Taking up my grandmother’s fight
The pandemic hit home when my grandma died. Her values of working to make the world a little more just live on in me
In moved mid-April, from being the COVID-19 something pandemic “happening out there” to something deeply personal. On April 9, we learned there was a home where my grandmother, Louise Hope, lived. When my father broke the news, a knot in my stomach. At 89, and suf- the sort of person most at risk from this wretched pandemic A few days later, we received the word she had contracted the disease and was isolated in her room. Then word reached that she had lost consciousness. Before the end of the weekend, she had passed away. because it strips the memories that form the basis of who we are. As horrible as it sounds, sometimes I would look at my grandmother sitting there in the home, blank look on her face, the telligence and wit she was known for dimmed from her eyes, and think for a moment it will be a good thing for her to pass. To be freed from the prison her mind had become. when it actually happened, my emotions were totally different. It was a
difficult thing to accept. Especially when you know that in her final hours, your f father and aunts are not able to be at the side of the woman who raised them. when there is this massive gap in the g grieving process when you can’t come together as family, when the closure that comes from ritual and faith expressed in a funeral is taken away. The truth is, despite the many privileges she had in life, my grandmother passed away when she was highly vulnerable. As Bob Marley said, “Once a man and twice a child” (perhaps updated now to “Once an adult”). There are few more true adages. This is the human condition: no matter how healthy we are, we all will face times in our lives where we can’t just “pull ourselves up by the bootstraps,” when need the community to survive. Co- ronavirus is forcing us to face this reality. Forcing us to remember our welfare state was built on the idea that we’re all in it together, that we contribute when
we can to the collective, so that when we can’t contribute, the collective will support us.
We are rediscovering why these values are so important. I hope we can go further and recognize their relevance beyond a viral outbreak to so many other social issues we face.
For me, these are values I learned from my grandmother. She was a caring, strong and intelligent woman, a university graduate who spent her professional career as an educator. She was also a lifelong member of the United Church of Canada and a proud, card-carrying member of the NDP. These institutions shaped her understanding of the caring, inclusive society Canada should strive to be. Her values also came from the communities she lived in. During my childhood she and my grandfather lived on the family farm outside of Stouffville, Ont., backdrop to many of my dearest memories. They both were active volunteers and supporters of good work in this community. But she was actually born and raised in Weston, back when it was not a neighbourhood but a small close-knit town at the edge of the big city. She loved Weston, sharing stories of skating on the school grounds, random cows that still walked into the road and the adventure of riding a wood-fire-heated streetcar all the way downtown to shop at Hudson’s Bay.
I was very close to my grandma. She invested her time and love in all her grandchildren in many ways, one of the main ones through creating opportunities for us. Grandma curated activities to help build me into the man I am today. From trips to the local library to visiting her sister in California, from going to see “Les Misérables” or attending a speech by Stephen Lewis. She passed on her values through how she lived her life.
Values of inclusion were best reflected in how she and my grandfather embraced my mother and her family. If they had initial worries when they learned my father was engaged to a Black woman from the Caribbean, my mom certainly never saw it. Growing up, the fact I had an extended family of white and Black members who had all formed deep bonds of affection for each other seemed normal, not something unusual.
Discussions about race and discrimination were not uncommon in my grandparents’ home, and welcoming folks was a family tradition. I have many memories of sharing Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving meals with special guests from all over the world.
I know how blessed I am. Blessed to have even known a grandparent, let alone to have had one who had the financial means and opportunity to give me so much of their time, who was such a good role model. And I know her values about a just, inclusive society were not universally shared by all Canadians of her generation.
I’m reminded of a cold night when I was walking home as a U of T student by Bloor and Bathurst. I passed an older white lady who reminded me of my grandmother. I think we made eye contact for the briefest of moments and due to the resemblance, I involuntarily smiled. The lady responded by swearing and calling me a racial slur.
