Eighty-eight-year-old Arne Sorbo misses his wife.
The retired Burnaby accountant met Iris when she was just 16.
He was 24 and fresh off the boat from Norway.
She was his best friend’s cousin, and her parents had picked him up at the train station.
On weekends, she started tagging along with her brother, her cousin and Arne when they went out dancing.
“It became a habit. She was likable, and I was a good looking boy. … Before you knew it, I got a kissing sore,” says Arne with a laugh, pointing to a cold sore healing on his lip.
He married Iris four years later.
They had four kids – a girl and then three boys.
She became a nurse; he worked for a fishing insurance company for 25 years.
They were parted a year-and-a-half ago.
“It means hell, absolutely hell,” Arne says of his life without her at a private care home in Langley. “I get up in the morning, look at the wall; look at the wall at noon; look at the wall at night, no communication. Everything is dead.”
Iris is alive, but she lives 32 kilometres away in Burnaby at Normanna Rest Home.
Those 32 kilometres might as well be a thousand.
Communicating over the phone is tough because Arne has trouble hearing and Iris doesn’t have easy access to a phone.
Their adult children try to get them together, but transporting the frail, wheelchair-bound seniors is hard on them physically.
Arne has been on a waiting list since September to join Iris at Normanna, but despite nine vacancies opening at the facility since then, he hasn’t been given a spot.
Arne’s son, Todd Sorbo, doesn’t get it.
“Based on medical need, sometimes you have to do that,” he says. “But right now there’s no medical, ethical reason why they should be apart.”
Sorbo and his siblings moved their parents into an assisted-living facility two-and-a-half years ago when the couple could no longer maintain their own Burnaby home.
Iris had been Arne’s main caregiver since he was partially paralyzed 10 years ago by Guillain-Barré Syndrome after a flu shot.
She took care of him for another year in their assisted-living apartment before she began needing full-time care herself because of Lewy body dementia, a disease that closely resembles Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
“Half the time she’s in a fantasy world and the other half she’s good,” Sorbo says. “That’s unfortunate because she knows when we don’t visit her, and she knows that her husband’s not there.”
Sorbo had to work hard to get his mother into Normanna, a care home founded by the local Norwegian community in the 1940s.
Iris had volunteered on the care home’s auxiliary for decades, and a tapestry made by her in better days still adorns the foyer.
Arne, meanwhile, didn’t qualify for residential care when he and Iris were parted a year-and-a-half ago.
And by the time he started needing full-time care in September, no spots were open that would reunite him with his wife.
He was offered placement in other facilities, but his son suspected that would mean waiting even longer to get into Normanna.
Fraser Health spokesperson Tasleem Juma says he was right.
“It’s true that once you have a bed, you’re health and your situation is not at risk any more,” she says. “So yes it does become less of the priority in getting you moved around.”
What frustrated Sorbo when he and his siblings were trying to decide where to move their dad was the lack of information he said they got from Fraser Health about where Arne was on the Normanna waiting list, what factors would impact his wait and how long it might take to get a spot.
“The playbook is hidden,” Sorbo says. “You’re making all these decisions without really being able to forecast anything.”
Ultimately, Arne’s family decided to move him into private care in Langley.
Sorbo isn’t hopeful his parents will ever be reunited because he believes his dad is getting bumped out of Normanna vacancies by seniors coming out of crowded local hospitals.
His view is supported by a recent Fraser Health email to care-home managers.
The memo – obtained by the NOW – stated hospitals are “in severe congestion every day” and called on care homes to make beds available even if the homes were experiencing a flu outbreak.
But Juma says reuniting couples in the same residential-care facility is a top priority for Fraser Health.
Designated a “reunification” client, Arne is at the very top of the Normanna waiting list, she says.
Of the vacancies that have come up since September, however, she says some were designated women’s or special needs beds that Arne doesn’t qualify for.
It’s possible to move clients around to accommodate the reunification of a couple, according to Juma, but it’s rare because of the disruption it could cause for other patients.
“The bottom line for us is that we’re doing everything we can to get them together,” Juma says, “but unfortunately we have to work within certain restrictions, and we have to work with Normanna to make sure that we can accommodate them.”
Normanna executive director Margaret Douglas-Matthews, however, says her facility has never gotten a request from Fraser Health to accommodate Arne, and she says it’s the health authority that decides who fills the beds.
“We do not control the gate,” she says.
For Arne and Iris, meanwhile, life apart drags on.
“The biggest complaint they have about living right now is they’re bored out of their tree,” Sorbo says. “They don’t have someone they can share old stories with.”
Slipping unpredictably between current reality and old memories, Iris says it would be wonderful to have her husband around.
“Right now I’m really lonesome,” she says. “That’s the hardest part.”
What would she do with Arne if he were with her again under the same roof?
“I’d put my arms around him and give him a big kiss ... I think maybe our sex days are over,” she says matter-of-factly. “It’s too bad because we had a good relationship.”
For Arne, it doesn’t matter that his wife’s mind isn’t there the way it once was – he wants her near.
“Her face is there, and her movements are there,” he says. “The difference would be I could have a face to look at, her face I’ve looked at since ’56. I loved her then and I love her now.”
For Sorbo, who is struggling to balance his own family and career with arranging the best care for his parents, there is some consolation in talking to other families he has met at his mom’s and dad’s care homes.
“Everybody has a story just like me,” he says. “I’m not the exception; I’m the rule. Everyone else who hasn’t gone through it yet, they assume the system actually is OK.”
