October 19, 2006 Prescription Drugs: Sibling Death From A Long-Term Addiction - Rod Colvin

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
Prescription Drugs: Sibling Death From A Long-Term Addiction
Hosts:  Dr. Gloria Horsley and Dr. Heidi Horsley
With guest:  Rod Colvin
October 19, 2006
G: Hello, I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley, with my co-host,
H; Dr. Heidi Horsley. 
G: Each week, we welcome you to Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope and renewal for those who have suffered the loss of a child or a sibling or a grandchild and the message is always others have been there and made it and you can too.  You do not walk alone.  If you’re listening to our Thursday live Internet show, please join Heidi and me on the show by calling our toll-free number, 1-866-472-5792, with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life.  These shows are archived on our website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org and www.thecompassionatefriends.org website.  They can also be downloaded through Itunes and we are on selected radio stations.  You can go on our website to find those stations.  We also have a blog now and we have a quote of the week so you’re definitely going to want to visit our website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org.  Good morning, Heidi.
H: Good morning, mom.
G: Last night you had an interesting event and I thought you might want to talk to our audience about it.
H: Okay.  I conducted a workshop at the Center For Women’s Reproductive Care at Columbia University, and basically what I spoke on is mourning pregnancy loss and early infant death.  It was interesting to be there because there were a lot of newly bereaved parents in the audience who had just recently either had a pregnancy loss or had a baby that had lived – one woman had a baby live 11 days and it had died so it was very emotional.  I myself have had two miscarriages so I could identify from a personal perspective on what they’re going through.
G: And infertility issues that they had, too, right?
H: Absolutely.  I went through three years of infertility and it’s a long journey and we all desperately want to get pregnant.  We all desperately want children.  It’s a very emotional journey.  I think what the women lost in the audience and what their spouses lost – but you don’t just lose a pregnancy when you miscarry or have a pregnancy loss or an ectopic pregnancy, you lose a dream.  You lose the dream of your future as parents and what would your life look like with these children. 
G: Yeah, we all lose the life we thought we were going to have and have to deal with a new life.
H: Absolutely, yes.  And I let them know about two shows.  For anyone interested that’s listening right now and has experienced pregnancy loss or early infant death, we have done two shows.  One was on September 2005 and it was called “Death of a Child in Early Infancy,” and, mom, you did that one with Susan Hawkes.  And then on February 23, 2006, we did a show called, “Healing the Broken Bond: Mourning Pregnancy Loss,” and Dr. Irv Leon was on.  His wife has had three ectopic pregnancies and I was on also talking about my infertility and my two miscarriages so that’s another show that may be of interest to listeners out there.
G: Good, well listen in to those shows.  Heid, we also had an email from Susie from Parker, Nevada, and we love to get your emails and also have you go on our blog.  Susie said that she really enjoyed Natalie Smith-Blakeslee’s show last week.  She said, “I couldn’t believe that she’d only been bereaved for a year,” and she said, “My daughter died three years ago,” and she just wanted to caution our other listeners because she said that she found the second year quite tough.
H: That’s a very good point.  I thought the second year was really tough, also.  Reality really sets in in the second year and you’re looking at your life going, wow, this is my life, and I am never going to see my brother again. 
G: Yeah, for sure.  So thanks a lot, Susie, for making that point.  And also I think the other point that can be made here is everybody’s grief is different, too, so there are no pat answers to anything.  But thank you so much for that comment.  Also, we had a lady blog in anonymously about the music on the show and she said her daughter had died just in the past couple of months.  First of all, I want to say it is so fantastic to have you people being able to come into the show who are newly bereaved.  We really hope that the show is helpful.  She said it was to her, and I think it’s amazing if there’s anything you can say is helpful in the first couple of months.
H: I agree completely.
G: She complained a little bit about the music and Heidi and I were talking about the fact that – well, Heidi, why don’t you say what you said about music?
H: I guess a couple of things.  One is that everybody has their own taste in music and tastes vary so much and also music is such a trigger.  Sometimes when you’re going along in your day and you hear a song, you can become overwhelmed with feelings of grief and loss because it can trigger memories or something in the song can talk about loss.  It’s a very powerful medium and it can send us into a place where sometimes we don’t want to be. 
