8 Beyond Borders: Travel, Loss and Stigma During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Chantelle Schoeller

COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic the day before my fifteenth birthday. Still adjusting to high school, it was about a month into the second semester of my grade nine year. In Toronto, the hustle and bustle seemingly continued after the declaration. My birthday was the Friday before the March break that year, and that was when the Ontario government had announced an extra two weeks of “March break”. I will never forget the announcement as it rang through my AP English class, with my principal saying that he would “see us on the other side” and my class joking that we were all going to die and reading too far into his words. COVID restrictions were slowly falling into place, and I remember being in the car with my mom when the laser tag place I was hoping to go to for my birthday called to confirm the booking, and that precautions would be in place, gear would be cleaned, and there was a good chance it would just be my small group of friends. I remember my mom remarking that they were taking it too seriously, and this would blow over eventually. We were both so, so wrong. 

The first lockdown officially began the week after March break, but my house seemed to run as normal. My mom was a personal support worker doing in-home care and my dad worked in a bottling facility, both deemed essential workers. For better or for worse, my parents worked through the entirety of the COVID pandemic, and so the first few weeks of the lockdown felt the same. My mom and dad would go to work, and my brother and I stayed home playing video games while our grandmother took care of us. Trying to recall the dates only leads me to blurs, but I know I finished my grade nine year fully online. I just remember the stress from my parents. My dad was unsure if he was going to keep his job or if the facility would go dark for a while during the pandemic. My mom was faced with the stress of going home-to-home to provide the most vulnerable with care, being over-worked, having new clients added to her, and seeing her patients pass away from complications: either not having access to care they needed or passing away from COVID. I remember my mom decontaminating herself before coming home, the exhaustion in her eyes, and the amount of PPE she would go through just as a personal support worker. The day-to-day slowly became one of hyper-vigilance, monitoring how everyone in the house felt, and self-isolation from myself (as I spent my days hiding away in my room, terrified of this virus) and my mom, who would isolate whenever she was unwell (which became the frequent, but thankfully it was never COVID). The days started to blend together, as my classes switched to remote learning, my days spent worrying about my parents and playing a lot of Animal Crossing New Horizon. I cannot recall the classes I had, I just remember the first COVID scare hitting my house and my mom self-isolating for a week in our basement. 

The biggest challenge during COVID though, was travelling. My family had plans to travel back to Madeira to visit family, and no pandemic could stop these plans. Our flight was booked for August 2020. There was a lot of stress around filling out the paperwork, having our family in Madeira fill out work so the government knew that we were going and had a valid reason to travel, and around the flight itself. The flight to Madeira was a challenging one, the flight to Lisbon was packed full of other Portuguese people waiting to return home, some who were stranded while visiting Canada and had not been able to return in months and some going back for funerals. Masks were required for the whole seven-hour flight, but for once my family was able to relax. Upon landing in Lisbon, our temperatures were checked and apps downloaded, I don’t remember the specific app for Madeira, but it had travel documents and acted as a way to record any symptoms of COVID. Visiting for the first time in almost ten years felt surreal, the island had few protocols concerning COVID, minimal cases, and was still open for tourists despite it all. Family is the most important thing to my own family, especially my mom. While visiting, we saw relatives we hadn’t seen in years and met some new additions who were born before our visit. While abroad, my cousin had her first son and excitedly called us around five in the morning (local time) to announce his birth, and my grandmother was delighted and saddened she could not be there. The trip came and went, and before long we were back in Canada. I will never forget that trip, especially because my mother’s uncle ended up passing away two weeks after the day we left. My mother was crushed, as we could not afford to fly out again to be with family during this loss, and COVID cases had only gotten worse. 

Despite it all, at the start of my grade ten year, things somehow got worse. I had just flown in from Madeira two weeks before the start of the semester, and I had gotten sick. Despite my hyper-vigilance, masking, the works, I ended up falling ill with the flu. Despite that and the COVID checks at school, I continued to go. I could feel eyes on me every time I coughed, I would excuse myself to the washroom to have coughing fits just so those around me would not think I had COVID. The stigma around COVID grew day-by-day as cases increased. As I continued to test negative for COVID, people in my classes started testing positive, and a story had spun that I had brought COVID to my school. I was ashamed, I stopped going to class for a week even after I had started to feel better, knowing I did everything I could to prevent myself from getting sick, the stigma persisted. I felt vile, disgusted, ashamed that I had brought something I didn’t have to school. No one remembers this, it got swept up in the actual COVID cases that had followed (and a COVID party that had been hosted by a student) as the school continued to shift the model of the semesters to insure some “normalcy.” I remember that this year ended online too, as there were more lockdowns in place with higher numbers and newer strains. COVID has shaped so many experiences, and unfortunately I don’t recall much more than this; I stayed online until grade twelve, my days spent hiding in my room crying over the perceived end of the world, online classes impacting my grades for the worse, and losing a sense of self that I have only now regained in university in “post-COVID” times. I can only imagine it will be a few more years until I can recall memories lost to the blur of time and my horrible memory, but for now, this closes that chapter, and I hope to stow it away and forget.