[00:00:00] News Report: Right now at 6:00-enough fentanyl in this Mickey Mouse baby bottle, police say, to kill ten people. The drug did kill a Nassau County nine month old. His mother is under arrest. 

[00:00:11] Angela Kennecke: (MUSIC UP!) The details are disturbing. Police have found deadly doses of fentanyl in things as unexpected as baby bottles and fake Jolly Ranchers. Our guest today on Grieving Out Loud has first hand experience with the strange and tragic ways this strong synthetic opioid is killing Americans.

[00:00:36] Barb Walsh: and she grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and. She does, she just chugged it. What she didn't know was that the water bottle contained diluted fentanyl, and she died immediately on the kitchen floor,

[00:00:52] Angela Kennecke: I'm Angela Kennecke this is Grieving Out Loud. Join us as Barb Walsh opens up about her heartbreaking loss. the powerful message she wants to convey to other parents, and the tireless effort she's making to prevent more tragic deaths amidst our nation's fentanyl crisis.

[00:01:16] Barb Walsh: She always said, oh mom, you're my best friend. I was like, I'm not gonna be your best friend until you graduate from college and have a job. And she did. And we traveled together and we were good friends. And she called me like a friend, not like a daughter who wasn't mature.

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:01:35] Angela Kennecke: Barb, welcome to Grieving Out Loud, and I am always saying this when I meet fellow parents who've lost someone to a Fentanyl poisoning. But I am so sorry that we're meeting under these circumstances.

[00:01:46] Barb Walsh: I agree. with that a hundred percent. but it's good that we're meeting under these circumstances because people need help.

[00:01:54] Angela Kennecke: They do and when we band together. We are a much louder voice and I think that can be a precipitate for change. So, tell me about your daughter Sophia. You of four children.

[00:02:06] Barb Walsh: She was 24 years old. She was professionally employed, college educated. Worked at a sales territory in Myrtle Beach and got promoted to Charlotte. had just moved into a new apartment and Charlotte In July 5th, she went back up to Boone, where she went to college to see some friends. She stopped at an acquaintance's house and she was thirsty and she grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and. She does, she just chugged it. What she didn't know that the water bottle contained diluted fentanyl, and she died immediately on the kitchen floor,

 And she was not reported as dead for 12 hours 

[00:02:49] Angela Kennecke: that is an unbelievable story, and I know everyone listening to this podcast will be shocked to hear that this incident happened and happened to your daughter and will think, how can that be? How can a bottle of water be in a refrigerator with fentanyl in it? Do you know?

[00:03:08] Barb Walsh: I. do have some information on that. our private investigator got ahold of, a chemist at Duke University and wanted to know, is it still potent if it's dissolved in water? The answer is yes, is colorless, odorless, and so it just looks like water. And, the speculation is this person, was in some pain or had a, a substance abuse disorder and would take a water bottle to work. Nobody thinks anything of that. And, um, would dose himself, microdose himself by the cap full, wouldn't drink the whole bottle, maybe drink it throughout the day. we do know that he did go to rehabilitation afterwards,

 (MUSIC UP!) 

While Barb believes her daughter died from drinking water laced with fentanyl, sadly she may never know exactly what happened.

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:04:05] Barb Walsh: We were told by the police because this person did not say how Sophia died. he constructed a story and um, he called 9 1 1. I have seen the death photos and I am amazed that the E M T didn't say, well, this didn't just happen. But they listened and believed to this person's story that Sophia was responsible for her own death due to, cocaine. lived three hours away from there and our local PD showed up at our door and shared the same story. And we're like, what? You know, what's going on here? who is this person and why? why? was she there? This was on a Monday morning, we're like, why was she there when she had work and she had a two hour drive to get back to work? She loved her job so it took us hiring an attorney and a private investigator to get them to finally admit that there was a case. by that time, they hadn't interviewed him, hadn't questioned him. They went to go interview him and he was gone. Didn't know where he went. we did not find out in the state of North Carolina, we have a pretty lengthy delay between a death occurs. the autopsy is pretty immediate within 72 hours. died in August. We did not find out until December that she died from Fentanyl. And at that point the police were like, oh, okay, we'll start to investigate this. Well, you can't, 

but our private investigator worked with us. We continued to speak to old friends, Sophia's, and we just broadened the requests until finally, someone knew how Sophia died on September 9th it was circulating around the community and nobody told the police, nobody called us. And that's was the whole water bottle story. So we finally on Sophia's birthday, met with the sheriff's office, the narcotics office, and let them know what we found out and needed to go back and reinvestigate this. And they did. They brought him in. He had an interview with his attorney presence. Then they did a polygraph test with the State Bureau of Investigation and he failed it and he would not admit the water bottle theory, but he admitted that he had given her a Percocet pill that had fentanyl in it, and they let him walk it was voluntary manslaughter and. the DA four months later wouldn't charge 'em. They let 'em walk, so we got nothing. 

