TRANSCRIPT
Gissele: Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content.
Today we’re talking with Barry Adkins after losing his 18-year-old son, Kevin, to alcohol poisoning. Barry saw that he had two choices. He could curl up in the corner and allow himself to become a victim, or he could get out and tell as many people as possible about what happened to his son, Kevin.
Barry chose the latter in an effort to raise awareness of the dangers of binge drinking. Barry set out on an Epic 1400 mile journey on foot from Arizona to Montana. His son’s ashes in his backpack, stopping at numerous schools, churches in treatment facilities along the way to share his story. Larry’s presentation describes in powerful detail the night his son died.[00:01:00]
The quiet morning that he got the knock on the door and how he came up with the idea to walk from Arizona to Montana.Barry’s message is both powerful inspiration and a warning about the consequences of even one night of binge drinking.
Barry has shared his story with over 200,000 students and parents. He has been a featured speaker at numerous high schools, community events, and town hall meetings. Barry has also been featured in numerous media outlets, including Reader’s Digest, the Dr. Gina Show and the Leon Fonte Show. Please join me in welcoming Barry.
Hi Barry.
Barry: Oh, thanks for having me on. Gissele
Gissele: Ah, thank you for being on the show.
I was wondering if you could share with the audience a little bit about the story of your son’s passing and how that led you to actually decide to become this powerful messenger on the dangers of pitch drinking.
Barry: Well, Gissele, I probably should start by kind of telling you, you know, what led up to that.
[00:02:00] Yeah, let’s start with that. So he had just graduated from high school. He struggled in high school. He was actually flunking his English class in March of his senior year in high school. And he needed it for graduation, right? Mm-hmm. And I would always talk to him about it and, you know, he would tell me to quit bothering him about it.
He’d take care of it. But at the end of the day, he did graduate, and I remember at his high school graduation ceremony, he gave me a hug and whispered, thanks for not giving up on me, dad.
Gissele: Hmm.
Barry: And shortly thereafter suffice to say he saved up enough money and I agree to co-sign a loan so he could buy a new truck.
And if you have listeners that work at dealerships, I apologize, but I have a healthy dislike for that process, right? Mm-hmm. Because they’re gonna try to sell me something I don’t want or need. He found one of the dealerships, so I gotta go in and sign papers, right?
Gissele: Mm-hmm. I
Barry: sit down in the, the dealerships.
You know, in their [00:03:00] office, and the first thing this guy says to me is, how about some life insurance? And I’m like, 18-year-old boys don’t need life insurance. They don’t die. But I was wrong. They do die. He wouldn’t live long enough to make a single payment on that truck. So a few weeks later.
I remember him sitting down in our living room and talking about how he couldn’t believe his life was finally beginning and he wanted to move out, and I did my best to discourage him because we honestly never really had any problems with him. His high school principal didn’t even know who he was. I didn’t have any luck talking out of it.
So a couple weeks later, his buddy Craig came over and they started moving him out. You know, he’s 18 years old. His definition of moving out was throwing a bed, a tv, and a dresser in the back of his truck. Mm-hmm. I remember him coming back in and he came into the living room and he said something I’ll never forget.
He said he wasn’t [00:04:00] gonna take his toothbrush with him. He’d be back tomorrow and grab it. I walked out front with him like I normally do, gave him a hug, told him that, be careful, and I loved him and watched him drive away. It was the last time I saw him alive that night. His friends decided to throw a house warming party for him.
Started with a keg of beer and moved on to shots. He left a voicemail for his sister that night talking about how much fun they were having and how drunk he was. After he left that voicemail, he passed out his friends laid him in his bed on his side in case he vomited, but the party was still going on.
They actually went in and shaved his head and his legs while he was passed out because he’s just passed out, right?
Gissele: Yeah. But
Barry: his buddy Craig, was worried about him, kept going back into check on him around 4:00 AM calls started coming into 9 1 1. First calls were difficulty [00:05:00] breathing. Next calls. Not breathing.