G: Absolutely, and the other thing as I was saying to Heidi because we’ve got 65 shows or something, folks who archive in do have to hear the same music over and the same introduction.  That’s just kind of the way it is with radio.  We did do some CDs where we cut out all the commercials and music, no we have the music with those, we just cut out the commercials, and they’re for sale through Compassionate Friends. 
H: And it might be an interesting blog discussion to find out what kind of music would people like to hear?  I’m curious what people would say.  I know it would probably vary but I’m curious if we put it out on the blog, let us know.  Give us your feedback and I’m curious to see what people would be interested in hearing.
G: Absolutely, so feel free to blog in on that.  Heidi, would you like to introduce our guest today?
H: Sure, I’d love to.  Our topic today is Prescription Drugs: Sibling Death From A Long-Term Addiction, and our guest is Rod Colvin.  In 1988, Rod Colvin lost his brother, Randy, age 35, to a drug addiction.  Randy’s death inspired Rod, a former journalist, to write Prescription Drug Addiction—The Hidden Epidemic.  Rod currently is the publisher of Addicus Books in Omaha, Nebraska.  From 2003 to 2005, Rod served on an advisory panel to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, which produced “Under the Counter: The Diversion and Abuse of Prescription Drugs in the United States.”  This was a landmark study on prescription drug abuse in the U.S.  Welcome to the show, Rod.
R: Well, thank you so much and good morning.
G: Good morning.  It’s great to have you on.  Well, Rod, could you start out first of all, you were just telling us that this is your brother Randy’s birthday and his death day.
R: Yes and it’s so ironic that we should be doing this interview at this hour on October 19th because it’s 18 years ago today almost to this very hour that he died.  It was his birthday, his 35th birthday.  He had just finished his college degree.  He’d gone back to school later in life and it was such a positive and self-esteem building experience for him and he had finished his degree and it was his birthday and so I was taking him out for a birthday dinner that evening.  I was a news reporter at the time in the newsroom and we have the police scanners and ambulance scanners going all the time and I had heard this ambulance call saying code 4 to Methodist Hospital but that means person not breathing being brought in by rescue squad, but you hear that stuff all the time in a newsroom, you don’t pay a lot of attention to it.  A couple of minutes later, I get a telephone call from this hospital here in Omaha saying that my brother had been brought in by a rescue squad in critical condition and so those horrible feelings you get when you get a call like that, your head feels like it’s the size of a bushel basket, and I jumped in my car and raced a few blocks to this hospital and raced into the emergency room and scanning the bay of beds there looking for my brother and I didn’t see him.  I couldn’t find him.  The nurse came up to me and she said, “Are you Randy’s brother?”  My brother’s name was Randy.  And I said, “Yes, I am.”  She said, “Well could we step out into the hall.”  And at that moment, I knew what had happened.  Pardon the feelings.
G: Absolutely.  18 years.  It doesn’t matter.  They’re still with us.
R: Especially on an anniversary.  Anyway, and I knew and I said, “He’s gone, isn’t he?”  Anyway, what I want to try to say is that while his loss has certainly been a profound loss, it was not a huge surprise because my brother had been addicted to prescription drugs on and off for fifteen years.  Now at the time, my family and I didn’t know much about enabling.  We didn’t know about addiction.  No family gets training for addiction.  It pops up and there you are in the throes of it and you’re helpless and you’re ashamed and you’re embarrassed and what will you do and what will the neighbors think?  All these.
G: And you’ve got a 20 year old.  That’s about how old he would have been, maybe he was even younger.
R: Yes.  And he had been given prescription drugs in his early 20s for anxiety.  He was what I call, like so many people who get in trouble with prescription drugs, our unwitting addicts.  They start taking a drug for a legitimate pain, be it physical pain, the vicodin, the lortabs for broken arm or whatever, or the anxiety drugs, benzodiazepines, valium, xanex, for anxiety.  They start taking these for a legitimate purpose.  They have no history of drug abuse, no history of addiction, but there are some underlying issues.  It could be depression.  It could be insomnia.  It could be undiagnosed anxiety.  They start taking these drugs for a legitimate reason and boy for the first time in their lives, they feel really good.
G: And what was your family thinking?  They were probably thinking, “Wow, this is good.  He’s getting better.”
R: Well, yeah, the doctors gave you these.  The psychiatrist prescribes this.  They need them.  How wonderful.  So these drugs make the addict – or the person who falls into the – I don’t like the word addict but sometimes for expediency it works, but the person who falls into the addiction trap, these drugs start making him or her feel really good.  The emotional pain is good.  The physical pain is gone.  So they start taking a little more.
