The world has moved on. But those who lost loved ones to COVID-19 feel stuck in time

Simar Singh Anand, who calls himself a steward of legacy, holds a photo of his father Gurinder (Babu) Singh Anand in his restaurant, Darbar, Montreal on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi

It’s been almost five years, but family members of Canadians who died of COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic often feel as if they are frozen in 2020.

It pains them that they couldn’t hold the hands of their parents, siblings, spouses and friends in the final moments of their lives. Instead, they said goodbye over speaker phone, or through a glass window. They watched as body bags were wheeled out of long-term care homes, and some held modest funerals outside as it snowed.

Ahead of the five-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a global pandemic on March 11, The Canadian Press spoke to five people who lost someone they loved as the virus started circulating in those frightening early days. Since then, more than 60,000 people have died of COVID-19 in Canada based on public health data.

“One thing that anyone who hasn’t lost a loved one during the pandemic, one thing that they will never realize … is what an out-of-body and traumatic experience that was,” said Simar Anand, whose father died of COVID-19.

“I think the hardest part for me is watching how much the world has moved on around me, whereas I’m still stuck in March 2020.”

Quick goodbye in a hazmat suit

Simar Singh Anand was told he had 20 minutes to get to the hospital if he wanted to see his father again.

When he arrived, the nurse pulled open a curtain to a window. On the other side of the glass, he saw his father’s body laying on a hospital bed.

Gurinder Singh Anand died at age 57 after a weeks-long battle with COVID-19.

“I begged, I got on my knees and I begged the nurses. I said, ‘Can I please just go inside and hold his hand?’”

Eventually, he was allowed in for two minutes, wearing a hazmat suit.

“That’s the last time we ever saw him,” Anand said.

Gurinder Singh Anand had recently got a sense of what retirement could look like after temporarily closing his restaurant in Montreal just weeks earlier, when pandemic lockdowns began.

“That was the first time in his life after moving to Canada that he got a break,” Anand said about his father, who had immigrated from India to Canada in the 1970s.

The elder Anand opened Resto Darbar in 2000 serving just two dishes on Styrofoam plates — chicken curry and aloo gobi — and they were reminiscent of the Punjabi food his mother cooked. Customers were drawn to his authenticity. They called him Babu. The menu expanded, but that food-first, no-frills mentality stayed, and a community grew.

“In a new country like Canada, over 30 years, he built so many deep connections,” his son said.

Just three weeks after the restaurant closed, his father was struggling to breathe and climb the stairs at home. Anand called an ambulance and watched as paramedics loaded his father on a stretcher. “He was looking at me and I was looking at him.”

Anand and his mother were the only ones at the funeral because of pandemic restrictions. Six hundred people joined virtually.

“I’m just keeping myself so busy that I don’t have to deal with the wounds and the trauma and the grief from March 2020. But I’m still stuck there and it seems the entire world around me has moved on.”

‘Why her?’

Maureen Ambersley was a registered practical nurse at a long-term care home in Mississauga.

Despite her daughter’s pleas to stay home, she kept working through that first year of the pandemic, refusing to abandon her colleagues and patients.

But on New Year’s Eve in 2020 her daughter Ashley Ambersley got the call she had feared. Her mother was being intubated.

“We weren’t able to say goodbye or even be by her bedside,” she said. “That eats us up every day.”

Her mother started showing symptoms of COVID-19, coughing and having trouble breathing, in late December 2020. She was admitted to hospital on Christmas, and died on Jan. 5, at 57 years old.

In the end, she basically sacrificed herself, her daughter said. This was consistent with her approach to life — she always opened her door to strangers who needed shelter or food and asked for donations to hospitals instead of birthday gifts. At home, she took care of her parents, kids and grandchildren living under one roof in Brampton.

“That’s how kind her heart was. If she could take out her own heart to save someone, she would,” Ashley Ambersley said.

“Every day I say ‘why you?’ Why her? Or I beat myself up by saying what I could have done better to protect her.”

