When Nancy Lee, manager of the Snug Cove General Store, tells you to stay home, she’s asking from a place of experience.
Her father died after testing positive for COVID-19.
Ming Ball Lee died at the Lynn Valley Care Centre March 14, just days after testing positive for COVID-19, said Nancy. He was two weeks short of his 90th birthday.
The Lynn Valley Care Centre has now been the location of at least 17 COVID-19-related deaths, including the first COVID-19 death in Canada on March 8.
Ming had lived at the care home for about six years, said Nancy, having moved there from Bowen Island.
While he lived on Bowen with Nancy and her husband, Ming was a familiar face along Miller and Scarborough roads.
“My dad, he was like clockwork,” said Nancy. “Every morning, he would get up. He would get dressed. He would go to the bathroom. He would make one piece of whole wheat toast with maybe an eighth of a teaspoon of honey on it. He’d have like this teeny tiny little bowl of cornflakes with this little bit of milk.
“And between me going to work at nine o’clock and 12 o’clock, my dad would go for his walk,” said Nancy. “He was not a fast walker but he would go every day. He would go rain or shine.”
Ming would walk out to Hood Point, turn around, and walk back exactly the way he came––invariably walking with instead of against traffic in one direction.
“People would stop and the bus drivers were very kind and they would stop and talk to him for a little bit,” said Nancy.
“He had this quirkiness about him.”
After Ming moved to the care home, Nancy would visit her father about every three weeks. She’d bring him lunch and the two would spend an afternoon together. On March 7, she went to visit him like usual but was met with a sign at the door to her father’s floor that there was a case of COVID-19 and that they weren’t admitting visitors.
She received a phone call the following Tuesday that her father had a fever and on Wednesday that he’d tested positive for COVID-19. “At that point in time, I was thinking, you know, what do I do, right?” Said Nancy.
“If I go to see my dad, I’m going to have to quarantine myself,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to work.”
“But…I didn’t even get to make the choice because he died at four o’clock in the morning Saturday.
“That’s what made it so real for me,” she said.
Nancy also said that in some ways, she’s lucky, if you can call it that. “I’m just glad that he went quickly and didn’t suffer because I would have been worried about him every day.
“There’s other people, their parents are in there still and it must be heart-wrenching to know that you can’t do anything.”
Nancy didn’t tell anyone other than some close friends of her father’s death for a few weeks and she says she doesn’t want people coming into the store to give their condolences.
“You know what? Stay home. That is what I need people to understand. They need to stay home.”
See more COVID-19 news here.
