I never meant to become the COVID widow

By Celia Walden July 19, 2021 â€" 3.26pm

Amanda Kloots doesn’t like to think in if onlys. She would drive herself mad that way. But there is one regret that keeps resurfacing.

“That first week when my husband was just lying there on the couch feeling tired...” The 39-year-old US TV host closes her eyes for a second, the pain prompted by that flashback to March 2020 now familiar enough to be wearying. “And I think to myself: ‘If only we had taken him to the emergency room, then and there’.”

With a shake of her tousled blonde head, she tries to dispel the thought. “But honestly, my answer to that is: ‘They would have sent him home.’ They would have sent him home! Because it wasn’t until the third test that Nick tested positive for COVID-19.”

By that time, Broadway star Nick Cordero had been admitted to hospital with pneumonia. Within days the 41-year-old was transferred to the ICU, as the virus ravaged his body. Within weeks he was forced to have his right leg amputated. Just over three months later, he died. “So you know,” murmurs Kloots, “whenever I have those regrets, I try to remember that I don’t think I could have changed anything.”

Cordero’s story touched people far beyond the theatre world in which both he and his wife of three years were well-loved figures. Cordero was a Tony Award nominee (who met his wife starring in Bullets Over Broadway), and his deterioration and death at such a young age and with no underlying health conditions underscored the terrifying COVID-19 unknowns early on in the pandemic. As Kloots started bravely documenting her husband’s progress and setbacks on social media over his 95-day battle, millions of people all over America and beyond started rooting for him, praying for him, and singing for him.

Their son Elvis was just one when Cordero was hospitalised and as word spread about this inspiring young mother’s Instagram dispatches, which included “AK! Positive Thought of the day” and a 3pm singalong to Live Your Life - a rock anthem written by her husband - Ohio-born Kloots’s following grew from 50,000 to more than 600,000. Today, as she publishes a heartbreaking but uplifting memoir she co-wrote with her sister, Anna - a memoir that is already a New York Times bestseller in the US - many struggling with grief and loss are still reaching out to this woman who became a symbol of courage, and Kloots feels that “as a tremendous responsibility”.

“It’s not like I ever intended to become that person,” she tells me from her dressing room at CBS studios in LA, where she is a co-host on The Talk, in between teaching fitness classes. And it’s true that neither “the stoic widow” nor the “specialist in grief” are covetable titles. “But those things were thrown at me. Yes, it was hard when people wrote to me about how to handle COVID, grief or loss, especially after Nick had passed, because every time you’re answering that message you go back into your own grief mode. It takes a bit of peace out of you. And part of you is thinking: ‘Why am I the expert on death? There are books for that.’ But I found that I wanted to be the bigger person and try to help other people through my own life experience.”

After her husband lost his battle Kloots remembers somebody telling her: “You know, I prayed and cheered for Nick every single day, because I felt like if Nick made it our world was going to make it through this pandemic. That still gives me chills now.”

Much has been made of the corrosive effects of social media, but for Kloots it provided a comfort at the most difficult moment of her life. “Even my family were worried about the toll it might take on me, doing those afternoon singalongs, but now everyone close to me understands that the Instagram army I created was a lifeline for me. Those people were like my right arm. I had people all over the world praying for Nick, and specialists ready to help from every field. I had a list of doctors I could call from all over the world. If we needed a place to stay, there were five different homes immediately on offer.” After her husband lost his battle Kloots remembers somebody telling her: “You know, I prayed and cheered for Nick every single day, because I felt like if Nick made it our world was going to make it through this pandemic.” Her eyes fill with tears. “That still gives me chills now. So you see, the social media world can be a really beautiful place.”

In the book, Live Your Life, Kloots’s faith comes through strongly on almost every page. On numerous occasions she is at her husband’s hospital bedside “begging and pleading with God to keep him alive, to let him live for Elvis”. Did no part of her question that faith after Cordero died? “Oh, absolutely. I would cry to my mum and dad and say: ‘This isn’t fair. I have all these thousands of people praying for Nick and God isn’t answering those prayers.’ But I think it’s OK to question your faith, because in the end it actually made me stronger.”

Yet there were moments when Kloots didn’t feel strong, she says. Moments when “I would be grocery shopping and I would literally stop in the middle of the supermarket and just start bawling as I thought of Nick joking ‘are we having gnocchi again?’ ” Then there were the moments after “I would put Elvis to bed and sit there in this very quiet house on the couch, with the person I wanted beside me just... not there”.

Had her husband been able to speak on that very last day, Kloots knows what he would have told her: “He would have said, ‘Amanda, you had better fall in love again. You had better find somebody to be with for the rest of your life. Don’t you dare not be happy!’ And I would have been in tears and shaking my head, but I do hope I can find love again one day. I want Elvis to have a father figure in his life.”

That she insists she feels “lucky and blessed” today is enough to shame anyone whinging about any temporary freedoms still being withheld. “But you know I really do feel that,” she stresses when I tell her this. “Because Nick was a performer I have all these recordings and videos that I can share with Elvis, when lots of people who have lost loved ones might just have what... an old voicemail? So if ever he wants to know how his dad walked or talked, it’s all there. This whole bank of memories. And you know,” her eyes grow shiny again, “sometimes I’ll catch Elvis in his own little world, talking to himself or laughing to himself in the car, and I’ll ask: ‘are you talking to daddy?’ Because I think he is.”

Like the USO girls who tried to keep up soldiers’ morale during the Second World War, Kloots feels she has a clear mission. “I want people to stay safe, stay active, stay spiritual, stay hopeful. Because COVID has been such a huge health check-in for all of us.” Cordero might have been a strong, healthy human being, she goes on, “but it was only because he was those things that he was able to fight as long as he did. So cherish your body, be grateful for your body, and move it every day. That’s always been my motto, and everything that has happened has only fuelled my fire.”

Live Your Life: My Story of Loving and Losing Nick Cordero by Amanda Kloots is published by Harper Collins on July 22

The Telegraph London

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