https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/08/09/widow-covid-missouri-home-loss/
The death of Lisa Grim’s 37-year-old husband not only devastated her and her two sons emotionally, it has broken them financially
Ralphie Grim, 10, pulls back the patio blinds in the family’s new apartment in Ozark, Mo. Ralphie's family recently moved after his father, Alan, died of covid-19. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
By
William Wan
August 9, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
OZARK, Mo. — Lisa Grim braced herself as she turned the key to her family’s new apartment.
It had taken more than a month to find a landlord willing to accept her — a newly widowed 33-year-old raising two kids, barely making $20,000 a year. None of the other 20 apartments had returned her calls and emails. This unit, which she had rented sight unseen, was the only one that approved her application.
“I’m not expecting anything fancy. As long as it’s clean and doesn’t smell,” she said as she opened the door on the first day of July, trailed by her 10-year-old son, Ralphie. She’d left her 4-year-old, Walker, crying that morning at the new day care he hated.
Nine months had passed since her husband Alan, 37, died of covid-19 in a rural Missouri ICU once again filling with coronavirus patients. Nine months since Lisa realized that without Alan’s salary, they could no longer afford their mortgage, forcing her to put the family’s house on the market and move to this apartment an hour away from everything her boys had known.
“Oh yay, it doesn’t stink,” Lisa declared as she walked into the living room. “It’s not bad, not horrible at all.”
Ralphie trudged in behind her and frowned. “It’s smaller than our old house,” he said.
He’d cried and yelled at her when she told him that they had to sell their modest, three-bedroom ranch home.
“It’s the only house I’ve ever lived in,” Ralphie argued. “It’s the house Daddy lived in.”
Lisa Grim shows her younger son, Walker, 4, the family’s new apartment. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
Alan’s death had not only devastated their family emotionally, it had broken them financially. Even as they grieved, the Grims — like tens of thousands of other families shattered by the pandemic — were now facing a cascade of secondary losses: income, home, school friends, long-held plans for the future.
In her left hand, Lisa clutched an inspection form property managers had given her that morning to note any problems in the apartment.
“The stove looks okay,” she said.
“It’s rusty,” Ralphie replied.
Her son — so often angry and sullen these days — seemed delighted to find so many things wrong with their new place.
“Light outside the door doesn’t work.”
“Weird duct-tape stuff on the screen door.”
“Crusty washer outlet.”
“Porch light got melted off.”
The aging unit was on the second floor in a neighborhood of strip malls and cracked asphalt parking lots. When Lisa spotted the listing in June, the property managers told her she couldn’t see the place because tenants were still living there. A few weeks later they told her she couldn’t move in yet because mold had been found in one of the rooms and needed to be removed.
Ralphie and Lisa Grim wait for the movers to arrive at the new apartment. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
So, before she put down the deposit weeks earlier, Lisa had parked outside the apartment complex to look at it from the outside. She tried to imagine what life inside might be like, whether this was the place they could recover, where the three of them might figure out how to be okay again.
The list on her inspection form grew longer. By the time she and Ralphie finished examining every corner, there were more than a dozen problems spelled out in her neat handwriting. Lisa tried to remain upbeat.
“It’s better than I expected,” she told her son.
Later that afternoon, with Ralphie at a friend’s house, Lisa sat alone on the floor of the empty apartment, opened a bulging green folder and spread their bills from the past year onto the carpet. There were car payments, cremation fees, credit card balances. There was the $1,000 in legal fees she paid when the mortgage company refused to give her the deed because Alan died on Oct. 1, 2020, without a will.
There were dozens of notices from the hospitals that treated Alan: $2,749.26 for the ER doctor that admitted him, $2,425.75 for the cardiologist, $7,747.07 for his stay at Cox Medical Center in Branson before being transferred to a larger facility, $228.09 for the final X-ray on his chest.
Words were highlighted in red: “Past due.” “Final notice.”
Lisa had increased her hours at the spa in Branson where she massaged elderly tourists. But just a few months earlier, the pressure she was under had sent her rushing back to Cox with acute gastroenteritis and a full-on panic attack.
Lisa and Ralphie open up the moving container filled with their belongings. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
Now, the bill from her visit — $910.08 — sat on top of the others for her husband.
As she knelt on the floor and flipped through the papers, Lisa began quietly sobbing.
This apartment, she knew, had to work.