‘It can’t be for nothing'

The death of Erica Surette’s mother has become the centrepiece of a class-action lawsuit that’s kept her intimately tied to the loss of the woman who raised her as a single parent, and whom she spoke to “100 times a day.”

“It’s just having to rehash it over and over again. It gets tough … especially when it’s been going on for so long," she said.

But Surette is steadfast in her belief that something went “off the rails” at Northwood, the Halifax long-term care home where at least 53 residents died, described as the “epicentre” of COVID-19 in Nova Scotia in 2020.

“We’ve all lost our loved ones and it can’t be for nothing,” Surette said.

Her mother Patricia West lived in a private room with early onset dementia. Plans were made in Feb. 2020 to move her to a floor with more care as her dementia advanced, but Surette asked for those plans to be paused when the pandemic hit.

“I asked them not to move her and then they said they wouldn’t, and then they said they had to and they did move her,” she said.

West was moved into a double room in March 2020 and contracted COVID-19 within weeks.

“When I spoke with her the last time I remember her saying, ‘Erica, I’m too tired. I have to let you go.’ And that was literally it.”

She died days later and Surette launched a lawsuit soon after. It alleges Northwood’s practices, policies, and procedures, and lack thereof, led to the untimely death of residents like her mother.

Northwood has said that the lawsuit “fundamentally failed” to provide sufficient evidence. A Supreme Court of Nova Scotia judge certified the class action in December, which Northwood has applied to appeal, stating the judge’s failure to “properly assess” the complainants' common issues.

The Canadian Press reached out to lawyers representing Northwood, but did not receive a response before publication.

“If I have the ability to try to help make some change, to help it so that our loved ones aren’t forgotten and that they’re early and untimely deaths aren’t for nothing, then why not?”

More than 14,000 long-term care residents and staff in Canada died between March 2020 and August 2021, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Circumstances were so dire that the Canadian military was called in to help seven Ontario homes, and reported deplorable conditions, such as feces and vomit on floors and walls.

‘A door that couldn’t close'

Samantha Monckton held a trumpet to her lips outside of her father’s Vancouver residential care home in March 2020. His third-floor window was open and she hoped the familiar tune of Blue Moon would stand in her absence.

Her father, Garry Monckton, was a prolific piano player and she’d dance around him flinging her blond hair as he pursed a Rothmans cigarette between his lips in the 1970s.

“There was a lot of music in the house. I wanted to fill his brain with that memory of music filling the room like he used to do that for us,” Samantha Monckton said.

He had tested positive for COVID-19 and was bedridden in isolation when his daughter trumpeted outside his window. His nurse said he was waving his hands to the familiar tune filling the room.

Garry Monckton died at age 77 on April 2, 2020.

“I never saw his body and I only picked it up in a bag,” she said in reference to the ashes she picked up from a funeral home that had cremated her father. She listened to Elvis at home with the velvet bag at her side.

“There was a big piece of what you generally think life should include — you know, your birth, your birthdays and your funeral, right? That’s kind of what you plan for. But it was kind of like a chapter or a door that couldn’t finally close. It had like a foot stuck in it. There was no way to really close that door.”

‘Learn to live’

Phyllis Thompson never took medication, even at 89 living in a Scarborough long-term care home with Alzheimer’s. She loved watching NASCAR, singing Frank Sinatra and baking cookies with raisins instead of chocolate chips.

When COVID-19 started infecting people in her residence, her daughter Linda Gay held onto hope that her mother’s physical health would protect her.

“And then we got the call that on the Friday night she was not well and Saturday night was much worse. Then Sunday morning she was gone,” Gay said. Her mother died on April 5, 2020.

Her sister watched as their mother was wheeled in a white body bag into an ambulance. Her items were collected and handed over in a garbage bag. They couldn’t bury her in her hometown of Quebec City until July 2022.

But Gay said she doesn’t focus on those bitter memories, and instead looks at the photo of her mother on her nightstand and smiles.

“Our hearts are still broken and I don’t think they ever truly heal. But you learn to live with that little break in your heart.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 4, 2025.

Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.

Hannah Alberga, The Canadian Press