G: And it makes the family feel good, too.  Their physical and emotional pain is gone. 
R: Yes, in the beginning, everybody is pleased and they take a little more and then they start running out early and then they’re afraid to ask their doctor for some more so they will sometimes do what’s called doctor shopping, one of the most popular ways to get additional drugs.  Go to a doctor, feign illness, feign pain, and of course doctors are onto this but any doctor can be fooled.  So they start doctor shopping and start getting more drugs.  Pretty soon, they are hooked.  They have withdrawals if they stop the drug.  So that’s a real panic so they start doing any number of things the clever addict can do today to get prescription drugs.
G: It’s time for break now, and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and please stay tuned for more about sibling death from a long-term prescription drug addiction with our guest, Rod Colvin.  Please join our show by calling our toll-free number 1-866-472-5792.  If you’d like to email us about this show or upcoming shows, you can reach Heidi or me through our website www.healingthegrievingheart.org.
When we went to break, first of all, I want to remind you all that these shows are archived on our website www.healingthegrievingheart.org as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org website so we hope that you’ll download our shows and look at our past shows there.  Well, when we went to break, Rod was talking about his brother, Randy, and how at the age of 20 he started on a road of addiction of prescription drugs.  And we were talking about how it was ironic – do you want to give us the dates on this Rod?
R: Sure, and I should also mention sometimes I skip over the fact, I know people wonder what did he die of?  Was it an overdose?  It was not an overdose, but over the 15-year period from his early twenties to his age 35, he was first prescribed the tranquilizers and then he progressed to pain pills.  Anything he could get to numb the emotional pain.  He was the equivalent of an alcoholic but his chemical of choice was prescription drugs and he would go to doctors and lie.  He would go to emergency rooms on the weekend and feign toothaches and get pain pills.  Anyway, he died in his sleep of a heart attack at age 35 and we know it was from the long-term abuse of his body from the prescription drugs.  There was no heart disease.
H: So he wasn’t celebrating too much the night of his birthday.
R: No.  And interestingly, he had been sober.  He had been clean for an entire year.  For some reason unbeknownst to us, he relapsed.  Of course, addiction is a disease of relapse.  He relapsed on his birthday.  He had been out partying and had been drinking some but did not have an overdose of alcohol or drugs in his system but we know he simply had worn his body out from all the abuse.  So as I mention while his death was devastating because we had tried so hard to save him for so many years and sometimes being enablers in hindsight, that his death was not a total shock.  But certainly we were devastated.
G: It wasn’t a total surprise, but it was a shock.
R: No, because he had had accidents, car accidents, injuries falling down stairs, because when he used drugs, be would become like a drunk.  He would be falling down drunk literally sometimes slurred speech.  It was no secret that he was impaired and so much chaos in his life and as anyone who’s been around addiction knows, addiction hurts everyone in the family.  No one escapes the pain and chaos.
G: Right, and chaos in life.  Well, tell us about his death.  How did the family deal with it and you as a sibling and Heidi might want to talk with you, too, about the sibling.
R: Sure.  I can say, of course, now, jumping ahead a little bit, the acute rip-your-gut-out pain of the loss has diminished but still that hole is still there in my heart.  I miss him terribly especially on this anniversary.
G: Yes, and tell us what the anniversary is again.
R: Today is the anniversary.  It was his birthday and the date of his death.  He died on his 35th birthday.  Of course, the original initial reactions were shock, disbelief, some anger that he had ultimately caused this.  An interesting thing as I look back and I think any sibling can relate to this.  We siblings are sometimes called the forgotten survivors.  Early on, the first few years after my brother’s death, people would come up to me, well, how’s your mother doing?  And in reality, I think she was doing better than I was.  She didn’t live with my brother any more.  He lived in the same town as me and had for the last six years.  We were buddies.  We talked often.  It seemed outwardly that she was perhaps handling it better than I was but people were more interested in her grief than mine. 
H: And probably thought her grief was more significant and bigger.
R: Yes, her grief was the one that really counted.  You’re just a brother.  And that’s the reality in our culture.  People don’t mean that but that’s the way it comes up.
H: And like you said, not only were they our brothers, they were our baby brothers. 
R: Yes.
H: Yes, so we were supposed to die before them.
R: Yes, and I don’t know if you thought of this, Heidi, but I was 38 when my brother died.  He was three years younger than me.