My son died alone in a hospital. Well, I slept peacefully in my bed.
The next morning was Sunday morning. My wife and I are sitting around talking about what we’re not gonna do that day or do that day. Eight 30 in the morning. The doorbell rings. And we’re looking at each other because we weren’t expecting company. And I open the door and I see two police officers and somebody in plain clothes at my front door.
Should have been a big red flag, right? It should have been, but I’m that guy. It didn’t even occur to me, Gissele, that something bad had happened. I actually joked with them as they came in thinking this had to have something to do with a dog or a parked car, but they didn’t laugh at any of my jokes. One of the officers in the plain clothes stayed at the front door.
The other officer walked in and stood in front of the chair that Kevin had sat in [00:06:00] two weeks before and talked about how his life was finally beginning. He said There had been an accident and your son is dead. We asked who, because we have a number of children, they said it was Kevin and they handed me his driver’s license.
Yeah, there is something pretty final about it when a police officer hands you your child’s driver’s license because until that exact moment in time, you’re holding out hope that this is all a big mistake. You’ve misspelled the last name,
but once they hand you, your child’s driver’s license, you know he is gone and he is never coming back.
Gissele: That must have been so devastating.
Barry: Yeah, people say it’s impossible to know what it feels like to lose a child, and they’re right until it happens to [00:07:00] you. It’s a life changing event.
There’s no two ways about that. Mm-hmm.
Gissele: And so what was the journey between hearing that your son had died to one, you had determined to spread the message to save the lives of other young people.
Barry: Well, I’ll tell you a little bit about the process. Honestly, I was angry with God and I told him so I simply didn’t understand why
 a kind God would. You know, let my son die. And I tried to bargain with him and said, Hey, back up time, you’re God, take me, let him live. And I don’t think, as a parent, I’m unusual. That’s not, I don’t think that would be an unusual thought for anybody. Right?
Gissele: No.
Barry: But a couple days later, I had another life changing event.
This is a little bit difficult for me to describe, but I’ll do my best. I was [00:08:00] laying in bed, it was about four o’clock in the morning and I was awake, and I just had this sense that someone had just came in the room, you know? Yeah. You have that feeling. Did somebody just walk in behind me or something?
And then there was a light. A light I’ve never seen before and I haven’t seen since, and there was a message, and the message was that he didn’t suffer. And something very good would come from this. And I didn’t get a chance to say anything. it’s not words you hear, it’s just things, you know. I, it’s really
Gissele: mm-hmm.
Barry: I’m not a seance guy or anything like that. I just, that’s what happened. And I’m not here to tell everybody that that made everything okay. ’cause it didn’t.
Gissele: Mm-hmm.
Barry: But it gave me a mission.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Barry: Right. And then we had to go pick up his [00:09:00] ashes. I remember going down to pick up his ashes and I walked in, you know, into a funeral home.
They’ve got, you know, pictures on the wall and they’re playing music in the background. They take me into an office, sit me down in a big comfortable chair, or the desk in front of me. The funeral director walks in. Sets an urn down in front of me, an urn that held all the remain of the kid that I burped.
I changed his diapers. I coached all kinds of different sports. I taught him to shoot a gun, swing, a golf club. All the remains of him were sitting in an urn in front of me. And at that moment I knew one thing, and that was that I didn’t want to be a victim. Because the world doesn’t need any more victims.
We’ve got plenty already. The world needs people who take something bad and they make something good come from it.
Gissele: This [00:10:00] might be a difficult question, so you can skip it if you want to, but what was your wife’s reaction like?
Barry: that’s another part about grief. Right. She has been incredibly supportive of everything. Yeah. Was she terrified when I said I wanted to walk to Montana? Yes, we both were, but I knew. That’s what I wanted to do and. I had a lot of people try to talk me out of it. Gissele, right?