[00:06:52] Angela Kennecke: Yeah. As an investigative reporter, , everything about what you just said makes me wanna start going through, files and documents and trying to figure out what the truth is here.

you believe it was a water bottle, but do you know for sure I mean, or will you ever know for sure.

[00:07:08] Barb Walsh: Well, that's what the DA said. He said. The problem that we have here, Barb, is are only two people who know for sure that's your daughter is dead. And that's this guy, and he's not, he has told 10 stories and he has actually admitted to killing her, but He failed the polygraph test on the water bottle.

[00:07:30] Angela Kennecke: So, The fact that just the two of them were involved would lead me to think that would be plenty to charge him, whether it was through a pill or she drank it in a water bottle, that he should be charged either way.

[00:07:43] Barb Walsh: Agree I agree

[00:07:45] Angela Kennecke: So did you get any answers as why that did not happen?

[00:07:49] Barb Walsh: So, I've learned a lot. das look at their track record, their win loss record. They get to decide whether they want to accept a case to prosecute not. if they think it's too difficult and they might lose, they will not take the case.

[00:08:06] Angela Kennecke: And that is the truth.

[00:08:07] Barb Walsh: That is the truth,

[00:08:08] Angela Kennecke: And ' cause as a reporter, I've had plenty of prosecutors tell me, well, there's just not enough evidence that we would convince a jury of 12 or whatever that this the way it is, even though we know. it's too risky and it costs too much money and it's gonna end in a loss anyway.

I've heard that from prosecutors. Yeah. 

[00:08:27] Barb Walsh: But we do have his direct friends who he called and said how Sophia died. told them, but that's considered

[00:08:34] Angela Kennecke: Yeah. Hearsay. Hearsay. Yeah. And, what I think about is my daughter did have a drug problem. We knew it. We were three days away from an intervention with her. We knew something was wrong. We didn't know what she was using. Right. But we knew that something was horribly wrong, and we were working on that intervention when she died of fentanyl poisoning.

It was laced in a drug. She didn't know that. however, in Sophia's case, I mean by all accounts, she was functioning, she was doing well. She graduated from college. I mean, by all accounts, she wasn't a drug user.

[00:09:07] Barb Walsh: she was a recreational drug user.

Right. So right now that's risky.

[00:09:13] Angela Kennecke: Uhhuh.

[00:09:14] Barb Walsh: There is no judgment from me on somebody who dies from Fentanyl because there's a many, many ways it can happen. And in all instances, these people are not choosing to die.

[00:09:27] Angela Kennecke: No.

[00:09:27] Barb Walsh: They're not choosing to, all of a sudden, Hey, gimme some fentanyl.

I'm gonna take too much of it because wanna see what that feels like. Somebody who has a substance use or a dependency, they buy the same thing every day and they're fine. But somewhere behind the scenes, somebody decided to put a Fentanyl additive into it, they're no longer with us.

They're dead.

was not their choice.

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:09:54] Angela Kennecke: In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently sent out an alert warning that drug overdose deaths involving counterfeit pills have doubled. Young Americans, in particular, have been hit hard by fake Percocets and OxyContin that contain deadly doses of fentanyl. You can read more about this alert and check out the latest news headlines about topics surrounding our nation's drug epidemic, substance use disorder, and the government's response by heading over to our website, emilyshope.

charity.

 (MUSIC UP!) I just think also something that's really hard to live within your case is the fact that she sat there dead on the kitchen floor for 12 hours and.

 I was at the scene of where my daughter died within a few hours of her death, maybe an hour. I mean, I don't really know because she was alone in her room, but I was there and I think I would hard time reconciling my mind with that. I'm sure that's been the case for you.

[00:10:58] Barb Walsh: What bothers me about it is she died and there was nobody who cared there. It wasn't that she was alone. She wasn't in a safe space apparently. And then I don't see any photographs of the death scene until after the case closed and I got all the files and I look at these pictures, which are gruesome, and I am like, how as law enforcement, you see a lot of dead bodies, law enforcement. You know what? Somebody who's been dead for over 12 hours look like. How could you believe his story? That is where it stops for me.

