Grounded, grieving and guilt

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This article was published 31/05/2021 (1613 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If she could, Urooj Danish would tell her father this: “Whatever I am today is because of you, Papa.”

In the last 14 months, COVID-19 has both erected barriers between nations and bound them together in common suffering.

No place remains untouched, and for migrants and their children, that has sometimes meant experiencing family losses to the virus from afar.

“This pandemic made me realize that family is everything,” said Urooj, who is the office manager for the Manitoba Islamic Association.

Her father had been battling prostate cancer for four years before he tested positive for COVID-19 on April 11, 2020.

He was doing well, but his immune system had been damaged. That day, he had the strength to walk himself into the hospital in Karachi, Pakistan.

Urooj couldn’t believe it when he died just five days later.

“It was devastating,” she said, adding her husband’s family tried to comfort her here. Her six younger siblings had been in Karachi with her father before he went to the hospital. She was the only one so far away.

“I was guilty that I was unable to help him, because that was the time he needed me and my other siblings the most,” she said.

It wouldn’t have mattered if she had been in Karachi; her siblings couldn’t visit either. They called the doctors and pleaded to see their father, but were unsuccessful. For them, the pandemic had rendered a few kilometres the same as a few thousand, in Urooj’s case.

Because of her family’s experience, she said, it’s difficult for her when people are dismissive of the pandemic’s effects.

“I don’t want anybody to go through this experience,” she said. “Once you will go through this, then you will know how it feels — but I don’t want to say that to anybody.”

Urooj prefers to stay positive to honour her father. “When you do the right thing, the world will know,” her father once told her.

“I’m just trying to make him proud every single day, and I miss him every single day,” she said.

Simarpreet Singh, a 27-year-old PhD student at the University of Manitoba, lives with his parents. Much of his family lives in multigenerational homes in New Delhi.

“Family has always been there for us,” said Singh. “That is one of the most important parts in my immediate family, is just taking care of each other.”

When he says “immediate family,” it seems defined more broadly than some use it and includes great-aunts.

When Singh’s great-aunt in New Delhi contracted COVID-19, he watched his father struggle.

“He was devastated when she was hospitalized and then transferred to the ICU,” said Singh, adding his father braced for the worst.

Singh’s great-aunt was old — he wasn’t sure of her age — and had diabetes. She never left intensive care.

Singh watched helplessly from afar as India plunged deeper into its devastating COVID-19 crisis. Many family members there contacted the virus. Many recovered, but some died.

Worries compounded for those living in multigenerational homes, he said. Becoming infected likely meant infecting other family members.

“It has been really difficult,” he said. “Just, you know, feeling hopeless.”

Singh said he’s been using his education as a scientist to teach his family about the virus and how to protect themselves. And he wants others to do what they can to avoid his family’s trauma.

“I urge people to get vaccinated, so they don’t lose a loved one,” he said.

Neuman Kiamco prayed in the dark of his hospital room last summer as fireworks lit up the sky outside the window. Fourth of July celebrations were underway in the Chicago suburb around MacNeal Hospital, but Kiamco had nurse Sylvia Acosta — who’d been a co-worker before becoming his caretaker — draw the blinds to shut them out.

Acosta was surprised, she later told Kiamco’s sister Jeanette Perez, because Kiamco was usually upbeat, full of jokes, mischievous. But now he asked her to pray for him.

“I think he kind of knew that he was not getting better,” said Perez, who lives in Winnipeg. On July 5, Kiamco was moved to a new hospital, sedated and put on life-support. He died seven weeks later at the age of 48.

Kiamco and Perez grew up in the Philippines with their three siblings before they scattered around the globe to Canada, the United States, Australia and Norway.

During his seven weeks on life-support, Perez and her siblings talked every day through Facebook Messenger, but the pandemic kept them from travelling to be with him.

“We were very helpless,” said Perez. “We wanted to do everything for him, but (there was) nothing we can do. We can’t do anything. Not even go to his apartment and put everything together.”

Like many other families, they held their vigil on a computer screen, in two dimensions, absent the depth owed to full life.

When Kiamco told Perez he’d been infected, she thought he was joking or teasing her. That was their mode of communication. But now that he’s gone, Perez said she wishes they’d sometimes spoken more directly.

“We didn’t really say that we love each other or that we care about each other. I think I would have told him that I cared about him — more than he knows probably,” she said. “I think he knows that I do care about him because I call him and I text him, but I would just let him know.”

After he passed, his belongings were sent to Perez and her one brother in Canada. Perez rummaged through the things and found an old DVD with a short home video on it of a family reunion in the Philippines. Kiamco played Sweet Child O’ Mine on the guitar and their mother, who died in 2003, danced.

“It really struck me how a very short video really meant a lot to us. We couldn’t go back to that time, and we saw it, and he’s already gone, and we said, ‘Oh, what’s this — it’s a treasure that we found.’”

Now every Saturday, Perez sets up a camera. She tunes up her ukulele and plays.

fpcity@freepress.mb.ca