Well-meaning people that I think they were afraid I was gonna fail. and you get that right? Yeah. Who do you think you are? Right? That’s a long ways of walk. But I had another guy that I talked to that said something that kind of sealed the deal. I really wasn’t gonna get talked out of it, but he said, well, how do you think you’d feel about it in 10 years if you don’t do it?
Gissele: Ooh, perfect.
Barry: Was it easy? No. [00:11:00] But I knew it didn’t matter. This was, this was what I needed to do.
Gissele: So did you, you plan out the whole trip or was it like you were kind of just allowing yourself to be led where your next destination was?
Barry: so the idea for the walk, first of all for those.
Older individuals in your audience came from the movie Lonesome Dove. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, has Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duval. That was Kevin’s favorite movie. I won’t give away the ending of the movie. Mm-hmm. But I will tell you that that’s where the idea came from.
Gissele: Mm-hmm.
Barry: But then you gotta figure out, you know, in the movie somebody did something on horseback, not like this, but something similar.
Right. I knew I wasn’t gonna do it on horseback initially. I was gonna walk the Continental divide. But then I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the speaking stuff. Okay. So I’m gonna do the speaking stuff now. I need to get some help. Yeah. And I reached [00:12:00] out to people to sponsor me. I got a lot of. Nah, no thanks.
But a nonprofit here in town, notmykid.org I spoke to them and they were in they set up all of the speaking engagements, but you can imagine the logistics around this we’re mm-hmm. Pretty challenging because they said, okay, well you gotta tell me what day you’re gonna be in all these towns. Yeah.
So I had to give them a schedule. Of how, you know, how many miles am I gonna walk a week? When do I think I’m gonna be in this town? When do I think I’m gonna be in this town? And we got it figured out. I did. Were you a big walker
before? I’ve ran marathons. Oh, okay.
But walking was a different thing.
 one thing to say, I’m gonna go out tomorrow and walk 15 miles, right?
Gissele: Mm-hmm.
Barry: But it’s the wear and tear mm-hmm. Of every single day. And you can, I kind of [00:13:00] prepared for that by, on the weekends I’d go out and walk, you know, 15 miles each day or 20 miles each day.
Gissele: Mm-hmm.
Barry: Kind of get a sense of what it was gonna feel like.
But it’s. Pretty hard to judge what it’s gonna feel like repetitively. Right? There were ingrown toenails had plantar fasciitis, had knee issues. But I never took a single day off. I ended up walking seven days a week. I found it to be easier to just walk seven days a week. And there’s days I didn’t feel like going, but I always thought, eh, I might feel worse tomorrow.
Maybe I better go try. And usually when I got out there I felt better.
Gissele: Wow.
So how did you find the messaging was received in the conversations that you had with young people because, drinking is kind of part of the culture, if you may. What were some of their comments or questions? [00:14:00]
Barry: You know, my messaging has changed a lot through the years.
In the beginning, Gissele, I was actually just reading it and I rationalized that, I don’t know if I told you about this before, but I rationalized this by saying, well, Martin Luther King read I Have a Dream Speech.
Speaker 2: He read
Barry: the whole thing and it was good, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Barry: So I had it written out. But. I had so many places where teachers and principals would come up later and say, I have never seen those kids that quiet ever.
And as it evolved, one of the things I started doing was telling the audience, but I’m not here to tell ’em how to live their life. I’m just here to tell you a story. And I really believe for students especially, and everybody, nobody wants to be told how to live their life, right? Who are you to get
Speaker 4: up
Barry: here?
Tell me how to live my life. [00:15:00] I’m just here to tell you a story. And like I said there was some standing ovations in a few of them. Yeah. Mm-hmm. But for me, when they’re that quiet you know, something’s going on.
Gissele: Definitely. I’m sure I know that you’ve saved some lives
 Because I don’t know if kids are often educated on like how to drink, how to learn, how much. Alcohol to take? Like had your son had experience with alcohol before or was that really like the first time that he was out?
Barry: He, there was a couple times where I suspected it and that, you know, one of the questions I often get asked is, you know, did you ever talk to him about alcohol?
