A woman is honouring her father and 55 other residents who died during Manitoba’s deadliest care-home outbreak early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Later this month, Eddie Calisto-Tavares will unveil a commemorative bench to honour the COVID victims, including her 88-year-old father, Manuel dos Santos de Sousa Calisto, who died in the fall of 2020 at the Maples Long-Term Care Home.
In the four years since, she has lobbied government to improve seniors care in Manitoba. Every year, on world elder abuse awareness day on June 15, she and her family have put up memorial ribbons, flowers and posters with the names of the people who died at the care home in the nearby Andrew Mynarski Park.
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS FILES
Eddie Calisto-Tavares holds a photo of her father Manuel Calisto who died of COVID-19.
Over the past year, she has worked with the city to place a bench and adjacent plaque in the park. The bench will be unveiled on June 15 at 5:30 p.m.
It’s a physical place for the loved ones of those 56 people to mourn in a way they couldn’t in the height of the pandemic. “So many of us could not gather for funerals, and all of those rituals that we’re so used to as a society,” she said, noting it’s also a statement of awareness of elder abuse.
“I don’t want people to forget, first and foremost, of the horrendous abuse and neglect that not only happened during COVID, COVID really just made it more public, it was happening all along, and it’s still happening,” Calisto-Tavares said.
The long-term care home was the centre of an external review in February 2021, which found it was critically understaffed during the outbreak. It was owned by Revera Inc. at the time.
Calisto-Tavares said Extendicare Maples is not involved in the memorial.
She vows to continue to fight for supports that could have helped her father and other residents, including establishing an independent seniors advocate in the province, an idea promised by the NDP government while campaigning last fall.
Manuel dos Santos de Sousa Calisto died in the fall of 2020 at the Maples Long-Term Care Home.
“Now it’s in the budget. When is this going to actually happen?” she said. “I don’t want to be talking a year from now with you, and still say, we still don’t have a seniors advocate.”
The bill, which would bring in an office to investigate systemic mistreatment and individual issues facing seniors, was temporarily blocked after the Opposition Progressive Conservatives stalled several bills in legislature in March.
malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca
Malak Abas
Reporter
Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.
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