H: My brother was three years younger than me, also.
R: And it really called into question my mortality.  At 38, you’re not thinking a whole lot about dying, but I thought, my God, if my little brother’s going to die, if he can die, I can die, too, and that called me to think about my life goals and what I wanted to do which sounds like it does mean that’s sort of a positive effect, but it was such a rude awakening.  I think, my God, I’m mortal also.  You think at that stage in our life, we’re sort of thinking we’re invincible and will live forever.
H: I completely agree.  I can completely relate to what you’re saying.  It completely rocked my world and I went into a very existential place like you said, wow, life is not forever and we have a limited time on this earth and I need to look at why am I here?  What is my meaning?  What is my purpose?
R: And you were only 20 so you had even fewer coping skills than maybe I did at age 38.  You said something in the beginning of this show about what I refer to sometimes as grief spasms when that song or something will trigger something.  I remember early on, it took me a good five years, I think, to have a good amount of healing from my brother’s death.  That’s the point at which I decided to write this book to try to shed some light on this horrible, horrible drug problem that’s one of our nation’s most serious drug problems, but one day I was walking down a supermarket aisle, and I walked past the soap aisle and there was a stack of “Safeguard” soap and I just burst into sobs because that’s the soap my brother used and he always had a stack of it under his bathroom sink and just the smell of that soap and the sight of it just triggered that grief spasm and here I am in the supermarket sobbing, but that’s what happens to all of us when we’re so newly bereaved and those triggers hit you and they’re just gut wrenching.
H: They’re waves of grief.  You don’t know when they’re going to come over you.
G: And it can still hit us.  You never know when a sound or a sight or a smell or whatever.  In some ways, it’s kind of sweet, too, because it does bring you back to remembering them in a very profound way.
H: I have a question for you, Rod, about I have known a lot of people that have had somebody in the family die of drug overdoses and prescription, this kind of thing, and they don’t want to tell people how it happened, and I was wondering how you would respond to that.
R: Well, I think it is very, very typical.  It happened in my family.  I don’t know the phenomenon for this but here’s the way it seems to shake down.  People are extremely ashamed and embarrassed about addiction.  It’s a culture I think we still tend to see it somewhat as a moral issue, a moral weakness.  I prefer to see it as a disease.  If we’re diagnosed with diabetes or some other chronic condition, we’re certainly going to get help and it’s not embarrassing or shameful, but addiction carries the stigma of shame and embarrassment and I think shame is one of the most destructive emotions there is.
G: Rod, we need to go to break now.  I want to break here because I think this is a really important topic and we need to get back to this shame of addiction in the family dealing with that loss. 
Rod, I would like you to mention your website and say a little more about your book.
R: Certainly.  Five years after my brother’s death, I did write a book called Prescription Drug Addiction—The Hidden Epidemic, A Guide to Coping and Understanding.  I wanted to help others who were suffering with this addiction.  When the first edition came out in 1995, there was very little in the news about it and it was just maddening.  Your brother dies from medical pills, how could this happen?  Drugs coming from the medical community and there was so little information on it so I wanted to shed some light on what is now one of the nation’s most serious drug problems.  Prescription drug abuse outranks marijuana use, cocaine, and heroin use, and then I also have a website.  It’s a free resource for anybody who is struggling – friend or family or person who has become addicted.  www.presriptiondrugaddiction.com.  A lot of good information there.  A message board.  I invite anyone to go there for information. 
G: That’s great, and hopefully if you have some addicted family members, you’ll visit Rod’s website.  You can get in touch with us and we’ll put you in touch with him if you forget what it is or want to know more.  Also, I think it’s important to point out to you folks out there that it has been 18 years since Rod’s bother died and today was his birthday and today was the day that he died.  What I wanted to say about this is it’s been awhile, and I love when we have guests on the show to tell you what people have gone on to do or have them tell you how they have taken these terrible losses we all have in our life and gone on to do fantastic and wonderful things.  And it does take time, doesn’t it, Rod?
R: You know, it does.  And like I said, it was five years before I felt strong enough or had the idea come to me that I would write this book and I have to tell you, writing that book and having this website has been so, frankly, healing for me.  I thought I was doing it to help others and I think it has helped people who are looking for information, but sometimes I get letters from people saying that they have been in the throes of addiction and they came across my book and that it really helped them.  And I thank them profusely and let them know that any action they took toward recovery well certainly they deserve the credit.  But I cannot tell you how healing and how heartening it is when I get those letters to know that out of my deep personal loss, I did a little something that helped somebody else.  Every letter, eighteen years later, when I read those stories, I get tears in my eyes.  That’ll come as a real shock to you, won’t it?  But it’s very healing and very helpful.
