Amanda Kloots reflects on bringing Nick Cordero to hospital 1 year ago
Tuesday marked a grim anniversary for Amanda Kloots — exactly one year earlier, she took her sick husband to the hospital. Just over three months later, Nick Cordero died in that same hospital after a long and harrowing battle with COVID-19 and complications brought on by the virus.
It was, as she told her followers on Instagram this week, the last time she “saw Nick as Nick.”
“March 30, 2020 Elvis and I drove Nick to the emergency room at Cedar Sinai,” she wrote in the post. “With Covid restrictions in place, we didn’t know which entrance was even open, so I left him on the corner. We didn’t hug. We didn’t kiss goodbye. We couldn’t. It was clear he was sick with something and we couldn’t take any risks.”
Kloots and the Broadway star wed in 2017, and at the time of Cordero's illness, the son they shared, Elvis, hadn’t reached his first birthday.
“I don’t even know if he said bye to Elvis or if we said, ‘I love you,” the 39-year-old continued. “I told him I’d stay nearby and to call me when he’s done. We walked to The Grove to kill time. We thought it would be a couple hours. ... That was the last day I saw Nick as Nick.”
It remains a painful landmark in her grief.
Related: “I feel like he’s with me every day."
“My heart breaks today,” she wrote. “I wish I could go back in time, run to him as he was walking away, grab him, kiss him and hold him in my arms. On April 1, he went on the ventilator and I never spoke to him again.”
The message she wrote accompanied a video clip showing how she and Elvis spent the day, revisiting The Grove in Los Angeles one year later.
“We’re sitting at the beautiful Grove, waiting to hear something from Nick,” she said as she held their son close. “They’re playing ‘Volare.’ It’s a sign — a sign that everything’s going to be OK.”
Although the song is officially titled “Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu,” it’s commonly referred by the word that kicks off the chorus, ‘”Volare,” which means “to fly” in Italian.
Related: Nick Cordero died from COVID-19 complications in July 2020.
“To anyone, who like me, that dropped their person off at the hospital never to really ‘see’ them again, I’m thinking and praying for you today,” the “The Talk” cohost and fitness instructor added. “This day is just hard, there’s no other way to say it.”
In her Instagram Stories, she shared an additional message alongside a photo of her and her late husband.
Included in that message was a plea to others: “This virus is real. We aren’t through this yet. Continue to do your part.”
Cordero was 41 years old when he died. He had no known pre-existing conditions but was quickly overwhelmed by the impact of the coronavirus, developing infections that prompted two-mini-strokes, septic shock and eventually led doctors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to amputate his right leg. He died on July 5, 2020.
Kloots closed her post Tuesday with by quoting journalist and author Maria Shriver, writing, “@mariashriver wrote yesterday, ‘Rather than mourning what was, let me use this time as a chance to reflect on how we can make things better than the way they were before.’” To that she added, "Do your part, continue doing your part. For Nick and every COVID patient that didn’t make it home."