And they did nothing to figure out who Sophia was, and they just assumed she deserved to die.

[00:11:48] Angela Kennecke: Yeah. That's a horrible, horrible attitude that is prevalent in our society. Oh, well, if they died of fentanyl, they deserved to die. They deserved it. 'cause they took something and they shouldn't have.

[00:11:58] Barb Walsh: yes.

[00:11:59] Angela Kennecke: And I can, I can feel your frustration and what a travesty of justice. And also how do you not let that anger and that feeling of, I didn't get any resolution here, eat you up inside and destroy you.

[00:12:13] Barb Walsh: I have three other daughters.

I have to keep going for them. I spent the last, the year after Sophia died, making sure they stayed alive because I'm sure you have talked to other folks. young people will self-medicate and that's very risky. And I know a number of families that have lost two children. 

lose the first one unintentionally, and then they lose the second one because they were trying to self-medicate to take care of the grief from the first death. So that was my number one goal, to keep them alive. My youngest is still, my, the youngest two were still in college. This happened on the first day of class of their semester. I have to call 'em and tell 'em their sister's dead. It was just devastating. But it was around the one year mark where I just said, I can stay in my house and do nothing. Or I can find these people and help them, and by help them. I mean, the other victims, the families are become the victims.

 And that was very therapeutic for me

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:13:19] Angela Kennecke: Barb decided to transform her mourning into a meaningful mission. On the one year anniversary of her daughter's death, Barb founded a non profit called the Fentanyl Victims Network of North Carolina. Through her organization, she supports grieving families by sharing information about North Carolina's law enforcement system, the judicial system, and fentanyl related legislation.

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:13:49] Barb Walsh: felt like families needed to have more information. Eight people a day North Carolina get the same news I got, and there's no central place to find information on fentanyl and what you can and cannot do and what the laws are. So I. Every day. I took notes, got everything all together. Mike, my technical genius in the family said, I'll build you a

[00:14:11] Angela Kennecke: That's your husband? 

[00:14:13] Barb Walsh: that's my husband, Mike. 

Yep. And so all of the resources that I found, the websites, the links, are on this, fentanyl Victims Network of North Carolina website. So that someone doesn't have to start at zero 

so I can't bring Sophia back I'm trying through sharing information about her story to say we really shouldn't sit there and say, what were they doing taking fentanyl? You should be sitting there saying, well, how did Fentanyl kill them? Because fentanyl is killing people in many different ways.

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:14:50] Angela Kennecke: And we've heard many of those stories here on Grieving Out Loud and through our website, morethanjustanumber. org. Our platform is a dedicated space for those who have experienced the heart wrenching loss of a loved one due to fentanyl poisoning or drug overdose. A place where you can open up and share your unique story.

Our mission is to celebrate the lives of those who have been victims to the overdose epidemic by heightening their strengths. Understanding their challenges, and raising awareness about the wonderful people our world has lost due to drugs. If you'd like to create a meaningful memorial for your loved one, just head over to MoreThanJustANumber. org.

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:15:37] Barb Walsh: I believe in karma.

I believe if somebody is gonna walk around and do bad things, they're gonna kill people and then they're gonna go hide eventually. of all, he has to live with that for the rest of his life. And that's a, form of punishment. he caress. the second thing is he has left his hometown and feels he can't come back. So many people know about what occurred, so he's estranged from his family and his friends, 

[00:16:09] Angela Kennecke: right. And I've seen karma catch up with people maybe like a decade later. 

[00:16:12] Barb Walsh: And the assistant DA said the same thing, that if he made this mistake, he's gonna make more, or somebody's gonna come forward and say, what really went down? 

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:16:23] Angela Kennecke:  Regardless of what happened, Sophia's death, like countless others amid our nation's drug crisis, has left a trail of collateral damage. Walsh says at times, the weight of grief becomes overwhelming.

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:16:42] Barb Walsh: know this, there are days when you're like, good, I'm good, I'm good. And then all of a sudden you're not good. a trigger that happens and I have learned to accept that. And then I'll just go down for however long it takes. It could be an hour or two, it could be a couple of days. But the drive to help other people and to change the situation that we have and to save lives in her name

Right, 

what keeps me going.

[00:17:09] Angela Kennecke: me too. That's what keeps me 

[00:17:10] Barb Walsh: that's what she would want. She would want to know that. We honor her every day by getting out of bed and saving somebody else's life.

