FIREFIGHTERS FETE SENIOR
Help woman celebrate 102nd birthday
Red and white lights flashed Sunday as a fire truck that roared up Norland Avenue toward Dania Home, a long-term care facility in central Burnaby, just north of Deer Lake.
As the driver and three crew members pulled up, several of the home's residents peered out their windows to see what had brought the firefighters to their home with such urgency. A staff member stood at the side of the street and pointed the first responders a particular unit in the building, a room that had been carefully flagged before their arrival with an array of brightly coloured helium balloons.
Inside that unit sat Cecilia Wikjord, dressed sharply in white on white, with a bouquet of flowers in her hands. It was Wikjord's 102nd birthday and while the COVID-19 lockdown caused her celebrate to inside and in the company of only a few others, it did not keep her from rising from her chair, dancing and waving when her special visitors arrived.
One of the firefighters started dancing on the sidewalk below her, and then he went back to the truck, pulled out a replica fire helmet and placed it outside her door.
“Happy birthday,” the firefighter told Wikjord through a crack in the window, then he and the other crew members hopped back into their cab and sped off, horn and siren blaring as they went.
“I guess I made it,” Wikjord said of reaching the age of 102. “I feel as good as when I was born,” she reflected in a telephone interview. “I feel so good. I dance, I can jig, I can do steps. How could I be (102)?”
Wikjord has lived in the home for the last half-decade. She was a fairly recent arrival to Burnaby and grew up in Saskatchewan. She gave some insight into her longevity. “I was always out, busy, helping. … We had lots of fun, though.”
Hazel Baquiran, a recreation coordinator for the home, said they planned to later give Wikjord a vanilla cake. In non-pandemic times, residents regularly get together for larger celebratory gatherings, but during the lockdown, the care home has kept events quite small.
Residents in care homes have been particularly hard hit by COVID-19 in B.C. and Canada. There are now about a half dozen long-term care facilities in the Fraser and Coastal Health regions experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks. As of last month, roughly three-quarters of B.C.'s COVID-19-related deaths have been linked to long-term care facilities.