Bookstore owner succumbs to COVID-19
An architect, artist and bookstore owner, Otto Graser died of COVID-19 in The Ottawa Hospital on the same day that his wife was admitted with the respiratory illness.
Graser, 87, died late on the afternoon of April 6 just before his wife, Gail, could be moved into the same hospital room.
“My mom didn’t reach him in time,” said Christopher Graser, one of the couple’s two sons. “But she was allowed to stay in his room for a bit so she could have some time with him.” The Grasers were married 58 years.
Gail Graser, 83, is still weak and in hospital with COVID -19. “Hopefully, I don’t lose them both to this thing,” said the Graser’s eldest son, Alexander.
Otto Graser fell ill days after the couple returned from an abbreviated trip to Toulouse, France. The Grasers, who once owned a home in the scenic village of Puycelci, north of Toulouse, had been travelling to southern France for decades.
This year, at the behest of their children, they cut their trip short after the novel coronavirus slammed into Europe.
They flew back to Ottawa on Monday, March 23. Three days later, they started to exhibit COVID-19 symptoms. They were tested at the Brewer arena assessment centre, and received their results April 2: Otto tested positive for COVID-19, Gail was negative.
His condition deteriorated the next day — he had chills, diarrhea and was increasingly weak — and was taken by ambulance to the Ottawa Hospital.
Graser was given supplemental oxygen, but the oxygen levels in his blood continued to plummet. He asked not to be intubated.
“It was a very steep decline,” Christopher Graser said. “No matter how much oxygen they put into his lungs, it wasn’t getting into his blood. His saturation levels went way, way down.”
In severe cases, patients with COVID-19 develop a condition known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), in which the lung ’s tiny air sacs fill with fluid and inhibit the transfer of oxygen to the bloodstream.
Graser died on the afternoon of April 6 — the same day that his wife, Gail, was admitted to hospital with COVID-19.
They had met 60 years earlier, on New Year’s Eve in London, in the middle of Trafalgar Square. Otto was in London to study at the Polytechnic School of Architecture; Gail was a nursing graduate. They toured Europe together on a Vespa scooter.
They moved to Canada, married in September 1961 then settled in
Ottawa after Otto completed a master’s degree in architecture at McGill University.
As a young architect and draughtsman, he worked on the National Arts Centre, the design of which was led by Fred Lebensold. In 1965, Graser joined the federal government and worked as an architect and planner in the departments of Indigenous affairs and national defence. He designed buildings on both coasts, at CFB Esquimalt and CFB Halifax.
In his 50s, Graser took early retirement and launched a new and intensively creative phase of his life. He opened a bookstore — Arlington Books in Centretown — and founded Black Squirrel Press, a print shop that he ran out of the basement of his home on Fourth Avenue with an old letterpress machine.
“We’d spend many nights in the basement printing things,” said his son, Christopher.
He was a print maker, painter, photographer, potter and graphic artist; he travelled widely, collected antiques, and studied computer programming. He learned to handle a sailboat and a target pistol. He posted videos on YouTube, teaching people how to make digital art.
“He was a jack of all trades, and a master of some,” said his longtime friend, architect Jaan Krusberg. “He was bigger than life, you know.”
His sons said their father was a soft-spoken, introspective man with a deep sense of curiosity.
“He was producing and exhibiting right up to the end: He never stopped,” Christopher said. “He had a very active mind, he was interested in everything, and not judgmental, just genuinely inquisitive.
“He wanted to know how things worked.”
Graser is one of 14 people who have died in Ottawa from COVID-19 during the pandemic.