‘Where my train set was’
With all the furniture moved out, the old house felt hauntingly empty.
Most of their belongings had already been packed up and were in a moving container headed to the new apartment 35 miles away.
The one exception was the garage, which was still crammed with Alan’s tools and random knickknacks.
“He was a sweet man, but such a pack rat,” Lisa muttered aloud as she waded through the mess.
It should have been straightforward — sell, throw away or keep. For weeks, she tried to make progress. But each new object she picked up felt weighed down by history.
He’d loved vintage Volkswagens and had been working on restoring a 1964 Beetle when he died.
She discovered a power drill set — brand-new, still in its case — that Alan had conveniently neglected to tell her he bought. When she looked online and discovered it cost $400, she felt both annoyed and amused by him. They could use the money, but Lisa couldn’t quite bear to sell it.
Ralphie waits by the door as movers carry in furniture. The new apartment is 35 miles away from the family's original home. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
“Your daddy sure loved spending money on his tools,” she laughed, as her boys ran through the house. “How many voltmeters and hammers does one man need?”
In his old bedroom, Ralphie was leaping from one corner to another, explaining with each spot his feet landed where everything used to be.
“This is where my bed was.”
“This is where my train set was.”
“This is where the dresser was.”
His parents had bought the house in 2010, just months after marrying.
The two had met while working at Branson’s biggest amusement park. Alan worked at the Powder Keg roller coaster. Lisa worked in a tourist shop.
He was a big man — 6 foot 6 inches, 350 pounds — with a gentle manner. Lisa had struggled her whole life with anxiety and depression, and Alan was the first person she met who fully accepted her for who she was.
The three-bedroom house was supposed to be their starter home — a $65,500 fixer-upper on a cheap, rural patch of land.
Lisa had despised its hulking box shape and puke-brown cabinet doors, but she loved what the place represented.
They had found out she was pregnant with Ralphie just weeks before they secured the keys. The future seemed so full.
Alan eventually worked his way up to a $40,000-a-year job at an alarm company and planned to launch his own business installing fire alarms. Lisa wanted to go back to school to become a therapist.
They would save up and buy a better home. Move beyond Branson and its low-paying, tourism-dependent jobs, to a city with better prospects for their boys.
Coffee in hand, Lisa Grim rubs her head as mover Christian Williams carries a bookshelf into the new apartment. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
Instead, 10 years later, here Lisa was, walking through the house, taking apart that future piece by piece.
She’d nervously introduced her sons to the man she was dating, David Troyer, an accountant she’d met online. She told them she still loved their father but this was someone who was becoming important to her. She’d noticed from the start how kind he was. It reminded her of Alan.
They’d been staying with David for the past three weeks as they tried to sell the old house and move into the apartment.
“Why not move in here?” David had asked her.
She tried to explain to him. She wanted her boys to know she’d take care of them and that she didn’t need another man to do it. She wanted them to know their family of three would overcome all that they’d lost.
Now, walking through the house, Lisa ran her fingers across the dark-blue leaves she had stenciled on the wall of the bedroom she had shared with her husband for more than a decade. She paced along the faux-hardwood flooring Alan and Ralphie had spent four days installing in the kitchen. She paused at the bathroom Alan had remodeled on his own.
“He was so proud of this thing,” she said.
They never saved up enough for their dream home. When they tried to sell their house two years ago, a property inspector torpedoed the deal because of a sink hole in their backyard that he said endangered their septic system.
A few months after Alan died, when Lisa listed the house again, two offers fell through again because of the hole.
So she hired an excavation crew to fill it in and received a new offer for $118,000. But as she looked at the newly level backyard, she spotted another problem — the crew had torn up all the grass, leaving the area completely brown and bald.
“I don’t want the inspector seeing it like this,” Lisa said.
Now that she was paying rent on the new apartment, she desperately needed this bid on their house to lead to a sale.
The alarm company Alan worked for had sent a $42,000 life insurance check. The money had helped Lisa and the boys survive the past 10 months. To sell the house, Lisa had used $7,500 to replace the roof, plus $2,700 on the sink hole.
Already, half of the check was gone.
‘I don’t want to be better’
The car was silent on the long drive to the therapist’s office.
In the back seat, Ralphie fiddled with his phone. Beside him, Walker played a game on his tablet.
From the driver’s seat, Lisa glanced at her 10-year-old son in the rearview mirror and struggled for the right words to say.