I didn’t talk to him much, any of the kids much about alcohol, but I did about drugs because we have an alcoholic in the family. And he always talked about how stupid he was and how he wasn’t ever gonna let that happen to him.
You know, so in hindsight, [00:16:00] should I have done more of that? Yeah. and the question comes up, so when do you start talking to your kids about that? And my answer is, whatever you do, don’t wait until it’s too late.
Gissele: Yeah. I think conversations about like. Sex, alcohol, drugs, all of that stuff.
Ongoing conversations with children are important, and at the same time, we’re doing the best we can as parents, right? We don’t always anticipate, like you said, your son said that he wouldn’t do that sort of thing, right? Like sometimes you can’t anticipate. But as parents, we go back and question ourselves and say, could I have done that differently?
Could I have done that better? What role did self-forgiveness have in your ability to undertake this journey?
Barry: It was a big part of it, right? One of [00:17:00] the first things we did was agree that we’re not gonna play the blame game, right? I’m not gonna blame anybody at the party. I’m not gonna blame anyone.
But, but the forgiveness part of it. Takes a while, especially forgiving yourself. I heard a pastor describe it best once, ’cause forgiveness is one of the things that’s one of my key takeaways is forgiveness. And what I tell everybody is anger and vengeance is only gonna lead to one thing.
Destruction, forgiveness, leads to healing, and sometimes the most important person you need to forgive. Yourself. We all make mistakes. It’s the way you handle it. That really matters. ’cause I can’t change the past. I can only change the future.
Gissele: Yeah.
Barry: And that takes a long time to come to grips with Gissele.
Right? That’s, it does. That’s not something the day after you’re, you’re [00:18:00] there. That’s about 19 years in the rear view mirror for me.
Gissele: Yeah, definitely because we as parents put so much pressure on ourselves, we feel it’s our responsibility to keep our children safe. Even though your son had left home, there’s still that sense of,
 responsibility. it can feel definitely overwhelming, especially since like the thought is always, well, we’re gonna pass away before our children do. And so it’s not anything we’re gonna have to manage. They’re gonna have to manage our loss. But when it’s the reverse, you’re like, oh, this is not what I prepared for.
And what you’re helping us learn is, is. It’s not about trying to avoid the things in life that causes suffering, but alchemizing the difficult moments into something where it could be a positive out of it. That doesn’t diminish the grief. It just helps us not hurt ourselves because I do [00:19:00] feel like path to grieve and the path to blaming and the path to punishment hurts us as much as it hurts the other people as well.
Barry: it a hundred percent does. And one of my other key things for takeaways is about adversity. Yeah. Bad stuff happens to everybody. The way you respond to adversity is gonna define your life. And I’m living proof of that. divorces, whatever, you know, make the list, your boyfriend broke up with you, whatever.
All of these things happen. And the way you handle them, they’re gonna define your life. They just are, it’s not the A’s and b’s in school generally. Mm-hmm. Its the way you handle adversity.
Gissele: I wanna go back to that instance where you heard the voice say that something positive was gonna come.
’cause I’m sure there was a level of, reassurance did that help you rethink the whole concept of life or death [00:20:00] and whether or not things are final?
Barry: You know I’m a Christian and we all believe that God is out there. We have to push the believe button.
But when something like this happens you know he’s there. Right. And again, that, you know, you’ve heard people describe it, but I can’t describe that light.
Gissele: Yeah.
Barry: And I just knew. You know, it was God and it was kind of his voice, but I knew God was part of it and for me it moved.
Gissele: You mean like Kevin’s voice?
Barry: Yeah. Kind of his you know, because it seemed like he was pretty excited about it.
Gissele: Hmm
Barry: mm-hmm. Right. And it, it moved it from the theoretical to Oh yeah, he’s really there. He really [00:21:00] is. I mean, sometimes it’s you start to wonder if he’s really there, right? You start to wonder, well, is there really something there?
