James D Vance

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 developing a cough, a fit and healthy James had been hospitalised with doctors telling her he had Covid Pneumonia which made his lungs look like blown glass. Jerri heartbreakingly shares how she always believed James was coming home and that doctors believed they could save his life, saying James was: “supposed to be our success story.”After his death, Jerri discovered phone messages in which James told friends how scared he was, but he never revealed his fear to his family, their protector to the last. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/stolen-goodbyes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Om Podcasten

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/3Yq0jW5Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/stolen-goodbyes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.