COVID took many in the prime of life, leaving families to pick up the pieces

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/ [login to see] /covid-prime-of-life
Around 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning last October, Christina Summers got a phone call she'll never forget. It was a doctor at the Baltimore hospital where her husband, James, had been admitted a week earlier for COVID-19. He'd been struggling to breathe. Now, they were calling to tell her James was being put on a ventilator.

She picked up the phone and turned to the people who had been there for her most of her life: James's family. "I called his siblings immediately in the middle of the night and I said, 'You all got to come here immediately. I'm scared, I'm scared.'"

One of her sisters-in-law had just arrived when the doctor called back with the news: James had died, leaving Christina, who was 36 at the time, to raise their nine children on her own. "Me and my husband really worked like a team," she says. "My teammate's not here to help me, so I'm really feeling a single mom vibe, just trying to get accustomed to this."