H: So Rod, it sounds like you moved from a place of shame and then over the five years to a place where you are building awareness about this problem and talking openly about how your brother had died and what had happened.  I was wondering for our audience out there, how you got to that place.
R: Good, good question.  I had a little help because right before my brother died, my father was an alcoholic.  His father was an alcoholic.  So our family had a predisposition to addiction.  About six months before my brother died, I had joined a group.  This is in the early 80s when the adult children of alcoholics was at its peak and Melody Beattie’s book was out about codependency.  So I became introduced to all these concepts about addiction and shame and found out that I, too, was very shame based.  Of course, I think most of our society is but I had a lot of shame and so through that experience, I came to realize that we don’t have to be ashamed of human problems that everyone else that we know has gone through but yet nobody wants to talk about and when we let go of that shame and open up about it, we can release it.  So I had a little head start there in terms of understanding shame and being okay to spill my guts publicly and know that I’m not going to hurt myself or anybody else but in fact maybe help someone.
G: Now I was wondering as a parent, did you hold back at all as a sibling after your brother died about being open about it or what?  Were you trying to bury it because of the family?  Did that impact you as a sibling?
R: You know I didn’t try to bury it because again, I had become aware of it.  And I also had been a counselor and had a master’s degree in counseling so had a few insights about human behavior and I was not ashamed.  I knew my brother was a loving spirit and a good person and loved his two dogs but he got into this addiction trap and it changed him.  But when my book came out, I also did a companion piece for Family Circle magazine, and they had a picture of me and my brother as little boys with our tricycles and then a picture of my brother Randy just before he died and I thought it was a very helpful piece to reach a lot of people.
G: If you’ve got that and you want to send it to us, we’ll stick it up on our website.
R: Okay, thank you.  Well, here’s what happened.  My little family hometown where my mother lived in Kansas, some editor at the little hometown newspaper, 4,000 people, saw Family Circle and put a little blurb in the hometown newspaper about Randy Colvin, an article, and he had died from prescription drug addiction and my mother was beside herself with embarrassment and shame because from a small town, what will the neighbors think.  In small towns everybody worries about what everybody else will think about them, and she was so upset and called me.  She was going to have to move out of town because this was made public.  And, of course, everybody knew.  Everybody knew Randy had a drug problem so that’s an example of her discomfort with that and her still carrying this shame and the embarrassment but unfortunately, I think it’s too typical of those of us who find ourselves involved with addiction.
G: Yeah.  Now for our folks out there who are dealing with family members that are angry with them because they’ve come forward or thinking about coming forward or feeling like they’re having to be quiet about it, do you have any thoughts for them?
R: Well, that’s a tough one.  You know, she didn’t move out of town.  Eighteen years later, I’m chuckling, but she didn’t move out of town and nobody showed up on her doorstep flailing or accusing her of being a bad parent.
G: And it was important for you.
R: I had to look at this could help other people.  Do I hold back because it might hurt my mom’s feelings?
G: Right, so if you’re out there and people are mad at you, they get over it, right?
R: They get over it.
H: Well, and what I was going to say is if we hold on to these secrets and this information, we are not going to prevent someone else from dying.  What you’re doing, building awareness, you have prevented another person from dying this way.
R: Well, I hope it helps.  I get on this message board I have at www.prescriptiondrugaddiction.com there are people posting there of all ages who, for example, I’m thinking right now of a 38-year-old mother who’s been taking OxyCon for two years.  She says she has two beautiful children.  She’s afraid to tell her husband.  She’s afraid to tell her parents and she’s in this horrible, horrible painful trap.  Addicts aren’t having fun.  People tend to think addicts are having fun.  They are not having fun.  They are in a lot of pain and they’ve got a monkey on their back and they’ve got an addiction to feed, and I tell them, “I wonder if your family knew how much you are hurting, how badly they would feel if they knew they weren’t able to help you.”  If I had a child that was hurting and suffering and I wasn’t being allowed to help them, I would be devastated.
