text: In mid-March, a couple of days after the WHO declared a pandemic, the term "Boomer Remover" began trending on Twitter. It had, by then, appeared in more than sixty-five thousand tweets and references to the higher mortality rate among older people infected with COVID-19. The so-called joke riffed off the "OK Boomer" meme of earlier social media fame, and seemed to suggest that the deaths of those in one of the virus's more susceptible age ranges, fifty-six to seventy-four—a group whom younger generations often characterize as entitled, racist environment destroyers—maybe wasn't such a tragedy, after all. Around that same time, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus slammed countries that were responding slowly, or poorly, to the virus because they believed it killed only senior or older people. To categorize, and then dismiss, the virus as merely a senior-killer, he added, represented "a moral decay of the society." In the New York Times, Dr. Louise Aronson questioned the constant use of the qualifier only—as if, she wrote, "COVID-19 didn't matter much if it was a scourge only among the old." Indeed, that seemed to be what hundreds, perhaps millions, of us thought.
  
  For many politicians, media members, and, I'm embarrassed to say, those in my own social circles, the word only was breathed as a relief; it felt nearly as potent as a vaccine. It was a way to reassure, a way to say, barely between the lines, that not everybody will survive this virus, but everybody who matters will. Days into his country's lockdown, the lieutenant governor of Texas even suggested grandparents would be willing to sacrifice themselves for the country's economic future—a proposed solution that gained surprising ground in the U.S. Ultra-conservative talking head Ben Shapiro said, "If grandma dies in a nursing home at age 81, that's tragic and that's terrible, also the life expectancy in the United States is 80." (For the record, if somebody reaches eighty, they are expected to live at least another decade.) Ukraine's ex–health minister said those over aged sixty-five were already "corpses." All around the world, people acted as though, if the elderly died, well, too bad, but not really. All around the world, we called our grandmothers and our mothers and told them to stay inside.
  
  Canada's own callous, ageist attitudes toward seniors didn't come with as much punditry as some countries', but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. We saw such attitudes in our early apathetic treatment of those who live in long-term care and in the mirrored treatment of those who cared for them. They materialized again when public discourse shifted around the virus after health officials and common sense each debunked the myths about who COVID-19 affected—yes, younger people can get sick; yes, they can die—often (but not always) making the threat "real" for many people. And we saw our attitudes exposed yet again when, despite the still-unique vulnerability of seniors—their mortality rate remains much higher, and more of them are hospitalized—health policy and collective grief both seemed to favour younger demographics. Take, for example, the observations of twenty researchers, many of them Canadian, who together asked difficult, uncomfortable questions about the ageism and discrimination exposed by our response to the pandemic. "It is revealing that the younger adults who have died from complications of COVID-19 throughout the world have often generated long and in-depth media reports," wrote the authors, "while the deaths of thousands of older adults have been simply counted and summarized, if they were documented at all."
  
  As a result, thousands of women's deaths were reduced to a statistic. What's more, unlike in other countries, where men account for a greater portion of COVID-19 deaths, the sheer number of long-term care deaths here has tipped the gender balance during the first wave—largely because women comprise a larger share of residents in such facilities across Canada. We've been asked to care about their deaths because they could have been our mothers or grandmothers, sweet ladies with cotton-candy hair, flower-scented skin, and kind words. Follow that same logic, and you're asking someone to care about sexual violence because it could happen to your sisters, daughters, mothers. In both cases, we should care about these women not because of who they were to us, or what gender role they can be neatly categorized into, but because of who they are: extraordinary humans. Ageism would have us believe that most of these women were doddering around in their homes, knitting doilies, drooling, and waiting for death. It would have us believe that their value to society had passed. Beyond being morally reprehensible, those perceptions simply aren't true. Many senior women volunteer in the communities and in their care centres. They teach younger generations and pass down wisdom. They're caretakers and creators. And, in many cases, they were trailblazers.
  
  Thelma Coward-Ince was one such woman. In April, she contracted COVID-19 inside her Halifax long-term care home, Northwood. At the time, the facility accounted for most of the province's virus-related deaths. By the next month, long-term care deaths would encompass 97 per cent of all deaths in Nova Scotia. And by June, fifty-three residents at Northwood had died from the virus. Each of them had life stories. Coward-Ince herself graduated from Mount Saint Vincent University with a bachelor of arts. At sixteen, she began working and, shortly after, joined the Royal Canadian Navy, where she knocked down a domino of firsts. She was the first Black naval reservist and the first Black senior secretary as chief of staff to the admiral. At the National Defence, she was the first Black manager and the only female manager in her unit for more than a decade—there were also fewer than one hundred women working out of a total two thousand members in the division. She served on multiple boards, too, including the Black United Front, the Health Association of African Canadians, the Canadian Ethnocultural Council, and the Nova Scotia Advisory Commission on AIDS. And for twenty years, until she was diagnosed with dementia, she sang with the Nova Scotia Mass Choir.
  
  Northwood's first outbreak was considered resolved as of July 2020, around the same time the rest of the country's COVID-19 case counts plummeted. Mere months later, however, the country's second wave began to crest—and it looked like Canada might fail its elderly again. By fall, cases began to reappear in long-term care centres, including in some that had previously quelled their outbreaks. The facility where Roisin O'Brien worked was one of them. By October, resident cases in Ontario long-term care homes were approaching April numbers at 159 virus-positive patients; at 199, staff cases had already surpassed their April tallies. The province asked the Red Cross to help in several homes, just as the disaster relief organization had done over the summer in Quebec. It was as if the July and August heat had evaporated caution, community regard, and maybe also a little bit of the fear. It also seemed to erase much of the mass outpouring of support for frontline and essential workers, and with it the pressure to better protect them. As the quarantine ended, PSWs were largely forgotten. "Two months ago, we were heroes," Turney told me toward the end of August. "When have you last heard that?"