Two of Jean Claude Dianzenza Bahati's daughters, Paolla, left and Jeanceline Mangiri with arm on child, and three of his grandchildren photographed outside their home in Hamilton, Ont. on Nov. 30, 2020.Kate Dockeray/The Globe and Mail
Jeanceline Mangiri has 96 blue and white balloons she doesn’t know what to do with. They were the first decorations she bought for her father’s surprise 61st birthday party.
She had been planning the event in whispered phone calls with her siblings, afraid her two youngest children might overhear and snitch to their grandfather. She knew her father was desperate to see his grandchildren; they had spent the summer with him in Winnipeg, where he always kept his kitchen stocked with their favourite snacks: sausages, cookies and ice cream.
But the flight Jeanceline booked to bring her father to her home in Hamilton for the party in mid-December was swapped for one that took her to Winnipeg last week to bury him.
Jean Claude Dianzenza Bahati, a Congolese health care aide, died Nov. 6, just days after testing positive for COVID-19.Courtesy of family
Jean Claude Dianzenza Bahati, 60, a Congolese immigrant and father of nine, died Nov. 6, just days after he tested positive for COVID-19. His death was so sudden, so unexpected, that his family didn’t even get to hold a bedside vigil in personal protective equipment or have a teary goodbye over FaceTime.
Jean Claude’s job as a health care aide at Victoria General Hospital in Winnipeg put him on the front lines of the pandemic in a province that until this week had the highest rate of active infections in the country since mid-October (when adjusted for population). Manitoba’s runaway second wave has claimed 431 lives since October – after the virus killed 20 in the previous seven months.
His death has been added to the tally of the more than two dozen health care workers who have died from COVID-19 in this country, but to his family and community, the loss is so much more. He was the husband who would set his alarm for 6 a.m. so he could pick up his wife after she’d worked the overnight shift at a nursing home. The grandfather who took his grandchildren to the park after an exhausting day at work. The community leader who rallied fellow Congolese immigrants to visit one of their own in hospital. The father who spent endless hours in the passenger seat to help his children pass their driving tests.
Jean Claude’s journey to Winnipeg was a long one, drawn out over kilometres, years and mountains of immigration paperwork. He and his family fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo for Nigeria more than a decade ago but were separated. His wife and his five youngest children made their way to Winnipeg as government-assisted refugees in 2008, with the hope that he would follow as soon as his wife, Celine Mangiri, met the qualifications to sponsor him.
Weeks turned into months, which rolled into years. As a child, his daughter Paolla Mangiri, now 22, was mortified by her father’s absence, which came up at parent-teacher conferences and any time she’d visit a friend’s house. Did people believe her when she said he hadn’t abandoned his family? That he would soon join them in Canada, as he always promised on the phone?
Celine stumbled through English classes in order to train for the kind of health care work that attracts many newcomers and racialized Canadians. She got a job at a nursing home, tucked away money when she could and finally proved to immigration officials that she had enough income to support her husband after his arrival. The sponsorship was approved, and he rejoined his family in 2013.
The reunion at Winnipeg airport was so boisterous that the director of Love Actually might have dismissed it as “too much.” Jeanceline, 28, briefly forgetting she was nine months pregnant, leapt on her father beside the baggage carousel, whooping, laughing and crying.
Knowing his prospects of finding work in his profession – banking – were slim, Jean Claude followed his wife’s lead and also trained to become a health care aide. It was the fastest route to a paycheque, to easing the burden Celine had been carrying alone for so long.
He got work with an agency and happily took on any shift they offered, dashing from playing cards with a nursing home resident in one end of the city to stumbling through the lyrics of an English song he’d never heard before to cheer up a hospital patient in another. At the end of shifts, his children would massage Vicks into his aching legs.
As president of the Congolese Association of Manitoba, he made sure community members were taken care of when sick or in mourning, fetched visitors from the airport – even counselled couples through marital issues.
Some of his children grew up and moved out. The family, finally in a more comfortable financial position, upgraded to a nicer rental home in Winnipeg. Last year, the couple had finally saved up enough for the wedding they’d been waiting three decades to hold. They flew to Paris to pick out Celine’s gown (“Really? At your age? You’re going to wear a white dress?” Jeanceline teased) and Jean Claude’s white suit and wed in front of family and friends at Winnipeg’s St. Boniface Cathedral.
