Stolen Goodbyes
Welcome to the award-winning Stolen Goodbyes with Karen Rice, foreign affairs journalist, and podcaster. Each week inspiring wives, husbands, partners, children, and newly-weds intimately recount the shock and anguish of death to Covid 19 without warning or goodbye. Each season we push the boundaries to explore, explain and uncover a myriad of aspects of grief to Covid 19. Forced to grieve in isolation, these people detail needless mistakes and decisions that cost lives including patients being placed on Covid hospital wards when they were Covid-free or others condemned to an early death by the secret use of Do Not Resuscitate forms. Some were left to die alone, the ultimate social taboo. This unique, legacy podcast is a social history record of the widespread suffering caused by the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020, an infection that changed the world as we know it. It is also an important space where ordinary yet extraordinary people are remembered and celebrated for everything that made them quintessentially unique and irreplaceable. The participants of this podcast have bared their souls in a bid to stop their loved ones from being written off as just another statistic when they were much-loved individuals whose premature deaths could help to save others from the same fate while holding those responsible to account. This Covid 19 podcast helps participants and listeners to come to terms with a grief like no other. Created, produced, and hosted by Karen Rice, the Stolen Goodbyes podcast won gold in the fiercely competitive Best Lockdown category of the British Podcast Award 2021. Stolen Goodbyes is described as: "outstanding ethical and trauma-informed journalism. Karen Rice manages to capture a historic event in real time by listening with empathy. Future generations will listen to this podcast and know what it felt like to live through this pandemic." Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma. Please listen to, review, and share this podcast with your network, it really helps! If you would like to make a donation (no matter how small) to the running costs of this passion project, please visit: https://karen-rice.com/podcast/ You can follow Karen on Twitter @Ricekmc and Stolen Goodbyes on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3ITXSFC Facebook: https://bit.ly/3kGGwnG and Youtube: http://bit.ly/3Yq0jW5 Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/stolen-goodbyes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
On this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen speaks to Emma Charlesworth who lost her husband Stuart, more commonly known as Charlie, to COVID 19 at the age of just 45.
Emma speaks candidly about how Charlie battled and overcame testicular cancer when he was just 26, only to lose his life to Corona virus less than two decades later.
Emma speaks movingly of how Charlie walked to an ambulance after suffering an apparent panic attac...
Martin and wife Pamela had seven wonderful years together before he fell ill with Covid 19 while working as a speech and language pathologist in New Jersey in the United States. In this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Pamela recounts how the couple met online and describes how inspiring Martin was as a husband, father and medical professional.
Martin fell ill with a cough before being admitted to hospital where the initial feedback was...
On this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen speaks to Georgina Forsythe from Warwickshire who lost her fireman father John to Covid 19 on May 7 2020.
John caught the virus while on a cruise to South America with his wife Linda where they were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary. The couple went ahead with the trip at the beginning of March after the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advised that it was safe to do so.
A cruel and i...
In this episode of the Stolen Goodbyes podcast, Karen speaks to Linsey Simmonds in the Rhondda Valley in Wales who lost her father, Kevin Morgans, to COVID-19 on May 3 2020. He was 65.
Linsey speaks with a beautiful fondness about her popular father who was due to move into a granddad flat at the back of her home where he looked forward to being woken up by his young grandson every morning.
An anguished Linsey describes how the hospi...
In this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen talks to Shelly Weeks from Somerset, who lost her husband Roy to COVID-19 on April 11 2020. He was 73 years old.
She describes the devotion the couple shared through the years despite nae sayers claiming the age gap between them meant the romance was doomed to fail.
Shelly is angry and dissatisfied at the standard of care her husband, who suffered from dementia, received in the care home wh...
On this episode of the Stolen Goodbyes podcast, Karen speaks to Neil Robinson from Durham who lost his ‘whirlwind’ partner Susan Porter to COVID-19 on May 1 2020. She was 58.
Neil talks about some of the favourite memories he shared with Susan from as early as their teenager years to a chance encounter a decade later that resulted in them reuniting for 30 years.
Neil struggles with emotion as he describes how Susan fell ill and was...
On this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen speaks to Eileen McNamee from Scotland who lost her mother Anna to COVID-19 on May 21 2020.
Anna had been a fit 91-year-old who travelled the world cycling with her husband in years gone by. Eileen relives some of her favourite memories as well as describing her mother’s battle with the unforgiving virus.
Anna recounts how her elderly father didn’t want any carers coming into the house when ...
In this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen talks to Sally Gardiner, who tragically lost her husband to COVID-19 in April 2020 just four months after their wedding. Trevor was 59.
Sally describes their whirlwind romance, fairy tale wedding in Leeds castle and honeymoon to Venice. She tells how Trevor gave her so much happiness and a future she always dreamed of.
