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deaths
on March 8
Ruth Sheppard was 93 years old when she died at an Ontario nursing home, without any loved ones by her side.
Her decline, due to COVID-19, was rapid. Sheppard’s daughter Tami, who had Down syndrome and lived in the same residence, stopped eating when her mother disappeared from her life, and died herself six days later.
Their friends and family were not allowed into the care home to say goodbye.
“You know how everybody talks about closure?” said Dorothy Hannon, one of Ruth Sheppard’s closest friends. “I guess that’s what you don’t get now, with close people dying and you’re not being able to even see them.”
Across the country, thousands of Canadians are struggling with this lack of closure. Physically prohibited from being with their loved ones in their final moments, they are saying goodbye on phones, screens or, in some cases, not at all.
For several weeks, a team of CBC journalists has been keeping track of those who died, trying to find out as much as we can about who these people were in an effort to tell their stories.
At the beginning, this was easier. Public health officials were able to share more information — ages, genders, cities — when the numbers were relatively low. In some cases, they even revealed how these people came to acquire the virus.
But as the virus claimed more lives, the daily death toll became a flat number announced at a news conference or sometimes just posted unceremoniously on a website. Twenty here, another 60 there. Points on a curve that may or may not be flattening.
The story of COVID-19 in Canada is more than a graph. Each of those data points represents a hole in the lives of a Canadian family, who are now forced to mourn at a distance.
Here are some of the stories behind the first 1,000 lives lost to COVID-19.
Early days
Canada recorded its first confirmed case of COVID-19 in late January, but it wasn’t until March 8 that the virus claimed its first victim in this country.
In a case that would foreshadow many of the deaths to come, the victim was a man in his 80s who was a care-home resident. His family has asked for privacy to mourn their loss, but it is publicly known that he lived at the Lynn Valley Care Centre in North Vancouver, where COVID-19 claimed seven of its first 10 victims.
March 14 • North Vancouver, B.C.
One of those early victims was Ming Ball Lee, who immigrated to Canada from southern China in 1949. His first years in this country were marked by hard physical labour in the mines of northern Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, his daughter, Nancy Lee, said in an interview.
Later in life, he moved to Bowen Island, B.C., where he lived a quiet life marked by a meticulous routine some island residents could set their clocks by. “He would walk every single day, rain or shine, and people would stop and offer him a ride, and he would refuse,” Nancy recalled.
Lee moved to the Lynn Valley Care Centre in 2013, and Nancy visited regularly to bring him lunch or cut his hair.
On one such Saturday visit, Nancy noticed signs on her father’s floor warning of COVID-19. The following Tuesday, she was told by staff that her father had a fever, and on Wednesday that he’d tested positive for COVID-19. Lee said she received regular updates over the following days, including one on Friday afternoon that her father had been up and had had something to eat. Nancy recalled taking comfort from this message: Her father was doing fine.
Twelve hours later, he was dead.
The first COVID-19 death outside B.C.’s Lower Mainland happened March 11, but wasn’t reported by the province of Ontario until six days later. Little is known about the 77-year-old man who died at a hospital in Barrie, other than the fact that he had underlying health conditions and acquired the disease through close contact with someone who had travelled.
A week later, COVID-19 struck in Quebec for the first time.
March 18 • Lavaltrie, Que.
Mariette Tremblay was a well-loved mother, grandmother and great grandmother who was the beating heart of a large and growing family, according to a Facebook post that has been the family’s only public statement on her death. She was well known in Lavaltrie, a town about 50 kilometres northeast of Montreal, for her kindness and generosity. Despite having so many people who loved her, Tremblay died in hospital without any of them by her side.
“We wanted to be able to hold her hand, to comfort her, to speak softly into her ear, but we didn’t have the chance,” the family