MOURNING FROM AFAR

We must improve how we manage death and dying during pandemics, say those denied the most important moments of their lives.

- SARAH CATHERALL

Tim Gordon was restricted in the time he could be by his dying wife's bedside in ICU after the couple were in a car crash.

In February this year, Andrew Barclay sat in a MIQ hotel room in Christchurch, exhausted from travelling more than 18,000km from the other side of the world. He had come so far, but he was all too aware that his journey wasn't yet over. His mother, Frances Anne Elliot, lay dying just 4km away.

It had taken Barclay, an operations manager based in London, about 15 months just to get to this point, battling what he describes as maddening MIQ bureaucracy. A Kiwi citizen, he hadn't been home since 2015, but he was desperate to return to see his ailing 75-year-old mother.

He knew her health had deteriorated after he got on the plane, and he begged officials to allow him an early release from his hotel room. But he was too late. On February 20 - at a time when there were 2522 new daily community cases of Omicron his mother passed away while Barclay was still busy filling out forms.

Two days later, triple-jabbed Barclay was told the “good news” that he could leave MIQ and self-isolate for a further three days at his mother's home. He had lived there with her as a university student, but this time he was there to prepare her funeral.

Her glass of water was still on the kitchen table, and her gardening gloves were lying on the lawn, near the roses he had intended to clip with her. “My sister and her kids waved at me from the roadside because I was self-isolating. It was dreadful. The house was silent. Mum should have been cheering my arrival with arms outstretched. It had all gone so terribly wrong. This was when I really broke down,” he says.