G: It’s time for us to go to break again, but I also want to say to folks out there, what Rod just said is also if you’re hurting about these other issues and these things that have gone on around the death of a child, you might want to come forward and talk to people about it.
This is our final break so I just wanted to ask Rod, I wanted to talk to him a little about his work he does with The Compassionate Friends and then hear a little more about his publishing company.
R: Certainly.  Well, a few months ago, I had gone to Compassionate Friends right after my brother first died, and then I didn’t go for a number of years, but then about a year ago, I started leading a subgroup, if you will, of the adult siblings at our monthly meetings and, I’m telling you, I think it’s nourishing for people who come there but for me, whether I’ve just gone as a regular attendee or if I’m leading this group, the environment is so nourishing.  For those who are listening and who are newly grieved, I would encourage you to go to one of these meetings because it may be, for me, it was one of the only places in the world I could go to, be full of a room full of people who knew my pain, who knew the anguish, and there is nurturing there, and it is so, so helpful to go.  It certainly was for me.  I don’t mean to preach, but it was for me.
G: Well, one of the suggestions that we have, I’m on the board of Compassionate Friends, is that people go three times.  Try to commit yourself to three times because the first time can really be difficult.  New setting.  New surroundings.  It’s pretty overwhelming.  So try to commit yourself to three times, but it can be a great thing.  And the other thing Heidi was saying is that one of the things that Compassionate Friends has is people that are at different stages of loss also.  So you’re able to say, well, I’m going to be like this.  Next year, I could be a little better, a little better, or wow, I’ve come a long way.
R: Exactly.
G: So you actually are able to see the position yourself and have people understanding when you have those moment breakdowns when things happen, anniversaries, or whatever.  Well, tell us a little about your books and your publishing and your website again.
R: As you just said that, I’m also thankful for doing this show today.  The fact that it fell on the 19th of October, what a wonderful way for me to honor my brother’s memory and I so appreciate this opportunity.  As I mentioned, after my brother died, I wrote a book called Prescription Drug Addiction—The Hidden Epidemic.  I also have a website, a free resource, www.prescriptiondrugaddiction.com.  I also started a publishing business thirteen years ago called Addicus Books.  I’m a former journalist so this is a next step progression in my career.  We publish mostly consumer health books.  We’re at www.addicusbooks.com, and we publish health books so it keeps us very busy here.
G: For sure.  Well, is there anything that we’ve missed that you think we ought to talk about?  Either you or Heidi?  This is about siblings, so if you two have anything to say, now’s the time.
H: Well, I guess I had a question for Rod, which I didn’t know if we were going to get to.  It’s a quick question.  What do you know now about sibling loss that you wish you had known at the time of your brother’s death?
R: Well, boy, that’s a great question.  Very introspective.  I guess the knowledge that our psyches, our hearts, our emotions as human beings, we do have a normal process that will lead us toward healing at the time we’re in that horrible, gut-wrenching grief that doesn’t seem possible and even when people tell you that the time will help and that you will get better, it just doesn’t seem possible, but I think if we will give ourselves the path, and give ourselves room to grieve and do what’s natural, that we can heal and recover.  The loss is always there.  I wanted that to go away.  That loss is there but the anguish and the ache subsides with healing.
G: Heidi, what do you wish you’d known?
H: I think that Rod said it well.  I really like that.  I think I held on to the pain longer than I needed to because I was afraid I was going to forget, and with time, I’ve actually remembered more and had incredible memories because the pain hasn’t gotten in the way of those memories.
R: You know, a few months ago, I saw in one of Compassionate Friends newsletter a phrase that just jumped out at me and I love it.  It said, relationships die, love never does.
H: I like that.
G: Yeah, we certainly hold them in our hearts forever, don’t we?
R: You bet.
G: Well, Rod Colvin, thank you so much for coming on our show.  It’s been wonderful having you on.
R: Well, it’s certainly been my pleasure.  Thanks so much.
H: Thanks, Rod.
G: And it’s time to close our show, and I want to thank our guest, Rod Colvin.  Please stay tuned again next week when our guest will be Donna L. Schuurman, National Director of The Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families.  Donna is the bereaved sibling of Lynne.  This show is archived on our website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org website.  Stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time, 12:00 Eastern.  Thanks for listening.  I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley and
H: I’m Dr. Heidi Horsley.  Happy birthday, Randy.  Although you are gone, you are never forgotten.  Thank you, Rod.
R: Thank you.