Centenarian dies in outbreak at Almonte seniors’ home
Suzie Mocko survived the Great Depression and was held at gunpoint by Nazis with a baby in her arms during the Second World War.
On April 4, one day shy of her 101st birthday, Mocko left this world surrounded by her family wearing personal protective equipment and safety gowns. She died of COVID-19.
Mocko is one of 18 residents at Almonte Country Haven, an 82-bed long-term care facility in Mississippi Mills, who have died from what’s believed to be COVID -19-related complications.
As of Wednesday, the Leeds, Grenville and Lanark District Health Unit, the health agency that covers the area, reported 225 cases of the novel coronavirus — the highest rate of infection per 100,000 people in Ontario at 129.9 people.
According to Wednesday’s update by the Ontario Health Ministry, Almonte Country Haven is one of 98 long-term care homes in the province battling COVID-19 outbreaks in which 453 staff members and 834 residents have tested positive and 144 residents have died.
The care home was in lockdown by the time Mocko was deteriorating, but her family was allowed in, with precautions, to say goodbye.
“We suited up and all that stuff,” said her son Walter “Peppy” Mocko.
He remembers his mother as a “tough cookie” — compassionate, family-oriented but fiercely stubborn. She feared death, he said, with all that she’d been through in life — including surviving tuberculosis at the age of 16 — so that even in her final moments it was hard for her. “But boy, she done good,” he said. Mocko was born in 1919 in the former Yugoslavia and was married for 77 years until her husband Steve’s death in 2016.
They ran a lumber yard in Yugoslavia
and grocery store and dance hall in Czechoslovakia. But life was hard in their war-torn native land, so to give their two sons a better life, they immigrated to Canada in 1951 and built a new life in Leamington, Ont., where, despite not knowing how to read or write in English, Suzie Mocko became head cook at the Sun Parlor nursing home. She loved gardening, crocheting and baking.
Her obituary thanks her “extended family at Almonte Country Haven, who have showed great compassion, love and grace in dealing with all their residents.”
“They’re very good people there,” Peppy said. “The staff are people that I’ve known for 30 years. I knew their parents.”
Suzie Mocko went into the care home in 2016 and lived in a room with three others. Once she was sick, the others in the room quickly were, too. Another woman who was in that room died on April 1.
There were plans to expand the home this November so there would only be two residents to a unit or single-resident units.
“That’s what their plans were. They had architects in there explaining how things were going to be. I went to the meeting,” Mocko said. “Too little, too late.”
To soothe her when the time came, her family played Hungarian music, knowing how much their parents loved dancing to it. They held her hands and rubbed her brow.
“She felt very much at ease on her passing and so did I.”
From the bad, her son hopes there will come good — that the outbreaks will lead to the kind of care that people like his mom deserve and that families will be advocates for change.
Premier Doug Ford announced Wednesday plans to send hospital-based teams to help manage outbreaks in long-term care homes and to expand testing to include more asymptomatic residents, among other initiatives.
“We are in the fight of our lives right now,” Ford said.