[00:17:20] Angela Kennecke: Right, because you can't save your daughter's life. You can only help others now. And that is really the truth for me as well. Everything that you said is, I always say I, helping others helps me. place for me to put my grief. And actually to move forward in my life, helping others helps me move forward.

and I think of what a bright future Sophia had, you know, and I think that's where it just gets to be so difficult because it was from this water bottle. I mean, it had the label on it. You go to the fridge, you grab a water bottle, nobody's gonna think twice about that. That's not something like, oh, what could she have done differently?

[00:17:58] Barb Walsh: yes, there's woulda, coulda, shoulda,

Like it just goes circuit in your head if this person had been honest, would, the other thing is the police that didn't even occur to them. So there's a water bottle, you know, this guy cleaned up, he got rid of everything, but they didn't know they were looking for water bottles. They'd never had a case like that.

[00:18:21] Angela Kennecke: Well, it should serve as a warning. 

[00:18:22] Barb Walsh: I want everybody to know about Sophia's situation as an example of one of the ways that Fentanyl can kill you. It kills a lot of young people with bright futures people, even if they're struggling, it doesn't mean that in five or 10 years they could turn it around and then have the bright future.

[00:18:45] Angela Kennecke: Right.

[00:18:45] Barb Walsh: It's fentanyl is taking that off the table. Recovery, grandchildren, all kinds of, it just takes it off the table. And it's not fair for any of these people who die.

[00:18:59] Angela Kennecke: No, it robs you of everything. And I think that is the difference between when we were growing up, you would see people experiment with drugs or maybe even get into trouble with alcohol or drugs, but they had a chance, you know, they had a chance to recover. They had a chance to rebuild their lives. And not everybody did, but many people did.

Right? And now that chance has completely taken away from people completely.

[00:19:22] Barb Walsh: I was one of those, right? I experimented. I, you know, made it through college, made it out into the working world, moved on. 

But, we didn't have internet. We didn't have cell phones, we didn't have Snapchat. Fentanyl didn't even exist at that time. we stood a chance and kids today don't,

[00:19:41] Angela Kennecke: So fentanyl is here and hospitals want to use it, right, in controlled situations. And so what do we do about the problem of illegal fentanyl, do you think? I, I mean, you hear people say, shut down the border. And I always say, okay, but it's a much more complicated issue than that. 

[00:20:00] Barb Walsh: agree. The way I look at it is you have the border situation and there are people who are dealing with that, but right now we have Americans who are killing other americans. 

We have North Carolinians who choose to kill other North Carolinians for 10 bucks. They're doing it for money 

[00:20:19] Angela Kennecke: So it's not just a Chinese problem, it's not just a Mexican problem, it is an American problem.

[00:20:24] Barb Walsh: It's an American problem. American has a pill problem already.

there's a pill for everything, and the young people see that. They see the advertisements, they hear about it. So what's wrong with taking a pill? They don't think about that. So what do we do about illicit Fentanyl is I believe you say the word out loud. You say the word fentanyl out loud. You admit that your loved one died from fentanyl, which you and I are both doing, but there are many that I have met who are willing to talk about it privately, but will not admit it publicly. And so we need to get into the schools and we need to be talking about fentanyl.

There was just a big article about down in Charlotte, North Carolina, a teenager, a junior in high school died from Fentanyl, and they were saying people are doing starting, in school. And if they're doing pills in bathrooms in school, what's the probability one of them's gonna have fentanyl in it? 

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:21:22] Angela Kennecke: Because of the increasing number of students overdosing and dying from fentanyl, more schools are stocking Narcan, a medication that can reverse opioid overdose. In fact, the National Association of School Nurses now encourages schools across the country to develop a naloxone policy. Not only is my charity, Emily's Hope, working to get funding to distribute Narcan for free, but we've also created a K 12 substance use prevention curriculum. (MUSIC UP!) 

And that's where I think we need to start, because we need to start before kids even experiment. In that middle school time, which I hear kids in the school district I live in, They're vaping as young as third grade to fourth grade, sometimes 

[00:22:08] Barb Walsh: Oh my gosh,

[00:22:09] Angela Kennecke: Right? So I'm saying we need to get it to kids younger and in age, appropriate ways, and we shouldn't be afraid of that word, fentanyl either. We need let kids know fentanyl is out there. take any substance that you didn't get from a trusted adult ever. Ever.

[00:22:24] Barb Walsh: Correct. The other thing that I think we can do is, you know how we had stop, drop and roll.

