Painful Stories: More Funeral Director Testimony
What the National Citizen’s Inquiry heard from Funeral Directior Michael Vogiatzakis
Part 1: What Kind of Man Are You?
Click image to watch the testimony of Michael Vogiatzakis.
Yesterday I told you about Michael Vogiatzakis, a Manitoba funeral director who defied heartless pandemic rules while a family mourned the death of a six-year-old. The testimony that this same gentleman delivered two days earlier to the National Citizen’s Inquiry is now available as a stand-alone video here.
For the first 17 minutes, before he’s asked about embalming and blood clots, he relates several disturbing and heart-breaking anecdotes:
- About a man who’d told him personally he was dying of Stage 4 cancer, but whose death certificate said COVID.
- About a woman escorted off the premises by hospital security as her mother, on her deathbed, called for her by name.
- About an elderly resident in a care home begging for rescue and water, crying, believing that his own children had abandoned him.
- About funerals being capped at five people, even though caskets are borne by six pallbearers.
- About a young unvaccinated man who committed suicide after losing his job, being shunned by his friends, and told by his parents not to visit at Christmas.
In the words of Mr. Vogiatzakis, “It puts tears in my eyes when I talk about this. Because it is real. What the government did is real and it hurt a lot of families.”
Fair warning before you watch this video: this is really tough stuff to emotionally process. But it is experiences like these that motivated people to protest – to get behind the wheel of their big rigs, to drive thousands of miles through winter weather, and to insist politicians stop playing with other people’s lives.
Painful stories such as these fueled the Freedom Convoy. After the truckers reached Ottawa, as they sat there day after day, members of the public poured out their hearts to them. People told the truckers their own version of these painful stories.
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Donna Laframboise writes a daily blog at ThankYouTruckers.substack.com. It is a first draft of her upcoming book that focuses on interviews with Freedom Convoy truckers. She is a former National Post and Toronto Star columnist, and a former Vice President of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
