A 93-year-old woman has survived the COVID-19 disease but her daughter was not as fortunate.
Despite her age and some body aches, Dhanmatiya Dwarika is relatively healthy. If you tell her she looks good for her age, she’d simply compare herself to her 102-year-old sister who lives in Moruga.
“I following she now,” she told Guardian Media.
“She can’t do nothing but she not sick. No pain, she have no nothing. She tell me she have no complaints.”
For almost 70 years, she worked the land in Mayo, planting acres of crops and tending dozens of animals to help support her family, a duty she vividly remembers.
“I work very hard in the garden. I used to plant five acres of tannia, one acre of cassava, one acre of eddoes...I used to plant five acres of corn and I used to sell in the control board. I used to sell Port-of-Spain, I used to sell San Fernando in the market,” she said.
She can tell you the modern history of the country and world, not from any knowledge in a textbook but from her own eyes.
She’s lived through World War II, Independence, the 1990 attempted coup and now the COVID-19 pandemic, the latter of which she came face to face with in January.
The fact is that the majority of COVID-19 patients will survive the disease, albeit many with lasting complications and after an uphill battle. However, hope for a positive outcome tends to dwindle when the elderly become infected.
It’s not unwarranted, as most fatalities to date are among the elderly. As of yesterday, 3,676 people had lost their lives to the disease in T&T. However, at least 2,319 of them were over 60. It represents around 63 per cent of fatalities.
Dhanmatiya rang in the new year displaying symptoms and tested positive for the disease which has killed hundreds her age locally.
Unvaccinated, her fight was a difficult one that she barely remembers.
“I didn’t know myself. I don’t know what happened to me,” she recounted.
“For days I never catch myself. I never know myself.”
All she could recall with clarity is one day wandering the road, delirious, calling out for loved ones who long passed.
However, while she lived to tell the tale, her 70-year-old daughter, Kamla Dwarika, did not. She was taken by ambulance to the San Fernando General Hospital on Christmas Eve—the peak of the country’s largest wave of infections. She was transferred to the Augustus Long Hospital where she died on December 31.
However, her family was deeply displeased with the experience in the hospital and its lack of communication that they did not want Dhanmatiya to be subject to it.
It’s why they opted to keep her at home and be treated by a private doctor. But Kamla’s death was more than losing a daughter. Her passing now means Dhanmatiya has outlived all six of her children and her husband.
“I didn’t know I would live longer than my children and I don’t know what is wrong. I tried my best to do my best for my children and take care of them and everything,” she lamented.
She credits her survival to God and the good karma she amassed in her lifetime. However, while she’s grateful for life, she said she thinks it’s now time for her journey to conclude.
“I wish I could go now. To stay and depend on people and I love to do my work. But now I have to sit down and depend on somebody,” she said.