People know there's a fire, know exactly what to do. Well, instead of just talking about the dangers of fentanyl, we need to say what are the symptoms of when somebody is in trouble? What are you looking for? You're looking for somebody who passed out on the sofa at a party after taking a pill, and you think they're sleeping, but guess what?

Are they snoring? Are they gurgling? Are their lips kind of turn in a different color? Are their fingers turn in a different color? If you shake them, will they wake up? Those are all signs of fentanyl toxicity, and there's only two minutes to save them, so, You hopefully have someone in there who has Narcan.

[00:23:11] Angela Kennecke: Well, that's what we need to get Narcan out to more people as well as every place possible,

which hopefully now that it's gonna be over the counter, that will happen

[00:23:20] Barb Walsh: yes. Well, the other thing is to make people unafraid of calling 9 1 1 rather than leaving their friend laying there,

[00:23:30] Angela Kennecke: Right?

[00:23:31] Barb Walsh: make call and try to do CPR stay on the line.

[00:23:35] Angela Kennecke: They need be aware of Good Samaritan laws, which ironically, on the day Emily died, I was working on a story on Good Samaritan laws and I had to go back and revisit that story about four months later. 

 (MUSIC UP) 

[00:23:47] Angela Kennecke: On the very first episode of Grieving Out Loud, I talked about the day my 21 year old daughter, Emily, died. 

 (MUSIC TRANSITION) So as I was working on this story on the opioid crisis, I really wasn't thinking that my daughter would die of an opioid overdose. I was thinking that something was wrong with her and that she wouldn't tell us about it and that we needed to get her help. And I was scared because a few days earlier I had learned that one of her friends had died of an overdose.

Now, I didn't know this friend and I didn't know how he died or what the drug was, but on that very same day, I spoke with that young man's father. As I worked on this story on Good Samaritan laws., I spoke with three parents who'd all lost children to overdose. One was my daughter's friend whom I didn't know, and he said, I warned all of these kids when they came to my son's funeral that this could happen to them if they didn't get help, if they didn't change what they were doing, if they didn't change their lives.

The other parent I spoke to had a son who'd gone to the same elementary school as my daughter. He'd been clean for years. He'd been taking part in the recovery community for Hazelden, but he relapsed and he'd overdosed on 100% Fentanyl. His friends were planning an intervention for that evening, but he had died in the afternoon, and the third parent I spoke to was a mother whom I talked to before about her daughter's overdose.

That mother told me that her daughter overdosed in a drug house with a group of friends who cleaned up the area, and one of the boys called his mother before he called for help. Her daughter died. Now every day she times how long it would take her to get to that drug house from her house. Eight minutes.

She could have been there in eight minutes. I was working on this grim story, but it was a beautiful day and it never occurred to me that my daughter was using opioids or could overdose from opioids. 

 (MUSIC UP) 

[00:25:46] Angela Kennecke: And now, just like the parents I met on the day I lost my daughter, I'm opening up and telling my story. I want to shed light on the fentanyl crisis. and the trials of dealing with substance use disorder. The goal is simple. I hope my story encourages those who are going through similar struggles to seek help before it's too late.

 (QUICK MUSIC TRANSITION) Taking away the shame. Taking away the shame.

[00:26:21] Barb Walsh: There should be no shame in this.

And the other thing is journalists have an incredible amount of power. I'm a big fan of journalists because you know that words matter and how we use words influences how people think. And this whole word overdose and stigma. You know, let's talk about racial, let's talk about skin color. Let's talk about, who we love. There are a whole bunch of things that journalists have gotten behind and changed how American society views those things. So you as a journalist have so much power and you're using it, and I appreciate that so much.

[00:27:05] Angela Kennecke: Well, thanks. I try to talk to people about language too. That language really matters. Now I have a hard time because some of the deaths are truly overdoses 'cause they're a multi-drug overdose or a meth overdose. And some of the deaths are fentanyl. So I tend to say overdose slash fentanyl poisoning.

But other language, like, um, well obviously substance use disorder is what we should be using when people are suffering from a, an addiction to a substance. But, Things like in recovery rather than clean, you know? And obviously I hate the word junkie, it's a, nobody is a junkie. these are horrible words that have been associated with this disease of the brain for many people.

but it, the whole thing is now changing because it's not just people with substance use disorder who are dying. You 

[00:27:46] Barb Walsh: So look at it as the AIDS epidemic that was on 

[00:27:50] Angela Kennecke: I compare it to that a lot. 

