Nick Cordero’s widow, Amanda Kloots, credits the love and support of family on both sides for helping her through the coronavirus ordeal that took her husband’s life on Sunday after three months.
Cordero died at age 41 from complications of COVID-19. He had fought valiantly for more than 90 days, much of it on a ventilator.
On Monday, Kloots started to pick up the pieces and confront the void left in her life by his passing. And a video from her sister, Kloots said, summed up what got her through.
“How do you get through the hardest time in your life? Family,” Kloots wrote on Instagram.
“I woke up to this video my sister made for me,” she said. “She titled it, The Silver Linings. I have always been lucky to have a family that loves to be together and to support each other. I’m even luckier to have Nick’s family and extended family that are the same.”
The nearly 11-minute clip depicts a growing Elvis, who is now about a year old, and shots of day-to-day life made all the more poignant by what those simply daily tasks were supporting.
“This video captures these last 95 days,” Kloots wrote. “The love, the exhaustion, the bonds, the smiles, the song, the exercise, the hard work, the care, support and most of all love. They did all of this for Nick, Elvis and I — selfless time from their lives to be with us. In times of trauma, look for the silver linings. Spend time with family. Smile through the tears. Have faith when things seem impossible. Love one another.”
Kloots has been an unfailing cheerleader for her husband, a standout actor and dancer in several Broadway shows, a healthy man with no underlying conditions. Admitted to the hospital in late March with what they thought was pneumonia, he never came out. COVID-19 and its complications were something they never saw coming.
“He didn’t have a fever. He didn’t have a cough,” Kloots told “Good Morning America” in May, according to ABC News. “He had a sense of smell, he had a sense of taste, so we really didn’t think it was COVID, especially [with] his no preexisting conditions.”
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To this day they still don’t know how he got it, she said.
Throughout the ordeal, she never stopped rooting for Cordero, and getting others to root for him, in song, prayer and dancing. That included a daily exhortation to her Instagram followers to sing Cordero’s song, “Live Your Life,” in his honor. On Monday she marked the last one.
“3 p.m. PST will forever remind me of Nick now,” Kloots wrote on Instagram Stories. “Join me today on Live to sing for Nick one last time.”
Kloots brought thousands along on that journey of love and hope, CNN said.
Upon announcing his death Sunday, she expressed gratitude for the support she received in return.
“You have no idea how much you lifted my spirits at 3 p.m. everyday as the world sang Nick’s song, ‘Live Your Life.’ We sang it to him today, holding his hands,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “As I sang the last line to him, ‘They’ll give you hell but don’t you let them kill your light, not without a fight. Live your life,’ I smiled because he definitely put up a fight. I will love you forever and always my sweet man.”