S3/E26- Parent Stories: Marnie, part 2

In the second of three conversations, Marnie continues sharing the story of her daughter, Joey—this time moving into the heartbreaking account of her final days and the moment of her death. Alongside the deep pain, Marnie reflects with tenderness and honesty on the love that carried them through. Recorded in a bustling coffeehouse, this episode invites you to listen past the background sounds and into a mother’s unflinching story of loss, love, and remembrance.

Transcript

Bruce: 0:35

Welcome to Don't Forget to Breathe. I'm your host, Bruce Barker. This is part two of three in my conversation with Marnie as she continues sharing her story about her daughter Joey and the heartbreaking account of Joey's death. As I mentioned in part one, we recorded this conversation in a local coffee house. So you will definitely hear the hum of espresso machines, voices, babies crying, and the clinking of cups in the background. But again, I invite you to listen past those sounds and into Marnie's heartfelt story.

Marnie: 1:08

Joey was eight years old, so it was 2009. Um had a doctor appointment. They did the regular echo stress test. She was struggling to, I mean, she was super tired, and it was a change. They decided that they wanted to give her an artificial pig valve for an aortic valve, um, because her aortic valve was whooshing. It wasn't even working anymore. So knowing that was gonna be a big open heart surgery and what that entailed, and we we just knew that uh it was that, or she wasn't gonna make it, right? So she goes in, and with all of her surgeries, all of her sisters for everything, and that's so huge. I'm gonna say that because they're 15 years apart from first to last, 12 years, nine years, six years, whatever, they stopped college, would come home, they would, you know, if they lived in another state, if they were on whatever they were doing, they'd stop and come and be with her. So we had this surgery in Nebraska at the children's hospital out there. All sisters were there. It was just like our meeting point, but to make her feel safe, she sorry, ends up going in early in the morning, hospitals opening, she's going in 17 hours later. So the hospital closes around us, the lights are turning off, we're still in the waiting room. Of course, the doctors are, you know, every probably three to four hours, somebody would contact, hey, everything's going good. It's just taking a long time. It's a lot of work to do, you know, because at that same time they're giving her her very first pacemaker. So all this is happening. It was just wild. Then when the lights started turning on and the hospital's opening, we're like, yeah, we're still here, you know, we're still hanging out. We finally go in to see her, and it was that um first time in a long time where there was so much equipment and things plugged into her after that I think I I was scared again. I was scared like all over again as as much as the first. Um so then she started to like would instantly bounce back. She was feeling good. We we got her home. I think it was a couple weeks. Um, and then she started to run a fever, and I don't think she was with her dad at the time. So I don't I don't think that there was a lot of hey, is this 911? Is this an emergency? Um and he let it go a couple more days. Finally took her back into the emergency room at children's, and they then called me. I was in training for a new job. They called me to say, hey, she's got an infection. We're rushing her into emergency surgery. Her heart is woody with infection around the heart because it would now, you know, it's in her blood system. So he and they're like, get here, and it's a snowstorm. I have to fly out on the fly, you know, um, get out there and the doctor gets us in the hallway and he says, You guys should probably just plan for the funeral. You just shut down all those feelings again, just are shut off. And you're like, I just have to do what I have to do.

Bruce: 4:23

And she's eight years old. Eight years old. And so you're they're telling you to plan a funeral for your eight-year-old child. Okay.

Marnie: 4:29

So me and my ex-husband, you know, so since we're divorced, I think obviously the doctor knew that and said, What can I do to make this easier for them? Should they talk about this? And we just decided she was gonna be in Colorado no matter what, end of the day, whenever it was always gonna be in Colorado. And then we didn't really talk about too much else other than she was gonna have a headstone, she was gonna be not cremated, she, you know. So then they take her into surgery, and not only do they have to clean her all out and all that stuff, they took out her pacemaker and gave her an external one. So now it's on the outside of her body, and she just has to be in, she has to stay in ICU for seven to nine weeks. It was a it was a while. Wow. Um, and she couldn't leave that glass off room because she had this external, they couldn't even give it back, put it back in her because of the risk of infection again. So she was just really um, she always wanted to go outside, you know. Please just take me out to the little um outside ramp area where so I can look out and see what's happening. Because there was somebody building a parking garage and she would watch the like watch the cranes. The crane, yeah. She would watch the crane and she'd go, Mom, the guy gets up there with his lunch at like seven o'clock in the morning, and he doesn't come back down until five o'clock at night. Where do you think he goes to the bathroom? I I you know, I don't know what's happening in there. But she just was so observant. She wanted to move her room around. I see you. She wanted to move it around because she was bored of looking this way and that way. And, you know, these nurses would do anything she asked. She was playing games with them, and um, her dad spent a lot of time in there with her because I was in training for another job job. So she started picking music out. That's when she first started her music journey. Thriving Ivory was the band that she wanted, and Angels on the Moon was the song. And she's like, Mom, this is playing at my funeral.