The death of Lisa Grim’s 37-year-old husband not only devastated her and her two sons emotionally, it has broken them financially
Ralphie Grim, 10, pulls back the patio blinds in the family’s new apartment in Ozark, Mo. Ralphie's family recently moved after his father, Alan, died of covid-19. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
By
William Wan
August 9, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
OZARK, Mo. — Lisa Grim braced herself as she turned the key to her family’s new apartment.
It had taken more than a month to find a landlord willing to accept her — a newly widowed 33-year-old raising two kids, barely making $20,000 a year. None of the other 20 apartments had returned her calls and emails. This unit, which she had rented sight unseen, was the only one that approved her application.
“I’m not expecting anything fancy. As long as it’s clean and doesn’t smell,” she said as she opened the door on the first day of July, trailed by her 10-year-old son, Ralphie. She’d left her 4-year-old, Walker, crying that morning at the new day care he hated.
Nine months had passed since her husband Alan, 37, died of covid-19 in a rural Missouri ICU once again filling with coronavirus patients. Nine months since Lisa realized that without Alan’s salary, they could no longer afford their mortgage, forcing her to put the family’s house on the market and move to this apartment an hour away from everything her boys had known.
“Oh yay, it doesn’t stink,” Lisa declared as she walked into the living room. “It’s not bad, not horrible at all.”
Ralphie trudged in behind her and frowned. “It’s smaller than our old house,” he said.
He’d cried and yelled at her when she told him that they had to sell their modest, three-bedroom ranch home.
“It’s the only house I’ve ever lived in,” Ralphie argued. “It’s the house Daddy lived in.”
Lisa Grim shows her younger son, Walker, 4, the family’s new apartment. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
Alan’s death had not only devastated their family emotionally, it had broken them financially. Even as they grieved, the Grims — like tens of thousands of other families shattered by the pandemic — were now facing a cascade of secondary losses: income, home, school friends, long-held plans for the future.
In her left hand, Lisa clutched an inspection form property managers had given her that morning to note any problems in the apartment.
“The stove looks okay,” she said.
“It’s rusty,” Ralphie replied.
Her son — so often angry and sullen these days — seemed delighted to find so many things wrong with their new place.
“Light outside the door doesn’t work.”
“Weird duct-tape stuff on the screen door.”
“Crusty washer outlet.”
“Porch light got melted off.”
The aging unit was on the second floor in a neighborhood of strip malls and cracked asphalt parking lots. When Lisa spotted the listing in June, the property managers told her she couldn’t see the place because tenants were still living there. A few weeks later they told her she couldn’t move in yet because mold had been found in one of the rooms and needed to be removed.
Ralphie and Lisa Grim wait for the movers to arrive at the new apartment. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
So, before she put down the deposit weeks earlier, Lisa had parked outside the apartment complex to look at it from the outside. She tried to imagine what life inside might be like, whether this was the place they could recover, where the three of them might figure out how to be okay again.
The list on her inspection form grew longer. By the time she and Ralphie finished examining every corner, there were more than a dozen problems spelled out in her neat handwriting. Lisa tried to remain upbeat.
“It’s better than I expected,” she told her son.
Later that afternoon, with Ralphie at a friend’s house, Lisa sat alone on the floor of the empty apartment, opened a bulging green folder and spread their bills from the past year onto the carpet. There were car payments, cremation fees, credit card balances. There was the $1,000 in legal fees she paid when the mortgage company refused to give her the deed because Alan died on Oct. 1, 2020, without a will.
There were dozens of notices from the hospitals that treated Alan: $2,749.26 for the ER doctor that admitted him, $2,425.75 for the cardiologist, $7,747.07 for his stay at Cox Medical Center in Branson before being transferred to a larger facility, $228.09 for the final X-ray on his chest.
Words were highlighted in red: “Past due.” “Final notice.”
Lisa had increased her hours at the spa in Branson where she massaged elderly tourists. But just a few months earlier, the pressure she was under had sent her rushing back to Cox with acute gastroenteritis and a full-on panic attack.
Lisa and Ralphie open up the moving container filled with their belongings. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
Now, the bill from her visit — $910.08 — sat on top of the others for her husband.
As she knelt on the floor and flipped through the papers, Lisa began quietly sobbing.
This apartment, she knew, had to work.
‘Where my train set was’
With all the furniture moved out, the old house felt hauntingly empty.