Trevor, a diabetic, began feeling fatigue and nausea before being admitte...
In this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen speaks with Michelle Rumble from Pinner who lost her mother Violet to COVID-19 on April 9 2020. Violet was 78.
in this heart breaking episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Michelle recounts the shocking lack of care her selfless mother was subjected to after contracting Covid 19.
Michelle describes how her teetotal, non smoker mother’s ultimate fear was dying.
Hospital doctors told Violet h...
In this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen speaks to Carole Caudwell from Sussex, whose mother, Irene, survived four strokes only to lose her life to COVID-19 on 14 April 2020. She was 82.
Carole speaks about the extraordinary relationship Irene had with the stars of Liverpool in her day including the Beatles and Cilla Black.
After surviving strokes at the age of 81, her mother declared: “I’ve got too much to live for.”
Car...
In this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen speaks to Debbie Lewis from Buckinghamshire who lost her father Barry to COVID-19 in April 2020. He was 74. His death came five months after she lost her mother Patricia to cancer.
Debbie speaks fondly of her community-minded father who befriended the sick and lonely in his local area. A practical joker, Barry was never happier than when he was making people laugh.
Debbie recounts the ...
On this episode of Stolen Goodbyes, Karen speaks to Katie Haslam from Wiltshire who lost her father Terry to COVID-19 on 8 April 2020. He was 70.
Katie speaks fondly of her kind and generous father who doted on his baby granddaughter but who had suffered a stroke in later life.
Katie speaks of her utter shock and confusion after hospital staff said her father was okay despite testing positive for COVID 19 before he died a few d...
On this episode of the Stolen Goodbyes podcast, Karen talks with Brielle Adams, the adoptive daughter of Leo Adams, who passed away due to Covid-19 in late March in the United States at the age of 85. Brielle recalls how Leo loved Brielle from the moment he met her and nicknamed her" "Piggy Boo."
Leo went on to foster and adopt her despite being in his 60s.
Brielle, who suffers from addition, explains how Leo became her rock in life...
On this episode of the Stolen Goodbyes podcast, Karen sits down with Jane Smith who lost her husband Goff to Covid-19 in April 2020. Jane talks about the reputation Goff had in their town of Farringdon, Oxfordshire, as a first responder and painfully revisits the days and hours prior to his passing. A larger than life character, Goff loved nothing better than helping people out. Jane is comforted by the fact Goff didn’t suffer, but...
On this episode of The Stolen Goodbyes Podcast, Karen interviews Gordon Bonner, whose wife Muriel died on the 28th of April 2020. Gordon touchingly relates how they were long-distance pen pals before they embarked on a marriage that lasted for 63 years. Gordon was Muriel’s full-time carer after she developed dementia and before she was admitted to a care home after suffering a fall. Gordon movingly relates his anguish at being lock...
On this episode of the Stolen Goodbyes podcast, Karen is joined by Guatemalan Mauro Marquez who lost his mother Irma, 72, to Covid 19, in Oklahoma, in the United States, on January 10, 2021.
In a heart rending episode, Mauro recounts how they shared a very close relationship as his mother was deaf and relied on him to make sense of the world, while she helped him with his short sightedness.
Tragically, Mauro explains how ...
En este episodio del podcast Despedidas Robadas, Karen está acompañada por el guatemalteco Mauro Márquez, quien perdió a su madre Irma, de 72 años, a causa del Covid 19, en Oklahoma, Estados Unidos, el 10 de enero de 2021.
En un episodio desgarrador, Mauro cuenta cómo compartían una relación muy estrecha, ya que su madre era sorda y dependía de él para entender el mundo, mientras que ella le ayudaba con su miopía.
Trágicament...
On this episode of the Stolen Goodbyes podcast, Karen is joined by Jerri Vance from West Virginia, USA, who lost her husband James to Covid 19 on New Year’s Day 2021.
Jerri tells how James spent his life serving others, first in the Marine Corps, and then as a police officer, and was a proud and protective father who always went the extra mile to make his family's lives better.
Tragically, Jerri relates how a week after develop...
On this episode of the Stolen Goodbyes podcast, Karen talks to Emma Charlesworth in Kent in the UK, and Pamela Addison in New Jersey in the USA, who both lost their husbands to Covid 19 in April 2020. Both of their husbands were in their mid 40s when they died.
Despite the distance between them, the women have bonded through a shared sense of loss, support and grief including how both their husbands experienced their first...
In this special episode, people who lost their loved ones to Covid 19 in the first wave of the pandemic recount how Boris Johnson's delayed lockdown in early 2020, has impacted their lives forever.
The UK's first confirmed cases were on 31 January 2020 but Johnson waited almost another two months before performing a screeching u-turn to put the country into full lockdown on March 23. This was all too late for the following people:
...
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