Bruce: 6:17

Wait, wait, wait. She's picking music for her funeral. Yeah. So when you said on her music journey, eight years old. All right.

Marnie: 6:24

Uh-huh. She had a uh ear for music way back, all the kids do. And I listened to that song then and still do now, and will cry.

Bruce: 6:34

Yeah.

Marnie: 6:35

Because for an eight-year-old to s to hear some of those words, even and to think that I can relate. It's just something you don't want your kids to think about. Or I it was just, I think I was sad for her for the first time. Like I always saw her as my hero, but I was sad. And and was she gonna forever think of this? Oh, I mean, we knew that she was gonna make it through this one out and out at this time, but what about the next time? And you know, so then we were on that, just you know, getting her getting older, and you know, so at 2009, I think that year started another chapter in our lives of more intense medications and more intense hospital stays and all those things because now she's older and she can use her words more, right? As opposed to being a little kid. She's not a little kid now. I just you know, I'm kind of just feeling that feeling right now, and I'm yeah, I'm literally sad about it because they gave her another chance. I mean, she she ended up she stayed here for us, she stayed here for her family, and she'll say that a million times over. Hey, if it was up to me, I I I wouldn't have wanted to fight, but I did because I wanted to fight for you guys. You know, that was always her saying, I'm fighting for you guys. And that just and that story just kind of leads into her her wanting to experience life before she knew it was gonna be over. So, so now you know, she's moving into middle school and um she's starting to get teased for certain things, and she's starting to feel all these things, and and we just wanted her to get her license, we wanted her to graduate from high school, we wanted her to have a boyfriend, go to prom, all these great things, and she did, and she did, and and then she just stopped telling us when she didn't feel good, right? She got to that age where she's like, I know that if I tell them, they'll take me to the doctor, they'll figure it out, and then we'll have to fix it. So she stopped saying it, and that's you know, around the time she was 18. So all that to say that at the age of 20, she was going to college, living in Nebraska, had said that she was really not feeling good. She had a horrible cough, and she would call me and she's like, I don't know, go to the doctor. Do I need to come out there and you know take you to the doctor? So she ends up going with my friend, my friend that we started talking about from the get-go. She calls up her and then they um go down to children's. She has her little tote of meds with her. My friend says she's she's not gonna come home. She calls me and she's not gonna come home. I'm like, what? She's like, she's really bad. You you gotta get back out here because I don't, I think this is finally it. And to hear somebody else say that, that's not it. She's not a doctor, she's not Joey's doctor, right? She's a family friend, and I was like, Oh. And I remember just running out of work. I don't, I mean, I I think I said something, but I ran out, got home. Again, we just all got in the car, and again, it was oddly a snowstorm. So I get one of the kids, because I hate driving like that. I get one of the kids to get and we borrow another one of the kids' cars. We get in that car, we pack it full of as much stuff as we can. We're like, we're going out there. We don't know what that's gonna look like, how long that's gonna be. We're just out. Drive down there, and she is pale, she's bloated, she's crying. Um, oddly for her, that's not one of the things she does. Yeah. And she's at the university in Nebraska, and you know, they they just said, hey, look, she's she's sick, and we don't know. We're gonna have to do our little conferencing, but we don't know what we can do for her. We're gonna start her on some meds, we're gonna start her on these other things, these intensive things. She's her lungs are really bad. Um, she's in pulmonary failure. We're gonna have to put in a chest tube right away, like while she's still awake, and she was losing her mind. She's like, what? Uh no. Um, she's screaming. It was just, you know, and and one of my other daughters had to be in the room with her for that. And I mean, I think there's so much trauma around that last eight months of her being in the hospital that everybody witnessed. She was constantly saying she was sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry you guys have to do this. I'm sorry this is the way it is. I'm sorry if if you're mad. I'm so and I'm like, don't be sorry. You know, with this, we want to do this with you. She just felt responsible. And that's a sad. I mean, I feel responsible. I I'm the mom. You know, I we because it's a teaching hospital. I feel like we were put into test mode. Like they were gonna try things