Katie Engelhart on Empathy in Reporting

You recently wrote a piece about the first COVID-19 hotspot in the US, the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Washington, in California Sunday. How did you approach reporting and writing this story given the need to remain socially distant?

I never set foot in the nursing home. The place was under lockdown—and so, unusually, I had to report the whole 16,000-word story from afar. You know, it was OK. It doesn’t necessarily take longer to build intimacy over the phone. I think phone calls can be very intimate, especially when they are two or three or four hours long. And many of the elderly people who I interviewed are used to using phone calls as their primary tools of communication and connection. I spent the first month interviewing about two dozen Life Care residents, family members and nurses. I spent all day on the phone.

Building a visual sense of things was more difficult. Early on in my reporting, I got hold of a floor plan for the nursing home and started asking residents for their room numbers. Later, family members sent me cellphone photos of different rooms. I mapped out as much as I could.

When it comes to writing about sensitive topics, such as an individual’s health, what steps do you take to help them or their families feel comfortable talking to you? What are those conversations like?

Well, usually it’s not the health problems themselves that are sensitive subjects. It’s the feelings that form around them. Despair. Regret. Very often, anger. So for instance, in this piece, Debbie was OK talking about the particularities of her mother’s dementia. It was much harder for her to discuss her own behavior: say, the fact that she hadn’t visited her mother since December. I take these conversations really slowly.

I have reported a lot on ageing and eldercare, and that experience was very helpful. I think I’m able to anticipate sources of grief—and ask about them in a way that doesn’t make people feel ashamed. I’m able to understand the gravity of things. So, for instance, if a daughter mentions in passing that her elderly mother got a urinary tract infection, I’m able to slow down and say, “Oh wow, and did it take weeks and weeks for doctors to properly diagnose it? Yes? And had she started experiencing delirium by them? She had? She must have lost a lot of weight? Yes? I know how bad UTIs can be, in elderly women. I’m so sorry.” I really feel so deeply for people who are ageing with difficulty, or watching a parent age. I bring that empathy to the interviews.

Your forthcoming Fellows project is a book about the Right to Die and the idea of “rational suicide.” It is a sensitive topic and one that is approached differently around the world. Can you tell us about your goals for the book?

I write for the reader who is justice-oriented and curious about exploring taken-for-granted narratives, someone who’s not afraid to confront ugly truths. Because of the broader footprint of the Cold War and U.S. imperialism, there are a lot of groups that can relate, but I’m always writing for Korean Americans who have been denied access to their own history. Most of us became American because of the Korean War, yet the forgetting of that war is constantly reinforced in the U.S. It has taken me decades to understand how the Korean War made me, and I want to pass on that knowledge to people who don’t have the same luxury of time. I want to say, “Here, let me pull back the veil for you.”

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