And after this I can say, yeah, there’s life there.
Gissele: Yeah, and and what you were saying, it takes it from a theoretical ’cause I think often we think of like God out there and we’re over here and we can feel so separate and so alone. And when you look at the state of the world, you wonder why things are the way that they are.
And I think there is sort of a grander. Purpose and a grander picture that sometimes we don’t often see. But I think to have that reassurance, I myself have had a number of spiritual events that make you think, oh wait, here’s an experience to everything that I’ve been reading or wondering about, which makes you question.
How final is death? now that doesn’t lessen the loss any less. we are [00:22:00] still in this physical experience where you don’t get to experience your son in the same way. Have you had any other interactions, like through dreams or any other ways where you have been able to connect?
Barry: Well, I have no doubt that God was part of this process. And the reason I say that is I’m not the right guy to be doing this. I was never a public speaker. Mm-hmm. I’m a stay at home. I was telling somebody the other day, I had a really good month. ’cause I think I only put 50 miles on my car in a month.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Barry: I’m not that way, but I feel like it’s what He wants me to do.
Gissele: Mm-hmm.
Barry: Right. And another interesting thing for me is that. You need to be quiet to really feel [00:23:00] where God might be pushing you. And I remember I I was up in the Bob Marshall wilderness up in, up in Montana, out in the middle of nowhere.
I was sitting on top of this mountain with my uncle, and it was just, you know, utter silence. Right. Just. As quiet as it can be. And I turned to him and I whispered, man, it’s quiet up here. And he said, yeah. And it’s got a lot to say.
Gissele: Mm mm-hmm. I love that.
Barry: Yeah, because you have to understand it. I think we don’t have enough quiet time in our lives.
Anymore. We’re just bombarded every single day with stuff.
Gissele: Mm-hmm. Yeah. There’s constant messaging and there’s constant looking on social media, and I think what you’re talking about is really the path inward to be able to address all of the difficult things you were talking about, to deal with grief [00:24:00] and not let it consume you, to deal with forgiveness and allow yourself to open up to that.
You have to. Go through the emotions, right? Like you have to have felt the grief. You have to have felt the difficulty in forgiving because the mind immediately goes to, well, who was there, who could have taken care? Why didn’t they check more? And all of those things. Absolutely. Yeah.
Barry: was there blame to go around?
Yeah. The, the guy at the party was a 28-year-old this house that he moved into. There was a 28-year-old there who was renting the house rooms to 18 year olds. Right. So, you know, it is probably good situation, but was it Mikey’s fault? No. It, this was Kevin’s choice. This was his decision. Yeah. And that’s my third point is the two most important decisions you’re ever gonna make apart from following Jesus are about drugs and alcohol.
It isn’t even close. [00:25:00] We all know stories.
Right. You just, you need to educate yourselves as if your life and the lives of your kill children depend upon it.
Speaker 2: Because
Barry: it does, it just does. These are, these are society. We don’t talk a lot about how big this problem is. I googled it recently to find out how big the rehab industry is, and I believe the number was, people can look it up.
I think it was around $35 billion a year. Wow. And it’s projected to grow at 5% a year.
Gissele: it doesn’t, help. That’s alcohol in particular is, a legal drug, right. And the interesting thing that I observed during the pandemic was in Canada in particular, I don’t know about any other countries how they made alcohol more accessible, but of all the things they could have done during COVID, making alcohol more accessible, made me curious.[00:26:00]
I’m like like what is it that you’re promoting or saying? it’s sort of like different departments working on different things. Like you’ve got a public health that tells you, like do things in moderation, take care of your body, eat. Then you’ve got another department that is like making alcohol more accessible.
 it doesn’t make sense.
Barry: It’s a business, right? The alcohol industry is a business and they want to grow their industry and every opportunity they get to do that. Of course they’re gonna do it. Mm. You know do I blame them? No, not really, because it’s every, it’s your choice, right? Mm. It just,
Gissele: yeah, for sure. It’s the
Barry: education part of it.