out, right? They didn't know, and so they're like, hey, we could do this, but what do you think about this? What about this? So there was a lot of um interns that would come in, and Joey had them from the get-go. As soon as they came in, she would give them a nickname like your fancy pants, your little bit, your, you know, and then when they come in and she'd say that, it just they were invested so much into her and her story that they would get all the things on their phone so they could watch her magnesium, potassium, all those things, all those tests that she'd have done while they were off or while they weren't working their 12-hour shift or whatever. And then they could come in and go, hey, here's some orange juice I got you, because I saw that that was down, or how are you feeling? And then they would just stand there and look at her. And I mean, I'm sure they were like, What can I do? How am I gonna make this better? And that was it's gonna sound wild when I say this, but that was the best time of my life. Those eight months with her, I wasn't a mom to the other kids, I wasn't a wife, I didn't have a job. I all I mean, I all these things were true, right? I did have all those things, but I wasn't any of those things at the same time. So I was just there and it was just me and her doing this every day. I slept in the hospital room with her. We did have a hotel right next to the hospital where I could go and shower and stuff. And then when the kids did come out to see me and they would come to see their sister, we would switch off, you know, for a weekend or whatever. And they were really vigilant about like every weekend, one of them would come out. One of them would fly out and they were such a big help. We just had a little ritual. We would, I would wake, get up with her in the morning, we'd talk to the doctors for their rounds and and we would plan what we were gonna do for the day. We'd write on the windows, this is what we're gonna do. Oh, we have a procedure, they're gonna do a surgery, right? That just so that she had some kind of structure of like knowing what was or it's so unknown, right? You're in the hospital, you don't know, but I'm helping her to have like, hey, later today we're gonna have a I'm gonna wash your hair. And you because I would do everything for her except for six hours at night, and I would tell the nurses, don't bother me, I'm sleeping right there on the couch, unless it's an emergency, you guys do whatever during the day, I'll do everything. I'll take her to the bathroom, I'll clean her up, I'll move her around, do whatever. I can sit here and say, I love that time with her because I was in the present with her for the first time her whole life because I wasn't thinking about doing anything else but that. And it was it was beautiful. And there was times that she couldn't talk because she was on a ventilator and she was then she was gonna pass again and she and she had a cardiac arrest again. There was so much. And then when they finally said, You guys can go, but you have to stay in Nebraska and you have to stay next to the hospital for another two months. Well, we were gonna have to live in a hotel. We didn't have a house. She had already lost the apartment that she had in for college, so I'm by myself. I'm getting her over to there with a wheelchair, an oxygen, her L VAD, you know, her little heart backpack. And I didn't know how to do any of that. I mean, I'm and all the meds. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, is this what it's gonna be like? And then she's just like, You gotta get me home to Colorado mom, you know. Let's let's get through these. And she was then coaching me, let's get through these next appointments. Let's she was helping me get through the days. I mean, yeah, we just switched roles, you know. She's like, okay, I'm out of the hospital, I'm here, let's help you. Yeah. She's in charge. Uh-huh. So we get, we finally get home, the kids help us get home, and she was, she was living her best life. She was, she looked like a different person. I mean, if you saw pictures of her before 2020 and then after this surgery in 2021, you would not know who she was. Wow. It was like the her heart was working right for the first time in her life because now she had the heart pump. So her heart was actually pumping right for the first time. And and all these poisonous, later find out, all these poisonous medications she's on. But she was smiling and laughing and and having fun and wearing makeup, and she was just so full of life in a body that wasn't.

Bruce: 16:17

Wow.

Marnie: 16:17

Yeah. And so we got back at the end of summer. So her birthday was in September, and she turned 21. And of course, she didn't really have a 21-year-old birthday party. She did fun things and had her friends, and then Christmas came around, and again, we tried to just we're, I think, in the back of my mind, knowing that this was gonna be our last Christmas.

Bruce: 16:40

How did you know that was gonna be our last Christmas?

