Forced apart after nearly 70 years

The time to be happy is now.

Lillian stitched the words into the sampler years ago, her colourful needlework a snapshot of the Alder family’s life. The embroidered house is the home she and Ray built together, mixing mortar and laying the blocks. The five little figures are their three sons and two daughters. The camper is the one they towed to the farthest reaches of Canada, parking by streams in Nunavut.

Through nearly 70 years of marriage Lillian and Ray have believed happiness is not to be put off till later. Because later may never come.

The sampler now hangs above Lillian’s bed at the long-term care home she hurried into last month.

At another nursing home across town, the wall above Ray’s bed is blank.

Lillian, 86, and Ray, 89, are apart for the first time since the war because there is nowhere for them to be together and get the care they need. In May, they will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary.

“It’s torture,” says Lillian. “We’re in our last stages of life and we can’t even be together. We just pray we can be together before we die.”

As of January, there were 200 Ontario seniors on lists waiting to be reunited with their spouses, according to the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The ministry says the average wait time is 89 days.

And that’s after a 2008 policy change, implemented last year, which put spousal reunification second only to crisis cases in the ministry’s priorities. Crisis cases are those in which a client’s safety or health is at risk.

At some of the province’s Community Care Access Centres (CCAC), an artificial overloading of the crisis list means those on any other list “are constantly bumped by crisis cases,” says Jane Meadus, a lawyer with the Toronto-based Advocacy Centre for the Elderly. She has been advising the Alder family.

CCACs are trying to get people out of hospital by offering them services in the community. If that doesn’t work out, Meadus explains, “they’ll be put on the crisis list.”