WE’VE FORGOTTEN THAT FAMILY IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR ELDERS

Love and comfort from familiar faces so important to those in last stages of life

“Hi. This is Anne Jarvis. I’m calling to say hello to my mum,” I told the person who answered the phone at the long-term care home in Hamilton where my mother lived.

There was a pause.

“Your mother passed away,” the person said.

That’s how I found out my mother died.

My brother and I hadn’t been able to visit Mum since March. Non-essential visitors were banned because of the pandemic. Then, last Monday, the home notified my brother that one family member at a time could visit her. Hours later, she died.

My brother, who lives in Hamilton, had rushed to her bedside and was able to sit with her.

I never had a chance to see her. It takes three hours to drive to Hamilton.

So, except for a couple of hours with my brother the day she died, she spent the last three months of her life, when she needed her family most, cut off from them.

I said goodbye to her at a funeral home, Mum lying on a steel gurney, me standing there in shock, my shoulders heaving. “I’m sorry,” I told her.

She would have been 99 in less than three months, a remarkably long life.

She was a devoted wife for 57 years. “She’s my sweetheart,” my dad used to say.

She was the loving mother of two children and delighted grandmother of four. When her granddaughter was born, she wrote poems about her.

She was a volunteer for the Red Cross during the Second World War and later with disadvantaged children. She was a kind and gentle person.

And that was how it all ended. She deserved better.

Mum often couldn’t remember things I told her the last time we talked. But she remembered her family and life growing up. She liked to talk about it, and I liked hearing about it. That’s what we talked about when I was able to visit.

She told me about my grandfather. I never knew him because he died before she married. He ran the family business in Hamilton, Foster Pottery, which made clay flower pots. It was started by my great-grandfather. She told me about my grandmother. I don’t remember her because she died when I was two years old. She ran a bustling household with four kids.

Mum told me how her brother used to carry her home on the handlebars of his bike, how she and her sister, only 19 months older, did everything together and how her other sister died of leukemia at age 16. That was why Mum always donated money to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

We’d look at photos of her family — aunts, uncles, cousins — gathering at their cottage on Hamilton Harbour in the 1920s, swimming and canoeing in water that later became famous for its pollution.

She remembered men showing up at their house during the Great Depression, asking to work for food. Her mother made them sandwiches. She told me she was visiting her boyfriend’s family during the Second World War when the terrible news arrived. He’d been killed. She told me about her absent-minded professor at Mcmaster University who used to forget his lecture notes. Forty-two years later, I had a class in the building named after him.

And she remembered her first date with my dad. They ate footlong hotdogs. My dad squirted mustard on her dress.

When I could no longer visit Mum, I called her. I explained why we couldn’t visit, that we’d come as soon as we could. But I don’t know if she understood. That’s the worst part. We weren’t there for her, and I don’t know if she understood why.

She rarely answered the phone the last several months. So I’d ask a nurse to help her.

I tried a video chat, but Mum seemed confused.

She said less and less the last several weeks. She was often sleeping when I called. I could tell she was declining. I told a nurse that I was worried that we couldn’t be with her as she declined. But the rules were the rules.

I thought, What if she dies without us there?

And then it happened. She was gone.

“It’s a bad time to die,” my cousin said.

A lot of public health, as we’re seeing now, with Ontario attempting to reopen, is about balancing risk. We know the frail elderly are among the most vulnerable in this pandemic. Eightyfive per cent of COVID-19 deaths in Canada have been residents of long-term care homes.

We must protect our mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. That’s why we banned non-essential visits, to lower the risk of infecting our loved ones.

But we forgot something.

The love and comfort of family — being there, even when few words are spoken — is essential, and no more so than in the last leg of life.

For however long people live in long-term care, it is their home, not an isolation cell, and it is their life. They deserve to live it.

Starting Thursday, three months after the lockdown began, families will be allowed very limited visits with their loved ones at long-term care homes in Ontario.

But we can — we must — do better. We found new ways to do virtually everything during the lockdown. As we address everything that went wrong in longterm care and plan for a potential second wave, we need to find a way for residents to be with their families.

It will probably require more resources, from staff for managing visits to masks, gowns and gloves to prevent transmission of the virus. But it can be done. We’ve spent billions backing up everyone else affected by the pandemic. It’s the least we can do for our elders.

And it is essential.

Except for a couple of hours with my brother the day she died, she spent the last three months of her life, when she needed her family most, cut off from them.