22 • January 6, 2022 - January 12, 2022
THE NEW YORK AMSTERDAM NEWS
Health
Finding strength to continue when the ‘rock’ is no longer there By INDIA BOOKHART Howard University News Service Sandra McGowan-Watts is still stunned at how quickly her life turned upside down. “I go from being married and having a spouse, to being a widowed, single mother in the course of a month,” said McGowan, 47, a doctor with a practice in suburban Chicago. Her husband, Steven Watts, a 51-year-old Chicago bus driver, became sick in early April of 2020 from a disease that didn’t even have a name just 48 days earlier. The coronavirus pandemic was in its initial stages. There was massive confusion and misinformation regarding the disease. Epidemiologists, health care officials and the Centers for Disease and Control were struggling to find answers to a virus that suddenly was killing thousands. How does it spread? How deadly is it? What are the symptoms? How can we protect ourselves? Do masks work? What kinds of masks? Watts had been taking care of his ill mother, who had been experiencing shortness of breath, an incessant dry
cough and other symptoms, McGowanWatts said. He soon began experiencing the same symptoms, she said. “My husband got sick somewhere between visiting his mother and taking her to the hospital,” she said. Watts died from COVID-19 May 8. His mother, Lois Meeks, 68, died of the disease seven days earlier. These days, McGowan-Watts finds herself in a strange new place. A single child, she has no siblings to lean on, though she has two cousins who she said are like sisters. Her parents are dead. For support, she looks to her 13-year-old daughter, Justise, a few friends, relatives and a Facebook support group for widowed Black women. The McGowan-Watts family is one of thousands in the U.S. who have experienced the loss of one or more parents to COVID-19. According to the National Institute of Health, a child loses a parent or guardian in one of every four COVID deaths, a devastating consequence that is affecting the lives of an estimated 140,000 children. McGowan-Watts said the loss of her husband has been extremely difficult for her, but it has been particularly hard on her daughter. The relationship her
daughter had with her father was a special bond, she said. “He was her person,” she said. “He was the person she went to. He would get her off the school bus. He would take her to get snacks after school and he would take her to gymnastics.” The loss of her father has affected Justise in numerous ways, her mother said. She is in counseling to deal with the grief. The counselor advised her to quit her gymnastics classes because they were a consistent reminder to her of the loss of her father. “It’s hard for her to do gymnastics, because she’s looking for him to be there, and she’s looking to see him in the audience,” her mother said. “So, she has now switched to swimming.” Justise said the decision to switch was not hard: “I’ve always been good at swimming, so I decided to give it a try,” she said. She also attended Experience Camp at Camps Lake of the Woods and Greenwoods in Decatur, Michigan, where children talk about their feelings around grief and loss of a loved one. As one escape, Justise now cooks for the family most nights, her mother said, something she often did with her
father. “Cooking has been one way Justise manages her grief,” her mother said. “She chose cooking because that’s something he did a lot. A lot of the times when I wasn’t home, he was cooking.” Justise has created her own cooking show on Facebook, Justise’s Cooking Tutorial. With her braided hair down or in two buns, sometimes wearing her Girl Power t-shirt, sometimes in eyeglasses, Justise walks viewers through her family’s kitchen with a huge smile. Her ingredients are prepped and laid out in front of her. She carefully identifies what is needed for the dish and shows her audience how to make meals from scratch. McGowan-Watts is having her own difficulties dealing with her husband’s death. She always knew that on paper, they were an odd match—a medical doctor with a six-figure salary and a bus driver. She described him as a humorous, loving and supportive provider. She said he had a gregarious, warm personality. Whenever he was around, he had people laughing, she said. For her, she said, he was her “rock.”
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Bill de Blasio Mayor Dave A. Chokshi, MD, MSc Commissioner