I think the prevention, you know, as I said, $35 billion a year on rehab. I guarantee you they don’t spend 35 billion a year on prevention. It’s largely onesie, twosie things. it’s a PowerPoint in one class at school. [00:27:00] And, and it takes a lot of different angles to get to kids, to students. You know, am I one part of it?
Yeah. Is that the only part? Absolutely not. There are other things that help click with kids. You know, I’m not the only thing, but you know, some kids might click when you start talking about the chemical things that happen. I don’t know. But mm-hmm. There should be a little more, in my opinion, more focus on that prevention part.
Gissele: Yeah. Agree. And I think that’s the beauty of the conversations you’re opening up space for. And also the opportunity for parents to not expect the school system or all these other systems to educate kids, right? Like we have conversations with our kids and I, gotta give credit to my husband. I was always one of the, the complete abstinence.
We’re not gonna do drugs, we’re not gonna do anything. My husband’s like, well, that’s not realistic. Right? Yeah. Like, so just because you, that’s a choice you made for [00:28:00] yourself years ago. Doesn’t mean that that’s the thing they’re gonna make. The best thing we can do is arm them with information and tell them like, here, and Okay, this is what alcohol feels like in your body.
This is what it tastes like. You know, you should pace yourself. Like see what it does to your body. See how long it takes in your body so that you can become familiar. So it’s not a thing that like kids go out in. and want to explore like in large quantities. My husband was telling me when we were having these conversations, as our kids were younger, he would say to me that the ones, the children whose parents oppressed them more like about like, you can’t do this.
You can’t do that. Were the ones who probably explored it the most. He said when they were outside, they were the ones who were the binge drinkers. They were the ones, and he saw it and he was like. You know this, this person is hiding it. Whereas his mom, she used to have a drink with her when he came, home from high school.
And so he learned how to [00:29:00] maneuver and how it felt in his body. And so he would never like get drunk or pass out or do any of that because he knew, he started to experiment and see, oh, okay, this is how it impacts. I observe other people. And so he started to get familiar with, okay, what it does, what it doesn’t do in my body.
And what you’re talking about and the beautiful part about it is increasing their awareness of, okay, what’s my maximum? What’s the dangers? You don’t know? ’cause if you’re just taking shots and drinking, you’re not waiting for your body to process the alcohol, so you don’t know how much you’ve taken.
Barry: You know, for me, and you know, nobody ever likes to talk about peer pressure when you’re younger, but mm-hmm.
Peer pressure is there. The thing for me, and everybody’s different about this but for me you think, well, I need to impress these. My high school friends, I have one friend [00:30:00] that I still know from high school. I don’t know how many you have that you stay in contact with, but you know, my daughter said, well, I have ’em on Facebook.
I said, well, you do, but how many are your friends? Mm-hmm. Oh. Two, three. Yeah. One. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. So you think you need to impress these people and you don’t, and that comes with age. You just start realizing that I don’t really care what they think of me.
Gissele: Yeah.
Barry: That’s the beauty of it is you get older,
Yeah.
Gissele: So thank you for raising this. ’cause I think this is really important, sort of the reasons why people take. Substances. Like sometimes people just wanna experiment. Their people are addressing pain, right? If their home life is an issue, or if they have experienced trauma sometimes, and the peer pressure thing I think is so fundamental.
 I remember this about myself when I was in my teens, I cared so much what people thought about me, and I [00:31:00] thought people were constantly thinking about me, which is not even true.
They were only thinking about themselves. And that’s why I tell my kids, when I was in my twenties I thought, oh, all these people are looking at me. All these people are thinking of me And I’m like, they were not, yeah, they didn’t care about me. They were thinking about themselves and what other people were thinking about them.
Yeah. And so I think that’s an important thing in terms of what helps young people develop that inner confidence. Remember that inner worthiness,
Speaker 2: the worthiness of it. Yeah.
