Days before her death in November, Sharon Ogilvie called her daughter, Erica Lazarakos, weeping so desperately she could barely speak.
The 77-year-old woman had contracted COVID-19 during a massive outbreak that left her Stratford retirement home severely short-staffed. Ogilvie told her daughter, whom she called Rick, that she had soiled herself but nobody was responding to her bell.
Ogilvie, who suffered from a musculoskeletal degenerative disease, was in severe pain and had been lying in her own waste for more than four hours. She begged her daughter: “You have to do something.”
But Lazarakos felt helpless; she lives in the Sarnia area, an hour and a half away. Relatives weren’t allowed to visit during the outbreak and staff were no longer answering the phones. All she could do was cry and pray with her mother from the other side of the line.
When her mother called back again, less than an hour later, Lazarakos’s heart sank — but this time, something had shifted.
“Mum’s voice was completely altered. She said, ‘Rick, Rick! I think there was an angel in my room!’” Lazarakos recalled. “She said he handled her like a baby. He changed her, he cared for her, and then he sat down and he took her hand and he prayed with her.”
Lazarakos was stunned by the profound impact this stranger had on Ogilvie. Their first phone call was the most distraught she’d ever heard her mother; during the second call, she sounded at peace and went on to have a decent night’s sleep. She died just days later.
After that second call, Lazarakos turned to her husband, George, and said she wanted to thank this man. “I wish I could find out who that was,” she lamented. All she knew was that his name was Samuel, he was African, and he referred to her mother as Shalom, the Hebrew word for “peace” — a nickname that spoke to Ogilvie, a woman of deep faith who had just been praying with her daughter for respite from her pain.
But Samuel was just one of countless personal support workers who had parachuted into the home, which reached out to 19 different temporary worker agencies for help during its staffing crisis. The Lazarakoses figured privacy rules would prevent staff from identifying him, even if they had the time or inclination to track him down.
Lazarakos resigned herself to never finding the stranger who restored her mother’s peace and dignity in the days before she died.
But serendipity or coincidence — or God, if you ask Lazarakos — intervened four months later, when the family came across an article in the Toronto Star.
“That article was like this moment, where everything changed.”
As for so many elderly who died in homes besieged by COVID, Ogilvie’s last days were a dissonant ending to a sweet, melodious life.
She was born Lorna Sharon Harbord, the daughter of a sailor and a homemaker. She met the love of her life, John Ogilvie, in Hamilton when they were both in their early 20s working as bank tellers.
While the bank was their matchmaker, the Ogilvies were never meant for a life of counting cash; they were romantics. After moving to the Stratford area, John started biking past an old mill during his daily commute and it caught his imagination — the century-old architecture, the antique machinery rumbling inside, the puffs of sawdust.
One day, he noticed a “for sale” sign, so he hopped off his bike and went inside to speak with the mill’s owners. Despite having no experience in woodworking, he went home that day and made the pitch to his wife: Let’s buy Hoffmeyer’s Mill.
She agreed, of course. The business was successful, finding a niche in creating 19th-century reproductions, often using antique machinery — the ornate mouldings in a Cabbagetown Victorian, or a fence for actress Maggie Smith, who discovered the mill during one of her stints at the Stratford Festival, according to Lazarakos. For her and her brother Reg, who took over the business with his wife in 2005, the mill was also the backdrop to an idyllic childhood.
With her ice-blue eyes and dark brown hair, Ogilvie was a dynamic woman with a steel-trap memory. Lazarakos said she knew every Stratford-area cab driver by name and could recount details from every wedding anniversary she celebrated with her husband, down to the filet mignon they ate or the blazer he wore.
Ogilvie’s Christian faith was the most important thing in her life, Lazarakos said. She was also someone who cultivated beauty in everything she did. “Even if she was grocery shopping, you might think she was on her way to a great luncheon,” Lazarakos said. “She often looked like she was going to a wedding.”
