For some, 2020 has been a year of goodbyes and sorrow. For others such as Bev Boro and Doris Crippen it has been a year of surprises and reuniting. While Boro was reviewing some documents at work she could not help but notice a name that was sticking out from all of the names on the patients’ list. In disbelief Boro started to try and make sense of what her eyes were seeing. Could this Doris Crippen on the list be her long-lost baby sister, the same she had been looking for an entire lifetime? Boro, a Medication Aide at Dunklau Gardens, a nursing home and rehabilitation facility in Fremont Nebraska, headed to see for herself who Doris Crippen was. She grabbed a writing board and wrote on it: is Wendall Huffman your father? Crippen said yes.
Boro is the youngest of ten Huffman children. Huffman had ten children with three different mothers. Unfortunately, Boro ended up in the Foster care system, thus losing contact with her siblings, including Crippen. The sisters looked for each other for decades, however they failed to find each other’s contact information. That is, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the unexpected happened. Sometime in the spring Crippen who is 73, started feeling unwell and her state of health continued to deteriorate. As she continued to weaken, one day she fell off her bed while she was trying to reach for a glass of water on the nightstand. She was unable then to get herself back up from the floor. Thus, her son found her on the floor several hours later after she had fallen over.
After Crippen was rushed to the hospital, it was discovered that she had in fact gotten her arm fractured. Additionally, a COVID-19 test was conducted and Doris turned out to be positive for Coronavirus, which helped explain her prolonged general state of fatigue. She was then admitted to Nebraska Medicine and her prognosis was at the time very uncertain. After battling the relentless virus for over a month, it was clear that Doris would survive, so she was transferred to Dunklau Gardens, the nursing home and rehabilitation facility where Boro had been working as a medication aide for at least two decades. Crippen and Boro were the oldest and youngest siblings respectively. Boro went into Foster Care and subsequently got adopted, making it finding her very difficult. She was around six months old at the time. Crippen sees this reunification as a silver lining in the midst of the global pandemic. She said: “While others are angry about the coronavirus, I consider my COVID-19 experience to be a blessing.”She shared in a recent interview with the Washington Post on July 30th, 2020.