This past spring, Jean Claude accepted a job at Victoria General Hospital, which brought stability and a big pay bump to his life. The new job came near the end of the first wave of COVID-19, which didn’t overwhelm Manitoba the way it did other regions. The province disbanded its pandemic command table in the summer, and its slow response to the second wave has meant massive outbreaks in hospitals and long-term care homes. A staggering 89 per cent of reported cases and 96 per cent of deaths from COVID-19 have been logged since October. Knowing their father was encountering patients with the virus each day frightened Jean Claude’s children.
“Please, each time you go to work, can you pray?” Jeanceline asked him on the phone.
“Yeah, maman, I can pray. God is in control,” he replied.
After developing flu-like symptoms in late October and testing positive for COVID-19, Jean Claude self-isolated at home. Celine also tested positive, as did the couple’s two youngest sons, after his death.
The others didn’t experience any symptoms, but Jean Claude’s body was ravaged by fever in the day and chills at night; he lost his appetite and vomited frequently. A public-health nurse Celine reached by phone on Nov. 4 set up an appointment for her husband to go to a walk-in clinic on Nov. 6.
When the taxi pulled up to their house, Jean Claude went inside first and called out to Celine to hurry up. Minutes later, at the clinic, he slumped forward in his seat and stopped breathing. His wife called out: “Jean Claude! Jean Claude! Jean Claude!”
Jeanceline and Paolla are counting down days until they can come out of their travel quarantine and embrace their mother.Kate Dockeray/The Globe and Mail
He was given CPR, and an ambulance was dispatched to take him to hospital. Staff told Celine, who was supposed to be self-isolating, to go home. When she called the hospital an hour later, she learned Jean Claude was dead.
As news spread to his children and grandchildren, they fell into disbelief, unable to make sense of how their most recent interaction with Jean Claude was now, somehow, their last.
In her final phone call with her father, Paolla helped him upload some files to the Canada Revenue Agency website. The last time Jeanceline’s children video chatted with him, they asked, “Grandpa, why are you wearing a mask when inside the room?” He explained he’d caught “the corona” but reassured them he’d recover quickly.
Jeanceline’s eldest, Dayida, 12, has had an especially hard time with the loss. He has complained of headaches and one day asked his mother to come pick him up from school early. He would retreat to his room each afternoon to cry.
Jeanceline is a single mother, and Dayida grew up thinking of Jean Claude as his father. When they were in Winnipeg together, he’d ride shotgun with his grandfather and change out the Congolese oldies Jean Claude liked for more contemporary American tunes. They’d pick up four litres of ice cream and eat it right out of the pail with spoons. When Dayida misbehaved, his mother forbade him from watching TV, going online or using his phone, but he found a loophole: He would surreptitiously call his grandfather using the Amazon Echo smart speaker in the house. Jeanceline thought it was important for her son to have a father figure in his life, and she was in the early stages of making plans to send her son back to Winnipeg for a while to live with his grandparents.
A few days after her father’s death, Jeanceline placed a video call to her mother to see how she was doing. Celine answered but immediately put the phone down on a chair so her daughter couldn’t see the heartbreak written on her face. Jeanceline could hear Celine struggling to mask the grief in her voice and told her mother she’d call back later.
At that point, Celine had tested positive, but the sons she lived with were still waiting for their test results, so she isolated herself from them, and the rest of the world, in a corner of the house. There was no one to rub her back, stroke her hair, hold up her limp body as she sobbed.
Jeanceline and Paolla, who have travelled from Hamilton to Winnipeg, are counting down the days until they can come out of their travel quarantine and embrace their mother. But they’re also watching the province’s case counts carefully, praying for the curve to flatten. They’ve gambled that restrictions around funerals will be eased by Dec. 18, the day they plan to bury their father.
As it stands, only five people can attend a burial in Manitoba, including cemetery staff, so unless the rules change, Celine will be tasked with choosing which three of her husband’s nine children can be at his graveside.
Rent, hydro, internet and car bills keep coming in to the Dianzenza Bahati-Mangiri household, but Celine can’t even bear to sleep in the bedroom she shared with her husband, let alone return to a job that would serve as a constant reminder of him.
And so Diallo Mangiri, 22, one of Jean Claude’s sons who lives at home, is figuring out his new responsibilities.
“I’m putting more pressure on myself,” he said, explaining that he’s accepting more weekend shifts at the nursing home where he works as a dietary aide. “I need to be the leader of the house. I have to step up my role.”
Celine has told her daughter she will return to work eventually, but Jeanceline would prefer she didn’t put her health at risk.
“She’s the only parent we have,” Jeanceline said. “What if we lose her? Who’s going to take care of us?”
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