Marnie: 16:42

When we came back to Colorado, we had started now our journey with the university here in Colorado, going to the, you know, because we had to go to week visits and every two-day blood draws for her medication. And so we were there, and I asked the cardiologist if what it what does it look like? Like what's happening now? Like she's like, Well, usually, you know, since I don't think that she's gonna be able to get a heart transplant, but you can look around, you can shop and see. But I'm just telling you that we can't at our at our hospital a year. I'm like, okay, a year from right now, because this was August, September of 21. I'm like, so a year? And she's like, yeah. So instantly I started finding all these places to try and whether it would be through children's or Duke or Vanderbilt or you know, UCLA, what can someone help us? All of us turned us down, and so in January of 22, they we got the final, the final say of like, we can't help you. Towards the middle of February, Joey just changed. She just all of a sudden her body just was shutting down, and her organs were failing, and she was having horrible nosebleeds, and she was just in a really yucky place. And she, I was at work and one of the sisters was babysitting, if you want to say it. And the sister called me at work and she's like, Mom, I have to take her to the hospital. I'm like, why? She's like, she's bleeding so much out of her nose that she's gonna bleed out, you know, with her medication. She's just not, and I have to take her because something else is wrong. She can't breathe, you know, she's on nine liters of oxygen, and I just have to. And I'm like, okay, well, what does she say? And she's like, she says no. I'm like, well, why are you calling me? I don't, I don't know what I can do. I was so like, and so they got to the hospital and Joey's like, you're not gonna have me admitted. Like, I'm not, we can sit in the car. Well, they got her in there, but then they're like, only one person can go in. And Joey's like, if I'm gonna die back there and I'm only gonna have one person in there with me, let's go. So they walked back out. And she got in the car, and they all came back home. I got home from work and we started talking about the hospice. And we called them up and they said, Yes, we'll come out there, we'll check everything out for you, do the paperwork, we'll have a chaplain, and we'll see if this is something we can do. And they signed her up pretty much within days of that. Um, and that was the last week in February. And for the next two weeks, we had a nurse come out every day, we had oxygen getting delivered, we had the chaplain, and then all of her sisters stopped their lives again and came and lived at our house for the next two weeks. They slept on couches, chairs, floors, and everybody just played games with her if she wanted to, watched movies with her, like all the things that they thought were important. You know, let's let's write a story, let's, let's all the things you can't do, right? When you're an adult and you're away from home, and then now your sister's around and they're like, Okay, you want to play a game? No, I don't. I don't want to play with you. But she was just like, whatever. They took her for walks in her wheelchair. It was just, it was a blur, but it was um another one of those places where, like at the hospital, where you're like, this is beautiful because there's so much support, and it's always been us together, like this, right? So then Joey said, I want, I want to plan everything. I want to pick out dresses, I want to start trying them on. I want to tell you what day I want to go, what time, and then all the rest of I want it to be at grandma's church, I want it to be with grandma's pastor, I want it to be at this cemetery. And we're all sitting back, like, wow, this is really happy. I mean, she she already knew she was ready. She was more afraid of staying around and having them hurt her at the hospital than dying. She was not afraid of that. She was not afraid, she was she was tired.

Bruce: 20:44

So she is actively planning her funeral. Yeah, that she knows is she knows she's going to die soon, and she's planning everything.

Marnie: 20:53

And then she knew she's like, Mom, today's the day.

Bruce: 20:57

I want to pause here for a moment and let you know that Marnie is about to share in detail how her daughter Joey died in their home. This part of her story is deeply emotional and maybe difficult to hear. It could be triggering for some of you. Please take care of yourself. If you need to pause here, do so and return when you feel ready.

