text: Fifty-one-year-old Arlene Reid died on April 27 while her daughter frantically performed CPR. Like many PSWs, Reid worked several jobs: one in home care, one in long-term care, and another in a retirement home. During the weeks before she caught COVID-19, none of them appeared to make her feel safe. Each had a shortage of PPE; her home care job provided two surgical masks every five days. It also took her to multiple locations, in and out of people's houses and apartments, and at least one of her patients, she'd been told, was tested for the virus. Reid lived with a daughter who was battling cancer. She didn't want to put her in danger, and besides, the government had told people to stay home, not zig-zag across the GTA. In March, she'd gone on a trip home to Jamaica and, after her mandated quarantine, was hesitant to return to work. She told her employers so. One pressured her to return anyway, or be labelled with job insubordination. Another considered her "resigned." So she went to the first and she worked, and on April 17 she felt unwell enough to get tested. On April 20, the results came back positive. Reid, who has five children and three grandchildren, moved out of the house with her ill daughter and into the house with the one who would watch her take her last breath.
  
  Initially, Reid had a mild fever and a cough. As she became more sick, she developed a shortness of breath and a higher fever and began vomiting. She also experienced a loss of smell and taste. Through it all, she tried to stay positive, right to the end, telling that daughter, "I'm going to get better. Mommy is going to be okay. I'm going to walk away from this." And for a while, her daughters said, it did seem like she was getting better. After days of self-isolation in a bedroom inside the Brampton, Ontario, home, her cough had subsided. But the bad breathing stuck, until one night, feeling her condition rapidly decline, she asked her daughter to call 911. By the time the paramedics got there, it was too late. Officially, it's unknown where she contracted the virus, but her daughters believe it was through work. In addition to the home care, Reid worked at least one shift at one of the long-term care homes that required military support. Her employers, perhaps unsurprisingly, contend they are not to blame. Reid was the second PSW in Ontario to die from the virus, and the third healthcare worker. "My mom died at my house," her daughter told the Globe and Mail. "She just wanted to get better."
  
  Gloria Turney woke up to a text about her friend's death at 5:30 a.m. the Monday morning Reid died. The two had grown up together in Jamaica, and Turney thought of her as more of a family member than a friend. Reid had immigrated to Canada before her, and they reconnected when Turney followed. Like Reid, Turney has been a PSW for twenty years, working in home and community care. Before the pandemic, her day started at 6 a.m. She'd take the bus to her clients' homes and help them get out of bed, get washed and dressed, make sure they took their medication, help them get their breakfast—whatever it was, Turney helped. On any given day, she might see up to eight people, travelling between homes or between rooms at a retirement building. A visit could take fifteen minutes, or it could take three hours. A work day could end in the afternoon or at 10 p.m. She liked travelling every day, the freedom it gave her, how easy it was to take a break and grab a coffee after a difficult client. As the virus spread through the province, though, Turney decided it was no longer safe to be a "busser." She requested to work at one location a twenty-minute ride away, a transitional bed facility, where people stay as they're awaiting a permanent long-term care spot. She was working there when the first PSW in Ontario died; Turney had reached out to their shared union and asked, "What's going on?" People were putting their lives on the line.
  
  It was even worse when Reid died, fear and grief and shock folding together. Turney knew her; her family knew her. She hadn't heard about the death from the news, or from a co-worker, but from Reid's sister. It hit home harder. Now the cost of the disease had a face, shared laughter, a whole life of togetherness, love. She realized anybody could die from COVID-19. She realized she had to get up and go to work. Turney can't speak for what Reid's employers should have done. But she knows what she would have liked her company to do if the same awful, tragic, unthinkable thing had happened to her. Say something. Maybe the company doesn't want to admit fault. Fine. Turney just doesn't want to see them sweep a life, and a death, under the proverbial rug. The absolute bare minimum an employer can do is send condolence flowers, she added. And sure, she knows that some companies did, although mostly after Turney and her union "got loud" about the PSW deaths. What she'd have liked to see, though, is for any company that employs a worker who died to reach out to the family. To phone them. To get sincere about how truly, terribly sorry they are. To express care for the people they sent to the front line. "All these years of working with you," she said, "and a bouquet of flowers—is that it?"
  
  Turney is, however, sadly used to the indifference, and even callousness, of companies toward workers. She's been part of her union's bargaining committee for years. For a decade, she's been lobbying for better pay and better treatment. In 2013, her union went on strike to protest the $14 hourly wage for PSWs. They walked away with less than a tencent increase. So, they pushed the government. As a result, the hourly wage was bumped to $19, where it was capped, and the increase was rolled out over a number of years. After five years at the $19 cap, Turney and her union went back to the government and the companies with a simple message: you need to do better. That time, they walked away with a thirty-two-cent wage increase, this time rolled out over three years. In 2020, Turney made $19.13 an hour. It will be 2022 before she sees $19.32. If she hadn't lived in the same place in Burlington for years, or if she ever lost it, she knows she wouldn't be able to afford rent in her city. She doesn't have a pension, and unless she works 1,352 hours in a year, she doesn't get benefits. This, she told me, is why PSWs work in so many different homes at once. It's why some of them quit when the pandemic hit; it's also why some of them couldn't afford to stop going to work. It's why patients' care and living conditions both suffer. The pandemic may have made the situation worse, Turney said, but it also made it unavoidable.
  
  Suddenly, there was nowhere else to look, she told me. "This was the topic of the day—you had to look at it. Now your mothers, your fathers, your grandmothers are affected." People could no longer look away; they, too, now had a face to put to the problem, the grief, the fear. For Turney it could be frustrating to watch puppy-dog-eyed politicians act aghast, heartbroken. "We've been telling you for years that these are the conditions," she added. "We've been asking for years for you to help us to have a voice, and nobody chose to." Still, she does not regret working through the pandemic. For one, she loves her job. And second, she knows it helped her make it through the worst of the isolating time. She cannot imagine staying alone, inside her home, day after day. In March, she was supposed to go home to Jamaica. Her first vacation in six years would have been to see her sister, who had been diagnosed with Stage I breast cancer. In a normal year, she would have gone to visit her sick sister two or three times. Now, she had to settle for video calls. As much as she helped her clients through the pandemic, they helped her, too. They helped keep her mind off what should have been. Kept her from staying in her house alone. Gave her a purpose.
  
  There is one client in particular who helped Turney make it through. A retired realtor, she, like Turney, was born in December. Turney describes her as witty, with a keen sense of humour. "Nothing you do bothers this woman," she said. If her body had been adjusted into an uncomfortable position by accident, she made a joke of it: "Okay, why don't you do that again?" If someone asked if she was good, she'd quip, "You know I'm always good." To Turney, she was the best. Sometimes they'd joke around so much that, through laughter, Turney would plead, "Behave yourself!" The woman's family would know when Turney was working because she would help her put on makeup before their FaceTime. Lipstick, blush, her brows—everything. She would go all out. They'd look inside the woman's jewellery box and find something to match her outfit. The funny thing is, added Turney, she herself hardly wears cosmetics at all, and certainly not every day. But she helped her client because that's what made her client feel whole, happy. Because that's what you do when you believe somebody, no matter their age, has the right to dignity, good care, and a fulfilling life.