Part Two
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
After 35 years as a television news anchor and investigative reporter in South Dakota, Angela Kennecke has made the jump to the podcast world. Through 250-plus episodes of the Grieving Out Loud podcast, Kennecke speaks with parents, professors, actors, authors, doctors, and an expanding array of individuals through her lived experience of having lost a loved one to the opioid epidemic.
In Part One, Kennecke shares the painful story of the loss of her daughter, Emily, to fentanyl poisoning on May 18, 2018. One year after this tragedy, Kennecke founded Emily’s Hope, a charity dedicated to addressing stigma towards substance-use-related issues while spreading awareness, education, and prevention and removing financial barriers to recovery and treatment.
Here, Kennecke delves further into her experience by sharing more about her grief journey, her self-care practices, her outreach work, and the impact of her podcast.
Timeline of Tragedy
“Grief is truly brutal.” Kennecke begins. “The first week after Emily’s death, I was so devastated I felt like I would never be able to function again. I believe that is how most people feel and you have to take it one minute at a time. You have to be kind to yourself, and you have to put many things aside – even though our society doesn’t allow much for that. You need more than three days off work, that’s for sure.”
“You need to take care of your basic needs like sleeping and eating, which is really hard to do. Initially, I took a sleep aid prescribed by my doctor and I had a very supportive husband. I noticed that people who I never thought would show up for me did, and those I expected to show up for me didn’t always do so. So, there are secondary losses that happen throughout those first few weeks.”
“I came to realize that a lot of the folks who didn’t support me after Emily’s death are just uncomfortable with the idea of death. It isn’t personal or about me, they are uncomfortable because they think that death is contagious – that if they show support or even think about it – they could be next. I was glad that some people didn’t know what I was going through, because I would never want someone else to go through that.”
Hope and Gratitude
“I had a few people who had lost children to various circumstances reach out,” Kennecke continues, “And there was one thing a woman said that really stuck with me. She had lost her teenage daughter ten years prior and she said, ‘If you allow it, your life can be richer and more beautiful after this.’ I didn’t believe her, although I knew what she had been through. Regardless, her telling me that gave me a little something to grasp onto.”
“Another thing that helped me was going back to gratitude, and I wrote about that in my blogs early on. It sounds cliché, but when you are overwhelmed by all those emotions, it really helps to take a deep breath and say, ‘What can I be thankful for in the moment?’ Basic, fundamental statements like, ‘I am grateful that I am breathing,’ Or ‘I am grateful that I am in this house and not homeless,’ would shift my brain from that overwhelming pain.”
Grace and Perspective
“I believe that grief is a traumatic brain injury, especially when you experience the traumatic death of someone you have already been through a lot of trauma with – someone you love who is suffering from substance use. I believe that if you did CT scans or MRIs of someone’s brain after such an experience, it would look very much like a traumatic brain injury. It takes a while to recover from that, just as it would if your brain were physically injured. I don’t think we give ourselves enough grace in these situations.”
“In the first year, I was in shock, and the second year, I was depressed,” Kennecke explains, “Because it really started to sink in. From the third to the fourth year, you can start to gain some acceptance if you allow it. What I learned about grief is that when it shows up, you have to welcome it in and go through it. You can’t bury it, stuff it down, drink it away, or smoke it away because it is going to keep coming back until you have dealt with it. I didn’t do any of those things but instead I got really busy.”
Finding Purpose
“I got really busy because I was asked to do a lot,” Kennecke says. “I wanted to save lives and that is what I signed up for. Some of that busy-ness took a toll on me in the form of burnout, so you have to be careful of that. You have to give yourself time and to surround yourself with the right people, have a good grief counselor, and hopefully a helpful support group you can go to.”
“There are moms from all over the place running little organizations like mine – places like Iowa, North Dakota, Arizona, and Minnesota – and we all support each other. If you can find those people who truly know what you have been through, those connections can offer meaningful support.”
“We have a lot of donors who believe in our cause, which has also allowed us to donate half a million dollars in treatment scholarships. We have a lot of stories of people whose lives have been changed by that as well. In addition, we have been able to access Federal funds for drug-free communities, which are zip-code defined. We have clubs in our high schools and middle schools, we facilitate parent/caregiver workshops, and we hold art competitions for kids that emphasize healthy living.”
Making a Difference
“Emily’s Hope is a national organization,” Kennecke points out. “We have a board, a paid staff, and volunteers – and we are working to get our curriculum into another state. I wish we could quickly get it into every state, but everything takes longer than you hope. We have grown quickly in a short amount of time. I left the TV station to do this full-time about two-and-a-half years ago. Before that, I was working about 70 hours a week.”
Kennecke recognizes that her skills as a communicator have been pivotal in making things happen through Emily’s Hope, including her role as the host of the Grieving Out Loud podcast. She has interviewed a wide variety of grieving people from all walks of life. Some include Emily’s siblings, other grieving parents, people who have lost a parent to overdose, organization leaders, actors, scientists, historians, health professionals, and many, many more.
“I was making a difference by telling stories in the news, but I think I can save lives by doing this work,” Kennecke says. “It was a leap of faith, and I wasn’t sure if I could make it work but I was convinced that I needed to do it, so here we are. Everyone has a torch to carry, and we all need to do our part. Your part can be small or big, what matters is that you are following whatever that is for you.”
Insightful Outlook
“You learn to live with the grief and to carry it with you,” Kennecke attests. “That is not something that comes naturally or right away, so it is important to give yourself a tremendous amount of grace. I know people who have gone the opposite direction. Most of us get thrown into the pit of despair at some point in our lives. I heard this saying years ago: Some of us splatter on the bottom and some of us bounce back up. I learned to be resilient, which is something that can’t be taught, although I don’t look down on anybody who can’t come back from a devastating loss. I get it and I understand it. I had external factors I had to live for – three other kids and a husband. On the days when I felt I couldn’t cope with the loss, I thought of my other kids and how they needed their mom.”
“Systems that are supposed to protect us fail us all the time, and the blame for that is not on me or you,” Kennecke concludes. “So many people internalize these bad things that happen to their families and their lives, and it isn’t their fault. Substance use disorder is a real disease of the brain. These substances hijack the brain, and we only have so much power over them. We only have power over how we respond to situations. We can’t control another human being, but our minds trick us into thinking we can. That’s why a lot of people look back and think ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda,’ but even if they did things differently before a tragedy, it still could have happened.”