After one year in a pandemic, Quebecers look back at the day it became official

Montreal mayor honours COVID-19 dead Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante comments on the COVID-19 pandemic and what the city and its residents have lost.

Montreal — On March 11, 2020, everything changed.

On that day, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the then-emerging coronavirus had spread to pandemic levels.

With their announcement, they would mark the day which future generations will read about in history books: a first reckoning of what would become one of the deadliest periods of human history.

Likely unknown by the WHO, Montreal resident Vanessa Larche had prepared for the day, even before anyone had mentioned a global catastrophe. In fact, she may have thought of this day more than any other.

It was her birthday, and she was out for dinner with her family. She was eating steak.

“I would have never guessed it would be the last time that we'd all get together to celebrate anything,” Larche told CTV News.

With nine cases already confirmed in Quebec, Larche says she and her family were already cautious of the dangers posed by the virus.

“We were already on high alert,” she said.

“You know, the waiter was touching the glass, touching the plates,” she said. “[I was wondering], you know, is there any danger here?”

Vanessa Larche hugs her children while eating out at a restaurant for her birthday in Montreal on March 11, 2020. (Photo courtesy, Vanessa Torres)

When she arrived home, she says she turned on the news to hear the pandemic announcement. Shortly after came plans for the province-wide, two-week shut down.

“I look back on it now and it's kind of funny,” she said. “I was just an emotional wreck, like ‘oh my goodness, I'm going to have the children home for two weeks nonstop’.”

Two weeks became a month, which became many months, and now, a year.

Like many, Larche says she’s had her fair-share of difficult days this year. She’s lost family members and has fallen into periods of poor mental health.

“I’m known as the rock in the family,” she said.

“[But this year] I've had my moments where I found myself hiding in the bathroom, literally crying on the floor, just out of the stress and the grief of not knowing when this is going to end.”

A year has passed, and her birthday has come again. She says that she’ll be spending it with her husband and kids.

“I told my husband I'm not cooking, and to keep the wine flowing.”

Elsewhere in the province that day in 2020, a group of women were kickboxing.

“The atmosphere is electric,” said Andrea Martyniuk, owner of a boxing and kickboxing gym for women in Greenfield Park, Quebec.

On any given day, the place is busy. “[We’d] have 13 girls [out] on the floor … maybe three, four girls in the front waiting their turn,” she said. “[It was] high energy, and a really wonderful sense of community.”

On that day, though, everyone in the gym stopped what they were doing for an impromptu meeting about what the future would hold. Nobody knew the answer.

Soon came the conversation with her husband, they’d need to close the gym.

Andrea Martyniuk poses next to a punching dummy at 30 Minute HIT, an all-women boxing circuit in Greenfield, Quebec. (Photo courtesy, Andrea Martyniuk)

“I remember we were just sitting at the table, like ‘okay, now what do we do’.”

Martyniuk says she gets calls all the time from people missing the gym, needing to punch out their frustrations.

“[They miss] just having that time for themselves … “Bad day? Punch it out. Hit the bag.”

Across the country, another woman had just gotten her new passport – a document that would become nearly useless in the year ahead. She didn’t know that yet, though.

On that day, Charlotte Crober was still living in Alberta, working for the government. She would soon move to Saint-Jerome to start her new job at a CEGEP.

“All my friends were like, ‘you’re insane’,” she said.

Having never travelled abroad, she had even further-reaching plans for 2020, with prospects for another new job in France.

A year later, she says her passport still looks like she got it yesterday.

“My passport still has no stamps in it,” said Crober.

Charlotte Crober poses with her passport in Saint-Jerome on March 10, 2021. She's had it for exactly one year, and there are still no stamps in its pages. (Photo courtesy, Charlotte Crober)

These days, we know a lot more about the virus. Thousands of people are getting vaccinated every day, and even as variant cases climb in Montreal, overall cases are down in major cities.

Crober says even though she wasn’t able to mark up her passport this year, she feels optimistic for the year to come.

“It's disappointing that I didn't get the choice [to travel], but ultimately, the future is wide open.”

Her first destination won’t be France, or anywhere in Europe for that matter.

“I think I'm going to go home with my parents. It's been a while.”