Jean Patricia Pollock
She visited him every day.
In fact, she started volunteering so she should spend more time with him.
And when Jean Pollock died from the COVID-19 infection she contracted at Pinecrest Nursing Home, her loving husband wasn’t that far behind.
Ninety-two-year-old Ted Pollock moved into the Bobcaygeon, Ont., nursing home about a year ago, the first time he’d been separated from his wife in their nearly 30 years of marriage.
So she visited him every day, said niece Marni Smith.
“Never fail, for three, four hours in the afternoon,” she said.
Ted, she said, was a lifelong volunteer, be it with the Rotary Club, Ducks Unlimited or the local snowmobile club.
They were both in Bobcaygeon, rebuilding their lives after losing their respective spouses, when they met.
They married in 1992.
“From the time they had dinner for the first time, they started seeing each other,” she said.
On March 21, Smith read a newspaper article about three Pinecrest residents testing positive for COVID-19.
She called Jean, who told her she’d started feeling sick March 17.
Ted would contract the respiratory disease himself the following week.
Smith grew concerned when Jean didn’t answer the phone on March 24 for their daily chat.
Smith called the hospital in Lindsay, “just to rule it out,” she said, and was surprised when she was connected to Jean’s room.
They’d never speak again — Jean died on March 28.
Heartbroken, Ted died a week later on April 4. “Ted was my buddy-uncle,” Smith said.
“It’s almost like he became my buddy — right after breakfast I’d scoot right over to his place, sit on a stool in his shop all day and just watch him putter around.”
Not having the closure of a proper funeral, she said, leaves a raw, open wound.
“That’s a huge missing piece.”