Angela Kennecke: 0:07

I'm Angela Kennecke, and you're listening to Grieving Out Loud. His resume is impressive, to say the least. Mark Benarzyk is a distinguished intellectual, author, and researcher, even managing and overseeing three programs at Stanford.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 0:24

I live in this essential tension between being an unrepentant intellectual, but at the same time. Having a deep heart, a hunger and a thirst for truth and to know who I am and what life is about.

Angela Kennecke: 0:39

Mark's latest book takes a deeply personal turn. A topic he found too painfully to publicly talk about for a couple of years. His 17 year old son's sudden death from fentanyl.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 0:55

I essentially shut everyone out. I told the pastor, don't come around. We don't want flowers. We don't want food.

Angela Kennecke: 1:05

Now, Mark not only shares his story openly, but also describes his grief as a gift. In this episode, he offers heartfelt advice for anyone navigating loss, be it from death, divorce, or another difficult situation.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 1:23

There is something about travail, whether it's in sports or climbing mountains, that there really is gain that comes from this.

Angela Kennecke: 1:44

Well, Mark, thank you for joining me on Grieving Out Loud. It is so great to meet you. I am so excited to talk about your book, even though the subject, of course, is very painful and grim. And we often talk about this on the podcast, the loss of our children and how that has shaped and transformed our lives. And I, I know that is the case with you as well, but thank you for being here to talk about it. Appreciate you having me on the show. I was looking a little bit at your background. Very impressive. You're an intellectual, a researcher, an author, a professional. I mean, you've done a lot.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 2:21

Yeah, I'm at Stanford University. That's my real job. And so the writing of this book was done in the wee hours of the morning and a labor of love, as you probably understand.

Angela Kennecke: 2:40

This labor of love, titled Finding New Life After the Death of My Son, came from Mark's unimaginable loss, his son Thomas death, just two weeks before his 18th birthday.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 2:58

He was a good boy. He had a good heart, you know, he would come home from school and he'd tell us about how some kids didn't fit in and they had names for him already in middle school, you know, the drifters, they walked around the outside of the cafeteria, nobody wanted to sit with them. Those were the people that he sat with. He befriended those kinds of folks. He was a really smart kid, he was wise beyond his years, very talented. Intellectually played guitar. He sang, he wrote songs, you know, and so he and I had a good relationship. We'd read books together. I mean, serious books, like Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled or C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. And we would talk on Saturdays. Every Saturday we'd go out. We'd call it boy time. We'd go out and maybe read, go for something to eat, go to the movies. You know, he was in the top of his class. But pained by the world. I mean, initially, he wanted to be like you, a journalist, a writer and whatnot. And, you know, the 24 7 election cycle, so negative, he decided he didn't want to do that. He decided he wanted to study anthropology and ancient religions and things like that.

Angela Kennecke: 4:16

What I hear, Mark, and I want you to keep telling me about him, but what I hear is a deeply sensitive, smart, gifted boy. Thank you And what I hear from so many parents, I mean, I could say the same about my daughter. And I hear from so many parents who've suffered this kind of loss due to a child taking something. It's really to relieve that burden of pain. The world is too harsh for these kids.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 4:44

No, I absolutely agree. And you know, look, I grew up in the sixties. I was in the Woodstock era. I saw Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner backwards with his teeth. And back then, you know, if you drank a six pack, you had a headache. Or if you took an illicit drug, you weren't going to die. Absolutely, LSD. I mean, the problem is that we've gone from the farm to the laboratory. You know, it used to be you had to grow this stuff and you had to have land and then you shipped it north and then it got cut. So your problem in the 60s was that by the time you got something, it was so weak there was nothing in it. Now, by being able to produce fentanyl in a laboratory. and it being 50 or 100 times more powerful than heroin or morphine. So it's a whole different world. And so what happens is a kid does it once, and it's a death sentence.

Angela Kennecke: 5:43

A death sentence that has swept across the country, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of young adults. Teens from small towns, big cities, from wealthy families, and those struggling to get by. Thomas was one of them. He had just graduated high school during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic. His future full of promise.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 6:09

So, you know, he graduated remotely, got accepted to University of Northern Colorado and CSU, but they weren't going to classes. His girlfriend at the time had got accepted to Davis and, you know, it was typical, like, well, what are we going to do with our relationship and things like that? The anxiety of COVID in the early days, I mean, you know, we lived in Campbell, which is about 20 minutes south of campus. And so my wife and I, and he snuck out one day, you know, and went down to the coast and got some Chinese food and ate in the parking lot. We were like prisoners. I mean, it was, it was a crazy time.

