FIRST PERSON | My sister Jin died just before the pandemic. 4 years later, her memory lives on. | CBC News

This First Person column is the experience of Souradet Shaw, a Winnipeg epidemiologist. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

My sister Jin died three days before the first known case of COVID-19 was identified in Canada. 

Being an infectious disease epidemiologist, I had read reports of a novel respiratory disease emerging from China in early December of 2019.  But weeks later, in early January 2020 as I walked into the Toronto hospital to see Jin for the last time, the chaos of what was happening in China had not yet reached our shores.

Jin greeted me from her wheelchair, smaller and frailer than the last time I saw her. 

We stayed up and reminisced, tracing our family’s journey from southern China to Southeast Asia to North America. My mom, two of my sisters and I arrived as refugees in Winnipeg in 1979. After a few years we were reunited with my two oldest sisters. One of them was Jin. 

She trained as a nurse in Taipei and would spend the rest of her life in hospitals in Manitoba and Ontario, working in labour and delivery until her cancer diagnosis. 

I am grateful for the time I had with her during her final days of life. I am grateful that we spent our afternoons watching terrible soap operas in Mandarin, and hearing her laughter as I pretended to know what the characters were saying. 

I am grateful that she recognized me when I reached out one last time to stroke her hair, before she closed her eyes and succumbed to the blackness of her sleep. 

There is a strange cadence at the end of a loved one’s journey with cancer: the flurry of activity as everyone adapts to new realities; the routines that are learned and adopted; and then, eventually, an almost impossible nothingness as you look for the traces of someone who is no longer there, at an empty bed and rooms full of half-filled pill containers. 

Jin died on Jan. 22. I flew home to Winnipeg the same night. I moved through Pearson airport like a ghost, tethered to the earth by sorrow and the still-fresh memories of my sister’s death. 

During the pandemic, I started a faculty position at the University of Manitoba. In January of this year, I found myself in Kenya to visit some of my university’s projects in East Africa. It was the fourth anniversary of Jin’s death, and four years since COVID-19 had also changed the world as we know it.

I looked for my sister in the clouds, in the water, in the smiles of families bursting with laughter.– Souradet Shaw

It was here that I found myself thinking of Jin. This was my fifth work trip to Kenya, and I am certain Jin would have been delighted to hear about my travels. About things as mundane as the mangoes and how they compared with the ones in Taiwan, where we went to inter our father after he died of malaria. 

After an intense week of work I found myself walking along a beach on the Kenyan coast.

The sky was aquamarine, and I watched families playing in the water, next to aged dhows (fishing vessels) and wooden boats with glass-bottoms. I saw the beach vendors take shelter from the sun beneath palm trees on ancient, bleached branches washed up against the shore. I sat down in the white sands and dipped my toes in the Indian Ocean, breathing in its saltiness and its cadence.

I thought of my dead sister, and of us on a beach in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, 30 years ago and 10,000 kilometres away.  I looked for my sister in the clouds, in the water, in the smiles of families bursting with laughter. I gazed across the blue of the Indian Ocean and I thought about the push and pull of grief, and how it advances and recedes like waves.

I thought about grace and the sacrifices you make for the people that you love.– Souradet Shaw

I thought of how beautiful it was that my sister’s face was one of the first things that thousands of babies saw as they entered the world. I thought about how Jin’s friends would visit her after their 12-hour overnight shifts to provide comfort and care in her final days. 

And I thought of how humbling it was that these women could so effortlessly shift from welcoming a newborn life to caring for a dying friend. I thought about grace and the sacrifices you make for the people you love. 

The tide came in on its interminable cadence, and warm water washed over my feet. I dusted the sand off my legs and got up to leave. The faint contours of my feet remained, only to be washed away by the next wave. 

This column is part of  CBC’s Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor’s blog and our FAQ.