Marnie: 21:22

You know, when we woke up on March 2nd, 2022, she's like, today's the day. Have everybody that's in town, all my friends. You know, there was 30 people in my living room, and we're all looking at her, and we're all crowded around, and she's sitting on the couch between me and her dad, and we're all crying, hugging on her, and just watching, because it it was almost like something you don't want to see, but you don't know why she wants you to see it. But she does. She at that's what she wants. Then I think it was like seven o'clock at night. The nurse showed up and gave her something to just kind of make her comfortable. It might have been a small amount of morphine to make her comfortable because she could not breathe, you know, and she was so swollen and her liver was done. I mean, she was done. She hadn't eaten in days. So the the nurse did that and got her comfortable sitting there. And then she says, she tells one of my other daughters, she's like, I want you to start playing some music that I like. I want you just to play a song, you know. And I can't remember what the first couple songs were. But when she decided, she she's like, let's play that song, You Are My Sunshine, because her her great grandma and her great aunt would sing it to her all the time, right? And so she's like, I want you to, I want you to play that. So my daughter gets it up on the phone and starts playing it, and that is very traumatic for some of my kids. They will never listen to that song again. Yeah. And I have like five different versions on my phone to play randomly because I don't care when I hear it. I don't care how many times I hear it back to back. It's just that song. And for the daughter that was playing the music, she's like, I had to restart it because it ended, because it's, you know, she's like, it stopped, and we weren't finished yet. Joey wasn't ready. And then the doctor came over and he's like, Are you ready? And she's like, Yeah. So he, you know, sits down next to her because there wasn't very many people in the program at the university that has an LVAD. I think there was eight, and all of them were aged 35 to 55. So she was young. And so there wasn't doctors in the hospice care that were taught or comfortable or knew anything about the LVAD. So I think we gave them a quick, quick, like, this is how it works. This is the off-on button, this is the unplug button, right? And there's this thing called the pacifier that that if you had to change your own full size the battery part and unplug it, it would scream. And he didn't get that pacifier in there and pulled the one plug out when he was doing it. And that noise got her attention, even though she was like relaxed and stuff, and she opened her eyes and she's I I want to say she said help. But that's just what I wanted to hear. I don't know. Or she might have said stop it. And then my daughter that was sitting right next to me, she's like, I I said plug her back in. Hurry, hurry, hurry, plug it back in. And then we didn't, obviously. And and Joey just like closed her eyes, and that part was I I wish I would have done that different. I wish I would because I it wasn't gonna be scary for her. She asked him to do it, and then it got loud, and then that alarm scared her. And so then I instantly am scream crying like you could not imagine. I mean, which also made the daughter that was trying to plug it in and sit next to me, she was now scream crying. We were both doing that so loud that there was silence all around us. And then after I'm screaming, crying, then the chaplain came over because I didn't want to look at her because she was sitting right next to me, and all of a sudden I could just feel her getting more tense. But you know, he tells me, he's like, she's already gone. You can look at her. I'm like, and then I I look at her, and I don't even know what I don't even know who she was. At that point, she was literally gone. It was just a vessel. Like it, I mean, can't even can't even explain it. It was yeah, it was just empty. I held her hand, I kissed her, I I took a picture because I don't think I would I mean, I I didn't want to believe it, so I thought if I took a picture on my phone, I was like, oh, then I'll know. Or then I have proof because I don't think this is real. And then the coroner came maybe half an hour, 45 minutes later, and which you know, what did that what was that even like? I mean, did they just put her on the bed and then we're standing in the hallway and the bed's getting pushed out the house? And I don't know. And later, after that day, maybe months later, I asked my mom, I'm like, what did you what did you see? What happened for you? Because I don't, I don't, I don't know. Like, was that and my mom said it was, you know, really scary for her and she was crying. And, you know, then I asked, Uncle or aunt, you know, what would you guys see? Like, what was it for you? And I guess I wanted somebody else to say, it was okay, it was beautiful. I don't know, because it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, and then the rest of the probably the next month was just a blur. I think I tried to lay in bed as much as possible, but then the kids were, I know all the kids were still there, they were just downstairs. So I'm like, I can't just lay in bed if they're just wanting to be here for me too. So I didn't fully just do my own grieving because I was still a mom of four kids and I still was a wife, and I still had a job. And yes, there was time for that, but I wanted to pretend like it wasn't real. I just kept putting off my grief, putting it off, putting it off until until it was killing me inside. It was making me sick, and then I had three back surgeries, three back fusions, and and then I spent the next three years of my life like that.

Bruce: 27:23

So the the physical toll of grief had physically hit your body as well.

Marnie: 27:31

Yeah.

Bruce: 27:32

Do you remember the funeral? Mine, I can tell you there's blurry parts and then there's some vivid parts.