Angela Kennecke: 6:49

And I think about how it affected us as adults. We were affected and we have developed brains and we have, you know, better understanding. And then you have this whole group of young people whose lives, because I've got kids the same age, you know, kids who were graduated from high school, kids who were going to college, couldn't go to class. It had to do everything online. I mean, it turned their entire worlds upside down. And it really, I think the reason why we have so many young people with so much anxiety and depression is because of it.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 7:21

Yeah.

Angela Kennecke: 7:22

There are other factors, of course, social media and other factors, but that is a big, big part of it.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 7:27

He went off to Snapchat for 15 bucks and bought what was sold as a Xanax, and that one pill killed him. He came home from work at about ten after nine at night. You know, my wife Ellen and I talked to him and, How you doing? How's it going? And he went to his room and that's the last time we saw him alive.

Angela Kennecke: 7:56

The next morning, Mark went to wake up his son for an online church service. He knocked on Thomas bedroom door shortly before ten. But there was no response.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 8:10

Knocked on his door, knocked on his door. Went in, and we found him, him dead in his room. What we later learned through phone records and toxicology reports and things like that was that he took the Xanax probably at about 9. 30. He ordered DoorDash, but he never lived to eat it. You know, he was probably dead in maybe 15, 20, 30 minutes.

Angela Kennecke: 8:35

Mark would discuss me is that This is the same scenario that has played out over and over again among families that I talk to. Their kid got a pill off Snapchat. Their kid died in their room. They found them. I mean, it's disgusting. It is like if someone was coming in and shooting your son, other people's daughters and sons, we'd be doing something about that, right? I mean, I just think it's insane. that our children can be dying in this way. For most families who've lost a child to fentanyl, there's no arrest, no trial, just unanswered questions and heartbreak. Thomas's case was unusual in that way.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 9:27

So four days after they took him out of our home, I got a call from the sergeant in charge of his case and we helped You know, break into his phone, and I don't know for sure, but they set up another purchase of one of these things, and they arrested the guy four days after Thomas died, and so we had a long, and I'm talking 18 months, legal battle, right?

Angela Kennecke: 9:55

Nothing is short in the legal system.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 9:57

No. And this goes back to, like, you're talking about rage and feeling the anger. So, you know, in any court series, there's something called an arraignment, the first time a person gets confronted with the charges. So, we went to the arraignment, and we actually met the guy who sold Thomas the pill. Now, I will tell you a background that the sergeant, four days afterwards, told me, that when they said to this guy, you know, you killed that boy. That he started weeping and sobbing to the point where he almost threw up. So I knew that he was repentant, that he was sorry about it. It wasn't some hard note, you know. But still, I don't even want to go back and try to reconstruct what I thought. But, you know, anger at this guy. Then, you know, we see the charges. I see the guy lives five miles from me. So we go to the arraignment. They set another court date for a plea. And, you know, my wife is, is crying to the point in the courtroom where the armed guard 20 feet away comes over and brings her a tissue box. You know, she's, I can't explain what it's like to be in the presence of these people. You know, if you've gone through this, and so I, I said to Ellen, I said, we'll wait some time before we leave the courtroom and we'll let this guy leave the building. So we waited, we waited, we walked outside and there he was. He's waiting for us, you know, and so I stare this guy down and there you've got that feeling of this is the guy that killed my son and just as we got to him, he stepped forward and he said, I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I had no idea that this was fentanyl. And he starts crying. He said, I haven't slept since it happened and blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, I'm, I'm Mark Thomas's dad, his mom. And you know, he said, well, I'll do anything to make it up. And so honestly, Angela, I stuck my hand out and I said, I forgive you. And it was the grace of God that came over me. And he grabbed his arm around me and pulled me and sobbed into my neck. I mean, Here's a guy who was a victim too, you know, they asked him, where'd you get this stuff? Well, some white guy on the internet. So, so anyway, we forgave him. And so that really freed us of so many things in one way and another way it complicated the case because we forgave him for inadvertently taking Thomas's life. But he was still guilty of five felony counts, right? Which were progressive lending, transportation, offense, and all in Xanax. So, you know, it wasn't our case. It's not a civil case. So the DA, great guy, came to our house, worked with us, talked with us. I told him, you be fair. You gotta do this for the people of Santa Clara County, the taxpayers, including me. And so we walked this essential tension, this line, between having forgiven him for the unintentional killing of our son, but feeling like he needed to stand trial for the things that he was guilty of.