Gissele: they don’t need to succumb to peer pressure, they are just enough as they are and to be of their authentic selves.
And if you look at the school system, and I’m not complaining about the school system, but we are taught conformity. There is a right answer and wrong answer. Everybody should sit and be quiet. So the kids that struggle the most are the kids who are the most aberrant, right?
Who don’t think the same way, who have struggles sitting down all day, because That’s not kids’ natural nature to [00:32:00] sit all day, right? And so what we’re taught to conform to this box and that there is this right answer versus wrong answer and color inside the lines. And so it shifts away from authenticity ’cause the need to belong, the need to fit in, the need to align.
And so then later on we’re like, oh yeah, be yourself. Be authentically. well, I don’t know how to do that. I was only taught to conform and belong. Where is the role for the authentic in schools and for the divergence and difference
Barry: and, and everybody learns differently.
Gissele: Mm-hmm.
Barry: Right?
Just so many things there. I barely got outta high school.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Barry: I simply didn’t understand the point.
Speaker 2: Yeah,
Barry: and I, I was only, it was only by the fear of my parents. That I got outta high school. I mean, it turns out, you know, once I went to college and I was paying for it, I got straight A’s, [00:33:00] but I just didn’t see the point.
And I’ve realized through the years that everybody matures differently and everybody learns differently because there’s a lot of pressure on kids today to decide, okay, what are you gonna do with your life? What are you gonna be, I didn’t decide, I ended up waiting two or three years before I went to college.
Mm-hmm. Because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Right. And
Speaker 2: yeah, and I
Barry: think you have to know when you’re 18 years old because you’re 18 years old, and I think adults tend to forget that not everybody matures and in general girls mature before boys, let’s just call it what it is. But you need to give them time.
They kind of figure it out.
Gissele: absolutely. And I think that’s, a really important conversation.
 we need to give them time to explore all the things that they’re passionate about, that they really want to [00:34:00] do. Rather than trying to push them into a profession because I don’t know, like I changed my mind a lot. Like first I was gonna be a lawyer, then I ended up in child welfare, and now I’m doing something different.
So there’s the opportunity to explore, the opportunity to find out what their real passions are, and to make a decision when you’re 18, 19, about the rest of your life, just doesn’t. make a lot of sense, right? what you’re passionate about now, but with the cost of education, that’s a huge investment you’re making or something you might not end up liking.
So it just doesn’t seem to make sense. Right?
Barry: Yeah. I think there are tests out there that can I’ve heard of some that can kind of tell you what you’re good at.
Speaker 2: Hmm. Which
Barry: kind of will help for me. I actually, short story. I actually got my pilot’s license before I got outta high school.
Gissele: Oh, that’s cool.
Barry: Yeah, because I had a class where the guy said, well, if you pass the private [00:35:00] pilot written, you can have an A in the class for the whole year and you don’t have to show up. So suffice to say, I ended up with my pilot pilot’s license. Yes. But I wanted to be in the Air Force. I wanted to fly jets and, and we took the tests and they said, well, you’d be good at electronics.
I wanted to be a pilot. They wouldn’t let me do that. But I didn’t forget that they said I might be good at electronics. And so that’s what I did. Engineering stuff. And I’ve been in the same industry for 44 years. Mm-hmm. Because I found something that I kind of like doing this stuff. I mean, the job is a job, right.
But I kinda like doing this stuff.
Gissele: And that’s, that’s what I say to my children. I say, explore the world. Explore all the things that you’re excited about now. Right. Because, and that’ll get you through the path, even if it’s just like the next step, like you said, okay, this guy said you don’t have to come to class.
I’d rather have some flying lessons. I [00:36:00] think that’s a great. Wait, have you ever flown since? Well,
Barry: I got my pilot’s license, but I couldn’t afford to keep flying. Right. Mm-hmm. My dad paid for it as part of my graduation gift ’cause he didn’t think I would pass the p private pilot written.
Oh. Because he said