The truth is, there is no such thing as a unified set of “Canadian values.” In every age there is a struggle of ideas around who we are as a nation and what we find important. But as I reflect on my grandmother’s life and legacy, I am most grateful for her connecting me to the values she fought for. It always felt good to feel I was continuing a family tradition of working toward social justice. Her values represent the best of Canada’s past, but also can be a foundation for our future.
The one positive of this COVID-19 crisis is that we collectively have rediscovered the value of supporting the vulnerable, which was increasingly drowned out by the chorus of individualism and hyper-materialism in our modern world.
Whether for self-interest in stopping the outbreak, or deep empathy for the suffering of others, collectively it seems that in Canada we have come to understand that stopping the virus means we need to focus on the vulnerable. Whether it’s buying hotels to house the homeless, or sending the military to support long-term-care homes, we are now willing to do things we would never have imagined before.
Yet a true focus on the vulnerable is ethically and pragmatically relevant to far more than our response to COVID-19. Supporting vulnerable youth early, with mentorship, with access to role models, with programs teaching them skills to regulate their negative emotions, is by far the best way we can prevent them from later being caught up in a life of crime and violence. And it’s far more cost-effective than having to engage with them later through policing and incarceration.
Same for homelessness. It is much easier to support those in danger of experiencing homelessness to stay housed, or invest in getting those who are experiencing homeless straight into homes, than backfilling with a highly expensive shelter system. It’s so much more effective to focus investments around the social determinants of health for those who are vulnerable to health disparities, like diabetes prevention programs, than to treat them later in hospital emergency rooms.
If the vulnerable were truly the focus of our time and investment, we would have far greater impact than our current approach of Band-Aid solutions and downstream interventions.
But most people would say, don’t we already do that?
Maybe in our rhetoric. But the fact is we went years in this city chronically underfunding our strategies to support vulnerable youth while allocating over a billion dollars a year for policing.
And we had one of the world’s biggest housing booms, but didn’t demand some of that investment go to creating affordable housing through policies like inclusionary zoning (where a percentage of every building must be affordable).
Follow the money, they say. And our investments, our collective attention, have not matched up with our values.
With COVID-19, most of us understand we must support the vulnerable because ultimately, as one community living in this city, we are all in danger wherever there is an outbreak.
But inequality and oppression are also a danger to us all. They poison our politics, stifle the potential of so many and collectively weaken our ability as a society to withstand future shocks.
Yet we don’t prioritize the vulnerable. Many times we’re cut off from their suffering, so we can pretend the need isn’t there, just as many of us allowed ourselves to wilfully ignore the plight of so many of our elders in long-term care. Or we stigmatize the vulnerable, saying they’re responsible for their situation, so why should they get a piece of our hard-earned tax dollars?
But the question now is collectively how we move forward. When COVID-19 ends will we say these were temporary values of a crisis, values we can’t “afford” in “normal times?” Or can we nurture and expand these values the crisis helped us rediscover? To realize the vulnerable are not “those people over there,” it’s you, it’s me, it’s our children, it’s our grandparents.
To understand that, we need new ways of living that put a focus on those who need it. Before Alzheimer’s fully took hold, my own grandmother spent many years slipping into the disease relatively isolated in her apartment. We’ve created a society where loneliness and isolation are realities for so many of our elderly. We’re all just too busy, we’re all too caught up in making it in the economy. But maybe COVID-19 is a moment we realize this needs to change, to move to models of care that integrate the elderly more into the fabric of our daily lives. We could do this if we really wanted to. And the reality is not everyone needs to be an activist or dedicate their lives to ending inequality to make these types of shifts happen. As my grandmother showed, in how we treat others, in how we carry ourselves, in the values we pass on to the next generation, we can all do our part to build a post-COVID world that is a little more just, a little more caring and a lot more human.
Kofi Hope is a senior policy adviser at the Wellesley Institute and a Rhodes scholar.