Marnie: 27:38

Yeah, um, I was pretty selfish in Joey's plan, obviously, you know, was her plan, but I was very selfish in since I'm the mom, nobody's gonna do a receiving line, nobody's gonna come up and look at her, nobody's gonna come to the cemetery except for immediate family, which was maybe 10 people. And then at the big reception later, I would have paid a million dollars not to go to. That is how much I did not want to be there. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I didn't want to watch the little movie they have playing, I didn't want the food, I wanted nothing. And the funeral part of it, it was the coldest day ever. It was so cold outside, sitting at the at the plot that all of us thought, I mean, we still are saying, Mom, it was like 300 below. That's how cold it was. You know, the wind was blowing, it was so cold. So any day that we go visit her now and the sun is shining, I don't care what the weather is, it's beautiful. Yeah, beautiful day. But I don't other than that, I don't really remember anything about her service. Maybe my my grandkids being a little uh they I mean, my my grandson was six, uh yeah, a little over six. So he he was confused. Like, why doesn't she just get up? Yeah, she just needs to sit up. But I I mean bits and pieces. I don't really remember. Yeah, the well, yeah. I um the one, I mean, obviously we have it this day and age, we have it on YouTube. Um, and uh the one sentence that was spoken out, um, because we had, you know, the kids all spoke. She she had the kind of energy that you only had to feel once to remember forever. And that has been true since September 5th, 2000. Only once, maybe for a second, and maybe for a minute, and if you were lucky, maybe for months and months, but you would you would know if you met her.

Bruce: 29:42

All right, Marnie, you mentioned once you read this letter that someone wrote that was at Joey's funeral. Who wrote that letter? And can you share?

Marnie: 29:50

Yeah. So all four of the girls got up on on stage, if you want to say. One had a poem and two had letters, and they were just, you know, read. So I can just read you one of those real quick. Um, one of my daughters. Sort of uh, I read this quote recently that I just can't get out of my head. I keep reading it, thinking that there couldn't be a truer statement to sum up Joey in the sentence. To be honest, summing up Joey in one sentence is entirely impossible. But I think this quote does a good job at trying. It goes, she had the kind of energy you only had to feel once to remember forever. And all of you in here have felt that energy. Maybe just once, maybe once in a while, and for the extremely lucky, once every second. Her energy was strong enough to pull you in close and never let you go. To keep wanting more, to keep you on your toes. And although it being the younger sister, I believe I can speak for all of us when I say we looked up to her for love, for strength, for laughs, and for energy. She was the one that was always sick, but it was her who kept us going. It was her who stayed strong and reminded us that she was going to be okay. She's still reminding us daily that she is okay through her secret notes we find, hidden messages, and memories of her scattered everywhere. I look out today and I see the face of the families, friends, neighbors, supporters, and even strangers. What ties us all together, though, is that this energy is and will forever be wrapped up in our hearts, radiating from inside, reminding us to laugh and to love in such a pure way as she did. Late at night, when I'm laying in bed and my fears crawl up from within, I start to worry that one day I will forget pieces of her. I fear that I will forget the way she walked or how she confidently sang the song and the wrong words to it, or even how her hugs felt on days when I really needed them. In these moments, I will go back to the quote from earlier lean heavily on the last words. You only had to feel it once to remember forever. I may forget some things along the way, but I will never forget the way she made me feel. About a year ago, when Joey was in the hospital and everyone was unsure about what her next day would look like, I had the special moment with her. She was bedridden for days and finally wanted to try standing. The nursing staff came up to help her stand with me, but little did I know she stood just to give me a hug. That one seemingly simple moment between her and I is something I know I will never forget. I am sure you all have those moments too that you're thinking about right now. And I want you to hold on to those as close as I do. She will never be replaced, she's not gone, she's everywhere as she has intended. I miss you and I love you, Joey.

Bruce: 32:19

Wow.

Marnie: 32:20

I mean, I've told my girls, but those things that they did, that they still do, are things that fill me up. They fill my cup, they make me proud, they keep me here, they keep me grounded, my cup runneth over.

Bruce: 32:34

Yeah, yeah.

Marnie: 32:34

Um, that's my saying with them, and it's never been truer than it was on the day that I lost Joey. That these kids have really come through every single time.

Bruce: 32:44

Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing the story about Joey so we can get to know her a little bit and that journey that you and your family have been on. That concludes part two of my conversation with Marnie, sharing the story of her daughter Joey, the love they shared, the struggles they faced, and the heartbreak of her death. In part three, we'll conclude Marnie's story as she shares her ongoing journey with grief and how she continues to carry Joey's memory forward. As always, thanks for listening. Be gentle with yourself and take care.