Peter Owen

If Boris Johnson had locked down earlier, Peter Owen would still be alive today, this is the firm belief of his daughter Becky. Instead, this beloved father and grandfather caught Covid 19 shopping in Sainsbury’s on March 19, three days before Johnson belatedly put the country into lockdown. Becky vividly describes the void left behind by the death of her father, a proud Welshman from Aberystwyth who “always made time for people.”Equally as powerful is her description of the surreality of his death and feelings of distorted grief because all the rituals that usually go with death were denied.  “I have nothing in my head to say that it’s really happened,” Becky explains. “I’ve gone from seeing my dad before lockdown to seeing a pot of ash, there was nothing in between. That’s a pretty abnormal thing“There was no proof that he died. I have no idea where he died, what the hospital ward looked like that he was on, or the bed, I don’t know where he was cremated, I don’t know any of the circumstances around his death.” Heartbreakingly, the nature of his death meant: “I’ve no idea what his last words to me were meant to be.”As with so many people in the Covid-19 bereaved community, Becky has only recently faced her loss and grief: “Coming out of lockdown was very difficult. I felt if I stayed in lockdown, he might somehow come back again and I wouldn’t be leaving him behind.” 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/ or http://bit.ly/3kMSKLgYou 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.

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.