April 11, 2020
COVID-19 worldwide has been especially cruel to seniors.
According to data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 80 per cent of the people the virus has killed have been 65 and older.
It's led many to take extra care with self-isolation and physical distancing during the pandemic — which means many are now feeling the impact of social isolation.
CBC’s The Early Edition asked seniors to call us from the safety of their homes to share their fears, their memories and — as we often need from our oldest generation — a sense of perspective.
Here are the stories of five of the people who called.
Rosemary Hopkinson, 79, West Vancouver
Rosemary Hopkinson grew up playing outside, getting filthy in the fields with her three older brothers in Northern Ireland in the 1940s.
When her mother called them to come inside to eat, she did not yell “dinner’s ready.”
“The call was: Wash your hands,” Rosemary recalls.
These days, she can’t help but conjure the voice of her mother and transport herself back to those fields when she hears the same refrain due to COVID-19.
“We got through measles, mumps, chicken pox, diphtheria. We only got one bath a week,” she says. “But at the same time, we survived everything with that mantra: Wash your hands.”
Even in her late 70s, Rosemary was cleaning homes for a living before the pandemic. She’s never bought into antibacterial cleaning products.
“There’s nothing like soap and water for washing anything,” she says.
To hear Rosemary Hopkins share her story tap here.
Don Robertson, 82, West Vancouver
When he was in Grade 2, Don Robertson remembers the weather turning nice outside the window of his bedroom where he was trapped battling scarlet fever. He recalls a bright orange sign slapped on the front door of his family’s small, four-room home at 20th Avenue and Crown Street in Vancouver that said “Quarantine — Do Not Enter.”
At some point in that three-week stretch, a neighbourhood girl came by and threw some letters from his classmates at Queen Elizabeth School over the fence and he watched her scuttle away.
“I can remember her just being scared to come near the house,” Don says.
Someone strung up a line from his bedroom to the back fence and stuck a tin can on either side — a makeshift telephone so he could talk to his friends.
“I remember the lineup at the back fence,” he says.
Don’s father, who worked at the Woodward’s department store, returned home from a business trip and wasn’t allowed inside. So he hit up the toy department at work, got himself a ladder, climbed up to his suffering son’s bedroom window, and hoisted a pile of new toys inside.
“I remember one red dump truck was in the box, and I held on to that for a long time,” says Don.
Robertson’s mother was inside with him, herself fatigued with thyroid problems. Nowadays, he wishes he had been better behaved, instead of the “miserable kid” he remembers being at that time.
“I still feel some guilt about that, even this late in my life,” Don says. “I really wanted to be outside.”
To hear Don Robertson share his story tap here.
Joan Maxwell, 72, Surrey
Many times in the first six years of her life, Joan Maxwell would stand on the street outside a window at the old Willow Chest Centre at Vancouver General Hospital and wave. Inside, her mother was in quarantine, battling a persistent tuberculosis infection that made her unsafe to her daughter.
“That was the ultimate in quarantine, as far as I was concerned,” Joan says.
Joan’s mother, Dora Hatton, discovered she had tuberculosis when she was a nursing student in Victoria. It was during one of her long stays in the hospital that she met Joan’s father, and they were warned not to have children.
“She was a bit defiant, and she did,” says Joan.
Dora had to give up little Joan but thankfully an aunt took her in. The family was honest with Joan about why she couldn’t live with her mother, and also about the hope that she’d be able to live with her mother and father one day.
“I think they did a fabulous job,” says Joan of her aunt and parents. “I always knew I was loved and I always knew the situation.”
When her parents’ tuberculosis got under control, Joan, her mother, father, and eventually a little brother made a home in East Vancouver. But the tuberculosis would return over the years, and when Joan was in Grade 10, her mother needed to be hospitalized for the entire year.
“I learned how to cook. I learned how to clean … I was virtually running the household,” says Joan. “It was just the way it was.”
