Jeannine Pigeon
April 1, 1929-April 12, 2020
At a care home in Laval, north of Montreal, COVID-19 has killed more than 60 people.
After Suzanne Beauvais’s mother died in a car accident, her father married Jeannine Pigeon. She was warm, loving, and quick with a laugh and soon became like a second mother, Beauvais said.
On Sundays in the summer, Beauvais and her son, Jonathan, would visit her father and Pigeon to swim and eat. Pigeon loved the water and her spirit brightened the day.
Even after Alzheimer’s disease ravaged her brain, Jonathan recalled, she was funny and kind.
She lived at the CHSLD Ste-dorothée. Next door, her husband, Lionel Beauvais, lived in an autonomous residence. He would visit her frequently, checking in on her, making sure she was OK.
Then the coronavirus came and the residences were sealed. He couldn’t make the trip anymore, and his family couldn’t visit.
But somehow, the disease found a way in at Stedorothée. Some workers began feeling sick, union representatives said, but were ordered to come in by managers who feared the same staffing shortages that struck elsewhere in the province. Later, some of those workers tested positive for the virus. Now, it has infected most of the residents and killed one third. Pigeon was one of them. Her death struck a cruel blow to her family. Beauvais lamented the fact that she wasn’t able to hold Pigeon in her arms or say goodbye — nor could her father, who thankfully remains free of infection though devastated. “I wish I could have touched her, spoken to her,” she said. “She was a good person, she didn’t deserve to die like that.”
A class-action lawsuit request has since been filed against the centre and the health authority that oversees it, alleging that residents were treated in a “faulty, negligent and unsafe manner.”