Casey’s Perspective: Grief, Trauma, and Hope After Cooper’s Death

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode contains details about child loss, grief, and fentanyl. If you missed last week's episode, start there, it carries the full story of Cooper. This conversation goes places most couples never speak aloud, let alone record. Casey opens up about what grief actually looks like from the inside, the weight of it, the way it changes you, and why he believes sharing it publicly matters even when every instinct says to stay private. Chariti and Casey have walked this road before. They lost their toddler son Cameron to drowning years ago. Losing Cooper to fentanyl exposure was an entirely different kind of devastation, different faith questions, different relational depth, different trauma etched into their bodies. They don't gloss over that. They talk about finding Cooper, attempting CPR, the desperate drive to get him help, and what it means to pray for a miracle and not receive one the way you expected. They also speak plainly about something that needs to be said: the shame and misinformation surrounding fentanyl. Cooper was a musician, and the assumptions people make. about who fentanyl happens to, about what kind of person he was are wrong, and Chariti and Casey refuse to let those assumptions stand. And then there's the marriage. Grief brain is real, the reduced capacity, the emotional fog, the moments when two people in pain have nothing left to give each other. Chariti and Casey talk honestly about how they've protected their relationship through it all: the intentional communication, the boundaries they've set, the grace they've extended to people who didn't show up the way they hoped. Cooper was funny. He was talented. He brought joy into rooms. This episode honors that, and the mission his parents are now living out because of it.