These days, Joan and her husband, who has asthma, are taking great care and staying close to home. COVID-19 is scary to them and she worries about how her husband would fare if he caught it.
When asked how she feels when younger people whine about having to put their lives on hold and isolate themselves inside their homes, she laughs.
“It’s several generations ago [in my family] that men used to go to war,” she says. “All we’re being asked to do is to stay home and watch TV. Let’s get it in perspective.”
To hear Joan Maxwell share her story tap here.
Peter Trant, 79, Vancouver
Peter Trant has been spending most of his time at home alone for over a month. So far, he’s holding up just fine. He’s an old car collector with a workshop in his basement, so he putters away there.
“Time is not weighing heavy on me at all,” he says.
But he’s a social person and used to go out for lunch every day. Now he’s preparing and eating breakfasts, lunches and dinners alone in his Dunbar home. Except Friday night — that’s when he calls his local pub and orders up a treat.
“I say, here’s my credit card number, you make me a dinner,” he explains. “I’ll come and pick it up at 6:30, I’ll phone you when I’m out in front, you just bring it out and put it in the front seat of my car.”
Peter has also taken advantage of the early opening hours for seniors at his local Save-on-Foods where, for the most part, he reports grocery shopping has been “quite civilized.”
But even at 7 a.m., the bakery department can be congested. One morning, he spotted a tasty-looking apple pie on sale there, and pushed his cart toward it.
“I said, boy, I’m gonna buy one of those.”
Another senior started backing up and crashed right into him, then started yelling at him.
“She had a mask on and everything, I think she was probably panicking more than necessary,” Peter says. “I was so aghast I didn’t know what to say. I said a lot to myself but I didn’t say anything to her.”
Peter’s taking the precautions to protect himself from COVID-19 very seriously. He is quite worried, especially because he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung disorder that causes breathing problems.
“I wash my hands so much that I’m washing the skin off,” he says.
Peter won’t let himself imagine what it would be like to be one of the seniors in places like Italy or New York City, on ventilators helping them breathe, without a chance to say goodbye.
“I don’t feel old. I’m active, I’m still restoring cars,” he says. “But I am worried about catching this, because if I do, it probably will be the end of me.”
To hear Peter Trant share his story tap here.
Aviva Martin, 73, Vancouver
Aviva Martin still gets out of her Yaletown condo almost every day to walk among the cherry blossoms on the seawall. But these COVID-19 days are going at a slower pace than she’s used to. Usually, she’s got a full lineup of activities to keep busy.
“We tend to rush from one thing to another,” she says of active seniors like herself pre-COVID.
For the first two weeks of physical distancing, she felt deprived as everything that felt nourishing and kept her feeling young got cancelled.
But now she’s singing a different tune.
“I remember other years at this time thinking, oh, I really want to spend some time walking around on streets seeing gardens coming up and blossoms, and really having to think about making time to do that,” she says.
With the events of this year, or non-events as she corrects herself, she’s finding the time to stop and smell the flowers.
She’s also caught herself reflecting on how this moment fits into history, especially her grandmothers’ generation.
One grandmother travelled from Russia, through Siberia and China and over the Pacific to join her husband in the United States. It took over a year and she did it with three sons in tow. The other left Manchester, England, at age 13 and travelled on a boat to settle in Baltimore alongside a cousin she didn’t even know.
“They left, and that was it. Without the contact we have now,” Aviva says. “That’s pretty astonishing. And I’m sure it was repeated so many times.”
As Aviva settles into a slower pace, she’s reminded how fortunate she’s been.
“It’s new to us, but over history, there are difficulties in just life,” she said. “It’s interesting to think this is just the human condition. This is an opportunity to see things in a different light and in context.”
To hear Aviva Martin share her story tap here.
If you are a senior and you want to tell a story about how you are coping with COVID-19, or want to share your perspective on the pandemic, please email Jodie.Martinson@cbc.ca.