[00:27:52] Barb Walsh: Yeah. 

 it was very shameful and it was portrayed shamefully victim blaming until the young boy, Ryan White, didn't have AIDS and got a blood transfusion.

[00:28:04] Angela Kennecke: right.

[00:28:05] Barb Walsh: And that's how I feel about Sophia.

[00:28:07] Angela Kennecke: Yeah. a good comparison.

[00:28:09] Barb Walsh: we bring people in and say, this is happening to everyone and we shouldn't feel shame from it,

[00:28:17] Angela Kennecke: and always say in the case of aids, it took a bunch of angry mothers . Basically storming the capitol and making quilts and drawing attention to it. And we are angry Moms , whose children should not have been taken away from us. And we're gathering together. We're finding each other and we're getting the word out. And that's really what we can do. Right.

[00:28:37] Barb Walsh: yes, yes. and if you were doing this all by yourself and all you were doing was stand up, broadcast all by yourself. You compared the effectiveness of just doing that with the effectiveness of you doing interviews of other families and hearing other stories. you're on the right track. you're hearing so many different angles of these fentanyl deaths and what people are trying to do, and, that's invaluable.

[00:29:04] Angela Kennecke: Yeah, I think it's important too, and I just wanted, before we close, I wanted to ask you what you missed most about Sophia. 'cause I wanna remember, for who they were, not how they died.

[00:29:16] Barb Walsh: Right. Sophia was a tremendous communicator and she was in sales and professional sales, she did a lot of traveling between jobs and she always called she was traveling. We talked for five minutes, 10 minutes, maybe. So times an hour. It just depended on what she was doing, and that's what I miss.

[00:29:38] Angela Kennecke: Yeah,

[00:29:38] Barb Walsh: I I really miss that part. And a whole bunch of other stuff, but that That's where we were at in our relationship. she always said, oh mom, you're my best friend. I was like, I'm not gonna be your best friend until you graduate from college and have a job. And she did. And we traveled together and we were good friends. And she called me like a friend, not like a daughter who wasn't mature.

[00:30:04] Angela Kennecke: yeah, just to talk to you. it's the simple things I think that we miss, right. It's the simple things like that. their presence in our lives. Just the daily 

[00:30:14] Barb Walsh: Well, she was a foodie. She loved to cook, and so Thanksgiving was her favorite holiday, and Thanksgiving is pretty rough she'd always come up with some big dishes and do things and, you understand this, you know, Emily has some of the same

Yeah.

things that just bring it back.

[00:30:34] Angela Kennecke: And I think Barb, I think Thanksgiving will always be difficult, right? I try to kind of escape on some holidays 'cause it's so hard for me. 'cause holidays were Emily's thing too, and I really just feel like I can't be in the same place doing the same thing that I did when she was alive. And that makes it a little easier.

But that's what we as moms have to live with now, that it will always be hard.

[00:30:55] Barb Walsh: Well, it's adapting yeah. and I think that, No matter what way you adapt, it doesn't feel right, but it gets you through the day and I have to get through the day because I got three other children that they don't depend on me, but they've already endured enough pain.

[00:31:14] Angela Kennecke: right. . I think about that same exact way that my children don't need me for survival anymore. 'cause they're growing up and they're, well, one just graduated from college and the other one's still in college and one is working. But I were not to to function in some way, you know, would be really hard on them. And they've already had enough loss.

[00:31:33] Barb Walsh: We kind of always said our job is to raise our kids and to make sure they're good people. so now even though Sophia's dead, I still have to do my job. And that is to make sure, you know, she lives on and does good things.

[00:31:48] Angela Kennecke: She does live on through you, I believe, and through what you're doing. And so I am so grateful that you shared her story with me, and I am so sorry for the way that she died and a lot of the unanswered questions that you have and what you have to sort of know, resolution, right, that you have to but thank you for the hard work you're doing in North Carolina.

[00:32:09] Barb Walsh: Well, thank you for the hard work you're doing all across the United States.

 (MUSIC UP!) 

[00:32:13] Angela Kennecke: And thank you for listening to this episode of Grieving Out Loud. We know your days are packed and there are countless topics competing for your attention. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for spending your valuable time with us. We genuinely appreciate it. If you found this episode valuable and informative, we'd be grateful if you would please rate and review our podcast and share it with your loved ones.

Wishing you faith, hope, and courage. This podcast is produced by Casey Wonnenberg-King and Anna Fey..

 (MUSIC UP!) 

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