Cooped up, but not down
He’s 93, she’s 89, and their new-found love is helping them cope with pandemic
He wears a blazer and slacks, combs his hair, looks sharp.
She dresses up to the nines in makeup, shoes, jewelry.
The restaurant downstairs delivers their order: sometimes steak, others salmon or chicken Parmesan, but always a side dish, soup and dessert.
He brings the champagne, two glasses. She puts on the music, something that makes them want to move, like a Rod Stewart tune or a Frank Sinatra record.
They sit and they eat and they laugh. Afterwards, they dance, he insisting on the waltz and she on the groove.
This is what a weekend date night looks like for Fred Voytek, 93, and Zilla Myers, 89, a couple who met just two years ago, but are now hopelessly in love and cooped up in a Burlington retirement home as they wait out the pandemic.
Every Saturday since the Pearl and Pine Retirement Residence placed new safety measures for its clients on March 10, Voytek and Myers have traded in trips to nearby restaurants for a makeshift ballroom and eatery in their twobedroom suite overlooking Lake Ontario.
It’s a way to keep their relationship light and fresh, running on that same spark it had when they met as practical strangers who happened to live in the same building.
“We musn’t just let everything become so … We got to keep something to look forward to,” Myers says. “So, I said, ‘OK, Saturday night, we’re going to dress up, we’re going to dance ... ’ ”
“She’s a live wire,” interjects Voytek, the two of them giddy, sitting spaced from each other across the residence’s movie room. “She brings life and love to me. It’s a miracle, at our age.”
The nearly nonagenarians —
Myers turns 90 in July — say they’re “living in heaven,” spontaneous and in the present, much like any other couple would while riding the high of new-found love.
They play bingo and watch films. They take hour-long walks and call family on their iPads. And every morning, Voytek makes breakfast for Myers
before the two of them sit handin-hand reading the paper together.
“We’re an old, old couple, and yet we get up and we dance and we walk and we laugh and we sing,” Voytek says. “And we’re having a great time. We can’t believe it. We’re on cloud nine.”
This kettle of luck and good fortune, he adds, makes him want to share it beyond the four walls of his apartment. Last week, on a whim, he donated $10,000 to the Joseph Brant Hospital for the purchase of masks.
He says it was a spur-of-themoment gift — “I read an article in The Spectator about a donation there and I was compelled to do so as well” — but in the 1990s, he was treated for colon cancer at the hospital. And he’s donated fairly consistently ever since. In fact, a gym at Joseph Brant is named “The Voytek Gym” commemorating his generosity.
Voytek and Myers first encountered each other while living
in a different condominium building, on different floors, right across the street from Pearl and Pine about a decade ago.
Voytek was then living with his wife, Herta, who died in 2015 once they had already moved to the retirement residence. Myers had been a widow for some 10 years.
Unknowingly, the pair would park their cars near each other. Voytek would pass by Myers in the garage, always sure to lend a smile and a sheepish hello.
Years passed before they met again at Pearl and Pine in 2018.
“It was meant to be,” Voytek says.
“They make you believe that you can fall in love at every age,” says Shawna Legere-Morrell, executive director of Pearl and Pine, which opened in 2014.
“In six years, there might be three couples. But none quite like Fred and Zilla. No one’s ever done the official move-in with a new love except them.”
The couple’s unlikely romance, steeped in happenchance, is trumped only by their resolve to live without fear during a pandemic that’s decimated seniors more than any other demographic in Canada.
Pine and Pearl has yet to have a confirmed case of COVID-19, and it enforces serval measures — like regular temperature checks, restricting guest visits — to keep its residents safe.
Voytek, for one, thinks he’s “living in the safest place in the country.” But the risk, however big or small, is pretty plain for Myers to see.
“Still, there’s that little fear of what if? He’s so confident, though,” Myers says, smiling and looking at Voytek, “and he reassures me. We’re staying positive.”
“This is an inconvenience,” Voytek says. “It’s nothing like wartime.”
Indeed, 82 years ago last March, Voytek was an 11-yearold boy standing on the streets of his hometown in Vienna, Austria, watching the Nazi tanks roll by and invade his country.
“We had bombs 24 hours a day. Wherever you looked, you saw fighter jets,” says Voytek, who moved to Hamilton in 1952. “I was afraid then.”
At 93, Voytek says he’s living on borrowed time. “I thought I would die at 74,” he says, the same age his father, brother and uncle passed. Somehow, even through a war and now a pandemic, he’s living and living well, full of life and full of energy — not to mention love.
“It’s almost ridiculous to be my age and in a loving relationship,” he says. “To meet the most wonderful love of my life, it’s a miracle.”