Angela Kennecke: 13:08

Wait, forgiveness doesn't mean not holding people accountable. Absolutely. For their actions. And I think that's where people get confused. They think, if I forgive someone, that means I'm just letting them off the hook. for this horrible thing that they did. And that is not the case. And I think it is so amazing and also unusual that you saw remorse in this person who sold. Because I can tell you, I sat through, there were one, two, three, four people connected to Emily's case. All had sentencing, some had trials, every case was different. I didn't see any remorse from anybody involved. And especially, I would have liked to have seen remorse. from the boyfriend she had from the time that she was 16 until three weeks before her death. I mean, she is responsible for her choices and herself, but who was already involved with drugs, made it seem like it was the best thing ever, and really led her down this path, supplied her with the drugs, you know, used with her all of these things. that man, I never, I mean, in fact, he was horrible after her death. And that bothers me. If I would have seen any kind of remorse, like what you're talking about, you know, you would feel like, Oh, this person didn't realize what they were doing and they didn't know, and they felt bad. I think that would be better than what I saw was a denial of any accountability at all from anyone, anyone involved. And Emily's death wasn't the only one. There were like 10 deaths that many of these people, not the boyfriend, but many of these other people were associated with.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 14:41

And I think what you're pointing out is, just shows the perniciousness of this thing that I found out later that this kid knew my son from high school. So what happens is, you know these kids, you trust them. You know, Joey or Janie wouldn't do anything to harm me, but the line of drugs, they don't know where they're going to get them from. So yeah, you're right. I mean, that did make it easier. I don't know. Yes. Yes. Yes. Had he not been remorseful, I probably would have felt differently.

Angela Kennecke: 15:18

Have you lost a loved one to overdose or fentanyl poisoning? I'd like to invite you to share their story on our new Emily's Hope Memorial website called More Than Just a Number. They were our children, siblings, cousins, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, and friends. And friends so much more than just a number. You can submit a memorial today on more than just a number.org. From meeting the person responsible for his son's death to facing the daily reality of life without Thomas Mark views each experience as an opportunity to learn and grow. And in fact, he says he's grateful for his grief. We are well educated, when you have a great job, when you've tried to teach your children everything that you could to protect them and keep them safe, yet it all fails in the end. It's a tough thing to take.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 16:27

Yeah. I go through a lot of that in the book, and the question is, does it really fail? I know that sounds a little crazy. He, my son died so young, he was. You know, two weeks before his 18th birthday, but there's a very real sense in which Angela that he already had an enormous impact on life, not that he couldn't have had more, and I will tell you that I am a much better person as a direct result of his life and his death. He's taught me about life. about the meaning of life, about time. Time is a currency that we spend one day at a time. And so the loss of myself, and I'm trying to see it, I'm a person of faith, you know, Romans 8. 28 says, God causes all things to work together for good. To them who love God. And so I'm trying to see this as a bitter lesson, but one that has redemptive qualities to it. Does that make sense?

Angela Kennecke: 17:31

Yes. So I completely understand what you're saying. I have said over and over again, I am a better person because of this horrific loss that I went through. I'm much less judgmental. I'm much more compassionate. I'm much more understanding. And it's funny you bring up that quote. from the Bible, because before Emily died, I would often use the mantra, God can use all things for good. Now, immediately following her death, I didn't think, I thought that was ridiculous, right? I just thought, why was I saying that to myself? And here my daughter died, because I was struggling with my daughter. I knew something was wrong. In fact, when she died, we were three days away from an intervention. We didn't know what exactly. that she was doing, we later found out, but I didn't think there was anything good that could come out of any of this. And here I had been praying and saying that to myself, God can use all things for good. You know, I was praying for all best results for all possible, but I look at it a little differently six years down the road and you're not as far along as I am. So clearly you've come to some conclusions a lot quicker than I was able to do so.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 18:42

Well, you know, part of this is I've been on a journey for more than 40 years. the journey of self discovery. I read the work of Carl Jung. I've got over 2, 500 of my dreams recorded and analyzed over the last 40 years. I've done the deep inner work. So the fact is, when I went into this thing, it's not that I was without resources. And I agree with you entirely, you know, for some time after he died, for some long time, I would ask myself, you know, what good could come of this? And for me, I just tried to believe by faith that something would, so it's been, you know, we're into our fourth year now, and I think facing it head on, and this is, seems to be what you've done, just face it head on. If you do the work right, if you face it head on, and you work deep inside, that work never has to be repeated again.

