In the Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital room, the doctor told Elena that, unfortunately, her husband Mykhaïlo’s brain showed no signs of activity.
It was last February.
We will do a final test tomorrow, he said.
What if the test is negative, if the brain is not active?
We’ll give you time, replied the doctor. You will then have to decide if you want to donate your husband’s organs.
It was Lidia who translated for her little cousin. Lidia looking at me, in an interview: “I didn’t think Elena would say yes to organ donation…”
But immediately Elena said yes: “I want his heart to keep beating. »
Elena Gustiuc is Moldovan. She married a Ukrainian, Mykhaïlo Karakatitsa, known as Micha, and they had two daughters, Maryna and Yanna.
His cousin Lidia Oprea, who has lived in Montreal for seven years, is also Moldovan. The two women are little cousins, but are also great friends: they grew up together.
The Karakatitsa-Gustiuc lived in a village in southwestern Ukraine, in Odessa Oblast, on the shores of the Black Sea. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Lidia called Elena.
Come take refuge in Montreal, she suggested. Montreal where she lives with Pavel and their children.
Elena replied that Micha would never want. It had taken years to build the family home, adjacent to that of his elderly parents, on farmland. Years of hard work, building a nest, little by little.
Propose it anyway, replied Lidia. And then, tell him it’s not forever, you can always go back to Ukraine when the situation calms down…
The war was not in the village, not yet. But we heard the sounds of war, we felt the echoes. And villagers sometimes took refuge in their basements to sleep better, because of fear.
A few days later, Lidia received an email from Elena: Micha accepted, they were going to come to Montreal.
I specify here that Micha had a prosthesis as a hip, the result of an old injury. He was not mobilized.
The family headed to Elena’s parents in Moldova, estimating that it would take two months for Canadian immigration paperwork to be completed.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY FAMILY
The Karakatitsa-Gustiuc family upon their arrival in Montreal in January
It took eight, and so on January 30, Micha, Elena, Maryna and Yanna finally landed in Montreal to join Lidia, her husband and their two children in Anjou.
Three weeks later, Micha died.
In his village, everyone knew Mykhaïlo. I told you: he built his house with his hands for years. It was a manual, as they say.
Also, the whole village called him when something had to be fixed. Micha always said yes. A furnace that no longer works, a clogged sink?
The people of the village called Micha, sometimes at night…
Elena sometimes protested: “Micha, she said to him, it’s Sunday, you have the right to say no! »
But Micha never, never said no.
Micha only wanted two things.
One, may his family, Elena, Maryna and Yanna in the lead, be well.
Two, help others.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY FAMILY
When called to help, Micha always said yes. “He was so good,” says his wife Elena.
Lidia looks at me, sitting at her kitchen table: “Micha had a big heart. »
Arriving in Montreal, Elena thought: “Micha will be able to rest, after years of working, working, working… He will have a 9 to 5 job, we will be able to have good family time…”
But three weeks later, Micha felt bad, stroke.
Mykhaïlo spent a week in a coma, in Maisonneuve-Rosemont. It hadn’t been a month since he and his family had been in Montreal.
And there, everything collapsed, when everything seemed to be in place…
Elena was going to learn French and find a job. The children would go to school. Micha would eventually work with Pavel, Lidia’s husband, once he had obtained his license from the Régie du bâtiment du Québec.
And one day, not right away, when they could, Elena and Micha could reimburse the sums incurred by Elena to bring them to Montreal. There was no rush.
And there, a stroke had mowed down Micha. He was lying in a bed in a hospital in a country they didn’t know.
Lidia: “I knew organ donation was an option, but I didn’t have the courage to talk about it with Elena…”
It was intensive care physician Jean-Alexis Tremblay who broke the ice that day, when all the signs pointed to Mykhaïlo’s brain death.
At the table, in her house in Anjou, Lidia tells me about the hospital scene. To his right, Elena listens. In front of her, Maryna. Lidia says, she remembers everything. The Dr Tremblay who says that there is not much hope, who mentions organ donation, if the family wishes. Elena who says yes, right away. Maryna who accepts, too, immediately.
“I thought Elena would think longer,” Lidia told me. But she said yes right away, she wanted other people to be able to live thanks to Mykhaïlo’s organs if Micha could no longer live. »
The rules being what they are here, when it comes to organ donation, Elena doesn’t know who received her husband’s organs.
She knows that her Mykhaïlo donated three organs: her kidneys and her heart. In the hospital, learning this, Elena had this reaction: “When Micha was alive, he was so good, if he could have given his heart, he would have given it. »
Elena and her loved ones know this: three people from their new home probably have a better life today, thanks to Micha.
If Elena and Lidia agreed to talk to The Pressfor three reasons.
One, to shed some light on organ donor families. Nobody knows what it’s like to dive into this black hole, they explained to me, around Lidia’s kitchen table.
It’s the worst moment of your life, there are a thousand variables to face: pain, mourning, uncertainty, financial fear. It’s expensive to die.
Two, to thank the Mission of Dr Pierre Marsolais1intensive care physician, coordinator of tissue and organ donation for the CIUSSS du Nord-de-l’Île-de-Montréal and tireless pilgrim of organ donation in Quebec2. The Mission supported the family to face certain logistical and financial challenges after Micha’s death.
The work of the Mission of Dr Marsolais is unknown, Lidia and Elena want the families of organ donors to know: there is help and this help was, for them, essential.
Three, Lidia wants people to know it feels good to help. Just that: helping others is good for you.
And God knows that Elena and Lidia have had help for 40 days since Micha’s death. It did her good to help her friend. Those who helped Elena financially and materially, it did them good: many of them helped, in a thousand ways.
The interview was drawing to a close. Maryna hardly said a word. Maryna, who is 16, who learned the basics of English on her own on the internet, when she could not go to school, in Moldova, who already goes to school not far away, in Saint-Léonard .
I asked Lidia if Maryna wanted to say anything, for this paper. Lidia translated my request.
Maryna took her time to reflect. Then she started talking. And as she spoke, her voice cracked. I didn’t understand what she was saying.
But everyone around the table was wiping their eyes. Elena, the Dr Pierre Marsolais, Lidia, me…
Maryna stopped talking, wiped her eyes.
Lidia turned to me, to translate Maryna’s words: “When I arrived at the funeral home, when I saw my father dead, I had a flash. His heart is not dead, his heart is still beating somewhere. And I thought, smiling: he’s not dead. »