Most of their belongings had already been packed up and were in a moving container headed to the new apartment 35 miles away.
The one exception was the garage, which was still crammed with Alan’s tools and random knickknacks.
“He was a sweet man, but such a pack rat,” Lisa muttered aloud as she waded through the mess.
It should have been straightforward — sell, throw away or keep. For weeks, she tried to make progress. But each new object she picked up felt weighed down by history.
He’d loved vintage Volkswagens and had been working on restoring a 1964 Beetle when he died.
She discovered a power drill set — brand-new, still in its case — that Alan had conveniently neglected to tell her he bought. When she looked online and discovered it cost $400, she felt both annoyed and amused by him. They could use the money, but Lisa couldn’t quite bear to sell it.
Ralphie waits by the door as movers carry in furniture. The new apartment is 35 miles away from the family's original home. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
“Your daddy sure loved spending money on his tools,” she laughed, as her boys ran through the house. “How many voltmeters and hammers does one man need?”
In his old bedroom, Ralphie was leaping from one corner to another, explaining with each spot his feet landed where everything used to be.
“This is where my bed was.”
“This is where my train set was.”
“This is where the dresser was.”
His parents had bought the house in 2010, just months after marrying.
The two had met while working at Branson’s biggest amusement park. Alan worked at the Powder Keg roller coaster. Lisa worked in a tourist shop.
He was a big man — 6 foot 6 inches, 350 pounds — with a gentle manner. Lisa had struggled her whole life with anxiety and depression, and Alan was the first person she met who fully accepted her for who she was.
The three-bedroom house was supposed to be their starter home — a $65,500 fixer-upper on a cheap, rural patch of land.
Lisa had despised its hulking box shape and puke-brown cabinet doors, but she loved what the place represented.
They had found out she was pregnant with Ralphie just weeks before they secured the keys. The future seemed so full.
Alan eventually worked his way up to a $40,000-a-year job at an alarm company and planned to launch his own business installing fire alarms. Lisa wanted to go back to school to become a therapist.
They would save up and buy a better home. Move beyond Branson and its low-paying, tourism-dependent jobs, to a city with better prospects for their boys.
Coffee in hand, Lisa Grim rubs her head as mover Christian Williams carries a bookshelf into the new apartment. (Tristen Rouse/The Washington Post)
Instead, 10 years later, here Lisa was, walking through the house, taking apart that future piece by piece.
She’d nervously introduced her sons to the man she was dating, David Troyer, an accountant she’d met online. She told them she still loved their father but this was someone who was becoming important to her. She’d noticed from the start how kind he was. It reminded her of Alan.
They’d been staying with David for the past three weeks as they tried to sell the old house and move into the apartment.
“Why not move in here?” David had asked her.
She tried to explain to him. She wanted her boys to know she’d take care of them and that she didn’t need another man to do it. She wanted them to know their family of three would overcome all that they’d lost.
Now, walking through the house, Lisa ran her fingers across the dark-blue leaves she had stenciled on the wall of the bedroom she had shared with her husband for more than a decade. She paced along the faux-hardwood flooring Alan and Ralphie had spent four days installing in the kitchen. She paused at the bathroom Alan had remodeled on his own.
“He was so proud of this thing,” she said.
They never saved up enough for their dream home. When they tried to sell their house two years ago, a property inspector torpedoed the deal because of a sink hole in their backyard that he said endangered their septic system.
A few months after Alan died, when Lisa listed the house again, two offers fell through again because of the hole.
So she hired an excavation crew to fill it in and received a new offer for $118,000. But as she looked at the newly level backyard, she spotted another problem — the crew had torn up all the grass, leaving the area completely brown and bald.
“I don’t want the inspector seeing it like this,” Lisa said.
Now that she was paying rent on the new apartment, she desperately needed this bid on their house to lead to a sale.
The alarm company Alan worked for had sent a $42,000 life insurance check. The money had helped Lisa and the boys survive the past 10 months. To sell the house, Lisa had used $7,500 to replace the roof, plus $2,700 on the sink hole.
Already, half of the check was gone.
‘I don’t want to be better’
The car was silent on the long drive to the therapist’s office.
In the back seat, Ralphie fiddled with his phone. Beside him, Walker played a game on his tablet.
From the driver’s seat, Lisa glanced at her 10-year-old son in the rearview mirror and struggled for the right words to say.
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