Angela Kennecke: 19:43

It's so interesting you say that work never has to be repeated again, because I've often thought that the lessons that we are supposed to learn keep showing up, and in different forms, maybe wearing different clothing, but it's the same lesson, it is a similar theme until we learn it.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 20:01

Well that's true, and what I mean is exactly the same lesson. You learn it at a deeper level, somehow you now understand it with a sense of insight and hearing that. You know, the pain never goes away. Look, studies have shown men tend to just go to work, do sports, not deal with it. And that was something that I had determined I would not do. My wife and I faced it head on. So, if you don't do that, then you get in the cycle where you have to go back over and over and over again. But for me, it's a layering, you know. For me, my heart and my mind is, is like an archaeological dig. For You know, you go down layers and you go further back in time. And, and that's the journey that I've been on to discover my destiny and to create my destiny with my choices.

Angela Kennecke: 20:54

It's so interesting. You mentioned that about men. And I always say, it feels like I'm always surrounded by mothers. I'm always talking to, not always, I've had about, you know, six to 10 men on this podcast, but I've done. Um, I think it's 170 some episodes now, you know, so a very small minority of my guests are men, especially fathers, you know, to talk about this kind of loss and to deal with this kind of grief because I think men are taught to more avoid their emotions and just be busy.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 21:26

Yeah, and I work at a very large physics laboratory at Stanford and physicists are not necessarily the most touchy feely types, you know. Yeah. So, I live in this essential tension between being an unrepentant intellectual, but at the same time having a deep heart and a hunger and a thirst for truth and to know who I am and what life is about.

Angela Kennecke: 21:51

Yeah. And I know you're a man of faith. You talk about, you know, the grace of God coming over you, and was your faith ever Never. Rocky, was it ever in jeopardy after your son died? Did you ever think, God has abandoned me? Because I think a lot of parents feel that way. I think I thought I was protected. You know, I didn't think something like this could happen in my family. I took my children to church. I raised a child up the way they should go. All of the things. But yet, it did.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 22:23

Well, you know, I can tell you that, Ten days after he died, I posted my first post on his memorial site, and I closed with the words, My testimony today echoes Job. Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him. Now, I can say I've had a deep inner gyroscopic sense of orientation. You know, a gyroscope is such, once you set it in its boundaries, you can move it in any direction in space and it doesn't lose its orientation. I had something like that deep within me that existed, that co existed with pain and anger and frustration, so the emotions were like ketchup, mustard, relish, chocolate, you know, and what does that taste like? I never felt I was lost, and I never felt I was off the path the whole time. That doesn't mean that I didn't have some really hard conversations with God, and, you know, in the book I talk about a lot of this. But I guess what I'd say is, you know, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7, Jesus gives this little parable, you know, he says, you know, people who hear what I'm saying and don't do it, they build their house on the sand. People who hear my words and do it build their house on a rock. And what I can tell you is, you don't know. I didn't know till the storm came whether my house was built on the rock or not. You discover it, man. You discover it when the storm comes. You discover if your house is built on the rock. We all think it is, but I did. I trusted in Him. And part of this was the inner work that I'd done all

Angela Kennecke: 24:22

my life. Yeah, I can relate to some of what you're saying. Well, I feel I never completely lost faith or thought there's no God or God. I did feel maybe a little bit abandoned by God at some points early on. However, I think in my case I sort of lost faith in religion or the church itself. because I felt I had done everything you were supposed to, the church told me to do, to raise my child. And then the church wasn't really there for me following her death. I mean, they were there for the funeral, but I mean, following her death. I felt very ostracized by the church in general. Nobody came alongside me to support me within the church community. I had to seek outside of that. So I think that's maybe a people thing and not a God thing, right? Where I just, I felt that I was following this path and I was being led and I, when I listened to it, you know, I could make a difference and I could do things that mattered and could maybe save another child's life, but I don't know that I felt like religion had saved me or my daughter. Does that make sense?

