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Married 58 years, Oscar and Mary Fontaine lived together in their family home until the day he died.
Though advanced Parkinson’s made him weak, forcing him to use a feeding tube, Oscar still enjoyed his simple pleasures. Even as a pandemic raged around the world, and thousands died cut off from their families in hospitals and long-term care beds, Oscar was able to visit with family, watch tomatoes ripen in the backyard and rest amidst the familiar sights of home until his eyes grew too tired to open.
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Nearly one year into the pandemic, some seniors centres who moved social programs online or to telephone-based models say they’ll never fully go back.
“It’s been amazing the possibility online opened up,” said Rachel Tassone, life enrichment manager for SAGE seniors association.
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She’s had a mother and daughter join a singalong from opposite sides of the country. She dialled in another woman who lives alone and lost her eyesight. Husbands who wouldn’t set foot in a seniors centre pre-pandemic joined exercise class, she said. “I just can’t see us ever going back to in-person (completely).”
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The man looked big enough to kill her.
Muraado Raage is a Somali-Canadian grandmother â a Black woman who wears a headscarf, just like the three women attacked this month in south Edmonton.
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She was sitting at a bus stop in 2015 when the man walked up and began yelling: âWe have al-Qaida around us right now. ⦠This place is dangerous. Al-Qaida is around.â
He was huge and angry, she said, speaking through a translator. She froze, kept her eyes down, tense against a blow that fortunately never came. When the bus arrived, she fled.