Vicky Bjarnason, a victim of the vehicle attack at the Lapu-Lapu Day block party in Vancouver, with (from left to right) her stepson Kristjan and sons Helgi and Thor.Supplied
There was nothing in the world that Vicky Bjarnason loved more than her sons, Thor, 28, and Helgi, 27, and her stepsons Stefan, 38, and Kristjan, 35.
A resident of the Philippines, Ms. Bjarnason, 56, spent her last month and a half visiting them in Vancouver, splitting her time evenly between her “boys,” as she still called them.
But last Saturday, Helgi Bjarnason was holding her hand when a speeding SUV charged through Lapu-Lapu Day festivities. He tried to pull his mom to safety, but she was torn from his arms, Mr. Bjarnason explained Wednesday night from hospital, where he is recovering from a badly broken leg and other injuries.
Mr. Bjarnason’s friend Kira Salim, 34, who was with them that night, was also killed.
Vicky raised the boys in Cavite, south of Manila, working as a flight attendant, realtor “and doing anything else she could to raise me and my brother as best she could,” said Mr. Bjarnason.
In 2017, Thor moved to Vancouver to become a pilot. Mr. Bjarnason followed in 2022, becoming an occupational therapist.
Kira Salim.Supplied
He said Vicky was like the Energizer Bunny: She couldn’t sit still and never tired. At 10 p.m., she would finally settle and ask Helgi to start a movie. Not five seconds later, she’d be up chopping lettuce and making him chicken adobo.
She was adventurous. When Helgi and his boyfriend, Garrett McIlroy, took her tubing in the snow at Cypress Mountain, she went flying down the hill “again and again,” Mr. McIlroy recalls.
When they took her camping – another first – she was “chopping wood for the fire like a natural,” Mr. McIlroy recalls. They played cards in the tent until midnight. The next day she dipped her feet in the freezing ocean, grabbed a floatie, and drifted out to sea.
A few days before the attack, she started belting out Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love” from memory. The night before she died, she sang it with Mr. Bjarnason while celebrating his 27th birthday.
“I know she would have chosen for me to live – without a doubt in her mind,” he said.
“Our lives will never be the same without her.”