just a real big hug?” the boy asked with a sigh.
This year’s “COVID Christmas” somberly reflected that dusty cartoon about the need for hugs in our lives. Especially this year.
Earlier this month, two dictionary companies declared the same word — pandemic — the “Word of the Year” for 2020. It’s a fitting conclusion to a year infected with a plague of other related words: coronavirus, quarantine, COVID, and asymptomatic.
The word of this year could also be “hugs” because they’ve been rarer and more cherished than ever in our lifetimes. Hugs mean more than they used to. The gesture could be a casual squeeze in public, a meaningful grip in a hospital, or a final embrace with a parting loved one.
For Judi Smith, her last hug with another person came from a caring nurse who intuitively understood Smith needed one at that precise moment.
“She was a real sweetheart,” Smith said. “She looked at me, and said, ‘Oh hell, why not? You need one.”
Jerry Davich is a columnist for the Post-Tribune of Merrillville. Send comments to [email protected].