Biography/History: Funded by the State Library of Western Australia. This collection of stories, documents, experiences of the COVID 19 pandemic that hit Australia in early 2020. The COVID 19 pandemic led to the declaration of a state of emergency in Western Australia on the 16th of March.

WA went into lockdown between the months of March to May, with further restrictions continuing for months after. During this time, events were canceled, schools shut down and parks became overcrowded. Thousands of individuals, businesses, communities and organizations were severely impacted as they were forced to work from home social distance and book emergency flights.

This collection, produced by the Center for Stories in Northbridge, Western Australia, explores these unprecedented effects and contributes a record of this remarkable time in history. This interview features Chris McCormack talking about the devastating implications COVID 19 had on the passing of a loved one living overseas.

Christine McCormack: My name is Christine McCormack. Just after the restrictions came in the lockdown in WA. I got an email from my son in England to say that he was terminally ill and it took me a day or so to get my head around that.

But in the meantime, I told some friends and they suggested I get in contact with my local member of Parliament who would point me in the right direction as to how to get out of the country. I did finally get onto Border Force and they sent me a request for more information.

Pretty much all I had was fortunately his birth certificate and his father’s death certificate, both of which had his name on everything else of his, had gone to his place in England. And anyway, the Border Force were very good and by the end of that day, a Sunday, they had given me permission to leave the country.

So the next day I’d already put a tentative hold on a ticket to go to England, to fly to England. So I confirmed that, and it went up about $1,000 in those couple of days. It was either the 20, I think.

Yes, it was the 28th and the Sunday was the 29th when I got permission and I flew out. I think the 2nd of April, the plane was full. I don’t think there was an empty seat on it. Majority of people were either English retirees going home or backpackers from all over Europe who were heading to England and then trying to get back to their own country.

The backpackers weren’t taking any notice of any distance requirements, social distancing. Most of the older people were, but once we got on the plane, there was no real difference. The only thing different with the flight was there was no hot drinks, no alcohol, and very limited food enough to keep you going and probably what you should eat on a plane. But when we got off the plane in England.

It was weird. It was all boarded up like a new build or something. Nothing was open. Those shops you could see were not open and there was sort of a major path heading towards the exit.

And we seemed to be the only plane that had landed at that time. There was one other girl in front of me and about four customs people. Very different to anything I’ve ever seen in London. Well, any airport, really.

And that gentleman looked at my passport and said, How long are you staying in England? And I said, I don’t know. Have you got a return ticket? No. Do you have relatives in England? Yes. Okay. You can stay for six months.

And that was it. Absolutely nothing about COVID. The next problem was getting from Heathrow to where I was going to be staying, which was a little village called Streetly out of Luton. I had a bit of an issue with my phone, so I had it on roaming, but it’s still a bit of an issue.

But I managed to get messages to a young lady called Lisa, who was my son’s oldest friend. They’d been to two kindergartens together, eventually learned to walk hand in hand, school, socializing everything. And she had been his best man when he married Liz.

Anyway, I contacted her and she arranged an Uber for me. She had arranged an Airbnb for me to stay at in this little village, which was about five miles from where Jonathan lived. But I did start emailing his mother in law and his wife, and I never had any replies from his wife at all.

His mother in law replied and said, You can’t visit. No one’s allowed to visit outside their own home. I knew he was terminally ill the day after he’d sent me that first email on the 28th. He sent me an email on the 29th the next day to say it was terminal and he had weeks.

In actual fact, he had less than one week from the time he sent that email because he died on the Friday he was at home. He had been in hospital, but he wanted to be at home. For me, it would have been much better had he been in palliative care because that was just down the road from where I was staying. But he obviously wanted to spend as much time as he possibly could with his wife and his little granddaughters. I got an email from Pat on the following Saturday. So virtually exactly a week from the first I heard of his illness to say that he had died on the Friday afternoon.

And I think a lot of the fight sort of went out of me at that stage. But I did continue to try and see if I could see my granddaughters. Jonathan had said he didn’t really want to have a service, and he was thinking about his girls and his wife and probably not really thinking a lot anyway, because he was very ill by then and he’d put it in his really want to be cremated, which is sort of a family thing anyway. The funeral had been arranged by Pat, the mother in law, and she said it because that’s what he wanted.

He was having no service, just a basic cremation. And I said, Well, because I hadn’t been able to see him when he was alive, I wanted to see him there. And then and she said, no, repeated it. And I contacted the funeral directors, and I think they were giving, him a little more information than they were supposed to.

When I explained that I was mother and they just said that they, I couldn’t see him because it wasn’t a proper funeral, and that would be the only way was to have a service type of thing. And when I suggested to Pat that I do that, arrange that, I said I’d be quite willing to pay for the extra or even the whole thing and to just to get to see him. And she just said, No, I’m not going to do that. And in the three weeks I was there, I think I rang the funeral directors about four times and they just kept saying that they couldn’t say when the cremation would take place.

But I did ask if I if she would tell me what was actually on the death certificate, the cause of death, because that was a bit vague. And Jonathan’s email and just received that a few days ago. And it was metastatic colon cancer. I had thought it was more liver cancer, but apparently it had metastasized to the liver and the lungs. And I had had the email from Pat to say that the cremation had taken place, and it was nearly two months from the time he died to the time he was cremated.

So it wasn’t me staying there anyway. It was with everything that did happen. It happened so quickly at the beginning with flying over there, and I think I was partly in shock. Exhausted, of course, from the flight across and everything else that had gone on. It was a weird, very weird time.

It’s a very weird time for everybody with COVID, but it was, doubly, triply so for me. But I always felt that I was glad I was there and not in Australia. I looked across the field from where I was and it was almost like their house was the other side of those fields. There is a certain amount of anger that I was so close and wasn’t allowed to see them.

The number of deaths was going up between I think it was about 248 a day when I arrived and it was over 900 by the time I left and Qantas and the Australian Government had combined and they were going to be sending planes, four planes back that month, April, and the next one was only a few days away. So I decided I was sort of under the impression that this these four would be the last one for the foreseeable future.

And so I took the next one after that. And the flight back was very, very different to the flight over. And there was social distancing. We had a temperature taken. We had a seat between each of us. So unless you were traveling with family, you had space between you.

We were handed a pile of masks and sanitizer. When we got home, we were told to wear the masks and change them every 2 hours. So I had to quarantine in Melbourne and then fly back to Perth and have lockdown in Perth.

I think everybody’s had sort of different experiences of COVID. It’s made me quite cross with people who say, Oh, it’s so hard to stay home or not go to the movies or whatever. And some people have had some really bad experiences.

I don’t think I have grieved properly. I mean a stage of grieving with anger. And yeah, I’m now beginning to. Feel a little more sorrow than I did at the beginning and a lot of reflection and thinking, as I guess most people have with COVID I was really blown away by the amount of support I did get in England, especially when people from Australia were sending flowers to me. You know that in England and in Melbourne, but particularly England, because I know what it cost to send flowers to England.

Thank you for listening. For more information about the Center for Stories, head to our website, Center for Stories. Com.