Mark Bodnarczuk: 25:37

It absolutely does. In fact, I will tell you, my first three earned degrees are in theology, so it makes perfect sense. So there's a couple things. One, Our whole distribution, you know, I would say we've got a kind of a 20, 60, 20 distribution of people in our lives. 20 percent are strong supporters, positrons, 20 percent are negatrons, 60 percent are kind of in the middle, and that whole distribution of people shifted. And you know, Angela, it's because they don't know what to say. They don't know what to say. You are like a tuning fork, a 440A. That starts their guitar string resonating, and they're not even aware of it, so they don't know what to say. They avoid you. So we went through that. We lost friends, family. The other thing I would say is, I felt strongly that the Lord wanted me to have Him as my primary focus. So, I essentially shut everyone out. I told the pastor, don't come around. We don't want flowers. We don't want food. And he was the first one I saw. But I shut people out because I had a situation where I got up in someone's face because they said something that I felt was insensitive. And I thought, I don't want to have to go back and repair a hundred relationships. I'm gonna just put some walls up, And when I'm ready, I'll come out. And that's really what we did. Now I will say, you know, my wife came to me the day after and she said, I need to talk to someone. So I found her a PhD clinical psychologist who specialized in grief. I was still doing work with a union analyst, dream work, intensive inner work. So it's not like we didn't have resources. We went to the compassionate friends. You know, all of whom have lost a child, so we did have resources, but you're so right that people just,

Angela Kennecke: 27:40

they seem to change because they don't know what to do. Right. And I think it has a lot to do with people's own fears of death. and their own fears of losing a child or losing someone close to them. Nobody really wants to think that could happen to them. Nobody really wants, and then here you are right in their face showing that it can happen and does happen. And I think that people can be very uncomfortable with that. The other thing about faith that you, I think you are really living out is the idea that we are supposed to be thankful for all things or grateful for all things, which can be really tough when these horrible tragedies happen. And I read something that you wrote and I thought this was just so profound to me. And I'm going to read your words back to you because I thought it was so beautiful. From your book, Finding New Life After the Death of My Son, Grace, Forgiveness, and the Age of Counterfeit Pills and Fentanyl Poisoning. You wrote, I feel called to share my journey of inner healing and transformation. where God is using the seedbed of my grief, pain, and my loss inflicted wounds to transform me into what Jung called a wounded healer. I love that idea. I've always called myself the walking wounded, but a wounded healer. And then you went on to say, I don't know where God is leading me on the rest of my journey home, but I refuse to squander the gift of pain and grief that Thomas's death has given me. So. Tell me, what did it take for you to see pain and grief of your son's death as a gift?

Mark Bodnarczuk: 29:20

Well, you know, in common parlance, we say, no pain, no gain, right? I wasn't thinking that then, but the fact is, there is something about travail, whether it's in sports or climbing mountains, that there really is gain that comes from this. I think in that context you're talking about, I could not talk about Thomas death publicly for about two and a half years.

Angela Kennecke: 29:57

Mark did share his story with friends in a small group, but when a friend suggested he share it in a public video, he felt that it was simply too much to face.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 30:13

I couldn't do it. I couldn't speak up. And I realized that we develop these things called grievance stories. And so for me, I had both a grieving me and a rejoicing me. I actually saw this in a dream that I recount in the book. And so that's the problem with the death of a child. Nothing is simple. You're grieving, hyphen, rejoicing me. It's ketchup, mustard, relish. You know, and people ask you, How do you feel? Well, so at some point, I realized that part of the reason this was around the third year that I couldn't talk about this is because I wasn't factoring in it wasn't a truthful grievance story. So, for example, in order for it to be a truthful grievance story, I, one, have to say to this guy that I forgave, Hey, why did you do that? Second, I had to say to my son, You idiot! Why did you buy this thing, man? Didn't I teach you anything? You know? And then I had to forgive myself. Like you said, Did it all go wrong? You know, is there anything redeemable? And so what I realized is that I hadn't given God his place. When I really had to be honest, it was like plagiarism when you steal somebody else's work. I can't say I processed this without him. And so, I have become a better person. And until I'm able to let those words cross my lips, just like I heard you say, as hard as they are, it wasn't the truth, the whole truth, and the nothing but the truth. So Philip Yancey, my friend for 40 years, wrote the foreword for my book. He had a book called The Gift of Pain that he wrote with Paul Brand. You know, it just began to emerge in me this sense, from the gyroscopic sense, that, you know, there is something that is redeeming about this. That there is a, this pain really is creating meaning. It's creating destiny. To quote the Bible again, James says, Count it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials. Knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance and that endurance has its perfect result that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. I mean, it's these trials in life that become a gift.

Angela Kennecke: 32:54

It is just wonderful that you were able to get to that point. And I think that that's so difficult for so many people because they can only focus. on what they have lost, what they don't have anymore, and they get stuck there. I think about Emily and how, as time goes by, it bothers me that she fades a little bit more. The pain is still there, but she fades, and I'm bothered by that, but yet, life marches on. It goes on no matter what, whether you want it to or not. So we all have a choice, right, in how we can first accept what has happened, But then to get to that next level of even being grateful for the pain that you suffered at the loss. Not being grateful that they're gone, that's different, right?

