Coronavirus: Young widows

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Each Covid-19 death has a tremendous personal impact on loved ones. Host Nuala McGovern talks to three women who have lost their husbands to the disease. Their Facebook group 'Young Widows and Widowers of Covid-19’ is supporting others in the same situation. They call it “the club that nobody wants to join”. We also hear from three people in South Africa, Australia and the US who share the unexpected social consequences - both positive and negative - of wearing face masks when you have a facial disfigurement or difference.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Nula McGovrin on the BBC World Service and this is BBC OS
0:05.8	conversations about coronavirus. Young Widows.
0:10.3	This time three women share how they support people who like them have lost partners due to COVID and we hear how for those with facial disabilities or differences
0:24.0	wearing a face mask can bring unexpected side effects.
0:28.0	I don't think I realized how much mental and emotional energy it took to deal with the things that I deal with on a daily basis
0:36.8	just in terms of stairs and comments and basic harassment really.
0:50.0	While mass vaccination will gradually slow the spread of COVID-19, unfortunately deaths from the disease are continuing to rise. The World Health Organization,
0:56.3	they reported that almost 2 million people worldwide have died from COVID-related issues with the United States and the United Kingdom
1:05.2	among the countries with the highest death rates.
1:08.8	Each death has a tremendous personal impact on loved ones and Pamela Addison in New Jersey in the US
1:16.6	knows this all too well and after her husband Martin succumbed to the disease, she founded a Facebook group called Young Widows and Widowers of COVID-19 to support others in the same situation.
1:31.0	Jennifer Law is also in the US in Texas. situation. Charlesworth's husband Stuart in the UK was in his 40s when he too died during the pandemic.
1:47.4	The three men's deaths left eight children without a father. Pamela began by painting a picture of her late husband Martin.
1:57.0	He was a big music fanatic. If we were at a restaurant and a song came on.
2:03.0	He would stop in his tracks, look up at the ceiling,
2:06.3	and then within five seconds could tell me the artist
2:10.2	and the name of the song.
2:11.4	I was like, you should be on a game show because you probably won.
2:14.8	And he was really into guitars and he would dabble in music. He even wrote a song about me
2:21.0	which I found on his iPhone after he died so I didn't even
2:24.1	know he was doing that. It just showed how much he loved me and adored me. He loved being a dad.
2:31.6	The joy that those two kids brought out in him was something I just
	...

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