In her 40s, Ogilvie’s health took a turn. Doctors were never able to diagnose her degenerative disease, but its effects were similar to ALS. Her body grew wooden and over the next few decades, she gradually lost her ability to walk or even sit up. “In her last few days, she could barely manage to hold a telephone,” Lazarakos said.
Ogilvie cried the day she realized she could no longer wear her elegant shoes. But she continued to invite beauty into her shrinking world; even the orthotics she purchased were black and lovely, Lazarakos said.
After her husband died in 2018, Ogilvie moved into Cedarcroft Place Retirement Residence. She planned her new room in meticulous detail, taking photos of the space and carefully deliberating whether to bring her brass bookends or the pewter ones.
When the pandemic hit, Ogilvie struggled with the isolation. She was technology averse, so her only connection to the outside world during lockdowns was her phone.
Cedarcroft declared an outbreak in late October, which infected at least 74 people, including 24 staff, in the span of two months. As a staffing crisis took hold, Ogilvie’s meals started to get missed, her medications delayed. Staff stopped answering the phone.
Lazarakos knows the staff were traumatized too, and many went above and beyond. She places no blame on the home. “At Cedarcroft, along with other residences that had outbreaks, things were handled poorly,” she said. “But there were also some shining moments.” Cedarcroft did not respond to the Star’s request for comment.
Even before the outbreak, doctors told Lazarakos her mother didn’t have long. Ogilvie, a religious woman, didn’t fear death but she worried about dying from COVID, which she had been told “was not a nice death.”
She eventually tested positive. While her symptoms were thankfully mild, COVID likely hastened her deterioration, Lazarakos said. As the end drew near, Lazarakos despaired over not being by her mother’s side.
“To me, one of the biggest and most important gifts you can give someone you love is (to) be there with them when they transition from this life to the next,” she said. “COVID robbed us of that.”
COVID also kept her from helping her mother the day she got that terrible phone call. Which is why Lazarakos is so appreciative that a stranger named Samuel heard her mother’s cries, and gently provided her with physical and spiritual care.
“He was like a son to my mother, when I couldn’t be there,” she said. “He restored her dignity; it was profoundly peace-instilling … It was no small thing.”
Ogilvie died on Nov. 17 and was buried next to her husband in side-by-side plots overlooking the mill. Lazarakos said that while her mother had COVID when she died, the cause listed on her death certificate was “undiagnosed musculoskeletal degenerative disease.”
Four months later, while Lazarakos was at the church where she works as a director of children’s ministry, her phone started buzzing.
Her brother had texted her several photos of a Toronto Star article, which had been given to him by a family friend. “This might be a difficult read, but persevere to the end,” he told Lazarakos.
The March 20 story was a profile of a Ugandan refugee claimant and temporary agency worker. He had been deployed to some of the riskiest front-line jobs during COVID, while struggling himself to survive; throughout the pandemic, this worker has been homeless, fired without explanation, and unable to access sick pay, even when he developed COVID symptoms.
As Lazarakos read, her heart began to pound. The man’s name was Samuel Kisitu and during the second wave, his agency sent him to a Stratford retirement home suffering a large outbreak. The article described a resident Kisitu had cared for and prayed with, shortly before she died: “A religious woman he nicknamed Shalom.”
Her brother asked: Do you think it could be Mom?
Lazarakos had no doubt. “I said, I know it’s Mom.”
Front-page stories about pandemic heroes have rarely featured people like Samuel Kisitu. He belongs to a workforce that has been largely invisible despite being a critical pillar of the front-line response — temporary agency workers, many of whom are racialized immigrants or refugees performing high-risk work for minimal pay.
They have been sent into factories, health facilities, and long-term-care homes crippled by outbreaks. But many have struggled to pay rent, access sick pay or find secure work despite an unprecedented demand for their labour. Most of their names will never be recorded in the pandemic’s history books, where they are more likely to appear as nameless, peripheral characters in the stories of the COVID victims they helped.