Mark Bodnarczuk: 33:47

Right. Well, you know, Viktor Frankl from the walls of Auschwitz said, When you can no longer change the situation you're in, you're challenged to change yourself. What I'll also say, Angela, is that my life has been a journey along an inner and outer labyrinths. So the outer labyrinth of day to day life is you and I sitting here. This inner labyrinth is the dream world. And what you want are these things to be aligned, the deep soul that you are to be aligned. But most people live like this, what's driving them is not really what they want. So what I was doing along the outer labyrinths, was in a sense in parallel to the inner labyrinth, so I had these dreams that dreams themselves were processing the grief. Just tell you this one dream, I was in a mall, and I was surrounded by people, and I was with a little boy, and all the people around me were rejoicing that I had new life in my life. And so in the dream I was rejoicing, when I woke up, I had that sick feeling, and that's the ketchup, mustard, relish. You stay in the tension of those two feelings, and out of that comes growth.

Angela Kennecke: 35:11

I wrote a blog called The Dance Between Grief and Joy, and I often think about that. You know, you do this dance as a grieving parent, you still can have joy and allow joy into your life. You talk about all these different condiments. Right? But yet the grief will always be there and come rushing back, sometimes when you least expect it. What advice do you have? We have a lot of parents that listen to this podcast. A lot of people in grief who've lost someone, maybe not necessarily a child. What other advice would you have for them?

Mark Bodnarczuk: 35:44

I think a great place to start with all this is you've got a journal. You know, you've got to write. And again, this inner and outer labyrinth. You write what's going on in day to day life. And if you have any dreams, you write those down. My wife and I both record those. We share them. I would also say, you know, what you do depends on where you are. So in the early stages, you need support, compassionate friends, find a

Angela Kennecke: 36:10

therapist. And there are specific support groups now for people who've lost someone. We have one at Emily's Hope. It's a local group. We don't do it virtually because, quite frankly, I think that human interaction is so important. So we're not that big, but we have a support group for people who've lost someone to fentanyl or overdose. But you can find them in your community, no matter where you are now, I believe. There are so many. Mark says writing his book was also a huge part of his healing journey, giving him a way to process his grief. His story, Finding New Life After the Death of My Son, is deeply personal and filled with hard earned wisdom. If you want to read it, we've added a link in the show notes. You putting out this book and you talking about it and offering this valuable insight and also sharing your faith and your faith journey through all of this is very helpful to people. And so I think that it takes all of us really coming together to turn this ship around.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 37:22

No, I absolutely agree. I'm gonna do everything I can to keep his memory alive and to warn others.

Angela Kennecke: 37:29

Well, Thomas sounds like a wonderful kid. I wish I could have known him. I feel in a way I know him by knowing you. So, thank you very much for that.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 37:39

Well, Emily sounds like a great kid, too. I mean, I read a lot about her. Really talented. Lots going for her. It's a real lot.

Angela Kennecke: 37:46

Yeah. All of our kids. And I always say, I know you were like, his life was so meaningful, even though it was short, and he was able to do all these things. But I also think about all the lost potential to the world by the loss of our children. I look at my daughter's art, and I think if she was doing this at 18, 19, 20, what could she have done, you know, at 30? And the same with Thomas, you know, in the playing guitar or the studying and different things he was interested in doing. We will never know. That potential is lost, and that's where the tragedy really lies.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 38:17

Well, and there's a sense in which I feel like I've switched places with him. You know, normally children carry on the legacy of their parents, and I feel that falls upon me and my wife to carry on his legacy, and so it's commingled. It's his legacy. It's my legacy. And it's maybe as good as it gets in this life, you know.

Angela Kennecke: 38:40

I get that. I get that. Well, thank you. And thank you for being on the podcast.

Mark Bodnarczuk: 38:45

Thank you.

Angela Kennecke: 38:46

And thank you for listening to this episode of Grieving Out Loud. For more episodes, to read my blog, and to check out the latest news headlines surrounding the fentanyl epidemic and substance use disorder, check out our website, emilyshope. charity. We've posted a link in the show notes of this podcast. Also, do you have an idea for a podcast episode? We'd love to hear from you. You can find contact information in the show notes. Thanks again. Until next time, wishing you faith, hope, and courage. This podcast is produced by Kasey Wannenberg King and Kaylee Fitz.