Kisitu shared his story with the Star because he wanted to change that. He questioned why front-line workers like him have been treated like commodities, rather than people. “If we are saving lives, why are our lives not cared for?”
Lazarakos was moved by the story of this man, whose life had briefly, but meaningfully, intersected with her mother’s. “I had never thought: Who is it that’s taking over the jobs of people who have been taken out of the workplace because (of) COVID?”
“Samuel is representative of many, many people,” she said. “I don’t think we really know how many people have been in harm’s way, so that we could get through this.’
After reading the article, Lazarakos and her brother reached out to the Star and Kisitu’s church. In their emails, they asked for their contact information to be passed along to Kisitu. They wanted to thank him.
On a spring day in April, Lazarakos was with her daughter in the car when her phone suddenly rang with an unknown Toronto number. The phone was connected to her speakers through Bluetooth so when she answered, a Ugandan accent filled the car.
“He just said, ‘Hello, is this Erica?’ I said, ‘Yes, it is! Is this Samuel?’ And then we just went from there.”
Lazarakos wanted to know how Kisitu was doing; did he have a job, a decent place to live? Kisitu also shared his experience of meeting Ogilvie, allowing Lazarakos to hear her mother’s story again, only this time from the perspective of the other person in the room. Lazarakos said they both cried at points, and made plans to connect again.
“I felt terrible that another lockdown was coming,” she said, referring to the stay-at-home order that was enacted on April 8. “Really, I just wanted to get on the 402 and head to Toronto.”
Another three months passed. Kisitu completed an online course, had his refugee claim accepted, and applied for permanent residency for himself, his wife and children. He got a new job with Statistics Canada, as a census enumerator.
Many people who were touched by Kisitu’s story, including Lazarakos and her family, have also donated money. He hopes to invest in a used car, which would open up more work opportunities.
He has been buoyed by the positive response to his story. “I feel the privilege of raising the flag for so many people who have been through the same,” he said. “(The story) has created a sense of understanding of the reality of what’s taken place here in Canada.”
Lazarakos and her husband, meanwhile, got fully vaccinated. And finally, this past weekend, it was time to meet.
With their shared Christian faith — and mutual belief that God has brought them together — it seemed fitting for Lazarakos and Kisitu to meet at his church, Dominion Church International. The church, a hub for Toronto’s Ugandan diaspora, is where Kisitu lived for much of COVID’s first wave, sleeping on a mattress in the storage room.
Lazarakos and her husband drove the three hours from Sarnia and shortly before 10 a.m. on Sunday, they pulled up to a plain white-brick building on an industrial stretch of Sheppard Avenue, where a man in a bright red beret stood waiting.
In Uganda, the red beret has become a defiant symbol of political resistance, worn by supporters of opposition leader Bobi Wine and effectively banned in the country. It likely put a target on Kisitu’s back in 2019, when two men beat him senseless and dumped him in a coffee plantation. On Sunday, he wore it as a nod to his own people and story, which is now woven together with that of Lazarakos, a children’s pastor from Sarnia.
The pair approached each other, grinning nervously. For everyone present, no matter their religious beliefs, there was a sense of a larger meaning in this small moment.
In order for this meeting to occur, a man had to flee his country and cross an ocean to appear at the bedside of a dying woman, in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Their meeting was a reminder that amid the horrors of COVID, a million acts of tenderness were also delivered behind closed doors, often by people whose own humanity has not been valued in return.
It was proof that human connection, our greatest threat in a pandemic, will also be the balm that heals.
Kisitu moved first, outstretching his hand. “May I shake your hand?” he asked Lazarakos. “Oh!” she replied. “I’m happy for a hug. If you’re comfortable.”
He was.
Article From: The Star
Author: Jennifer Yang is a Toronto-based health reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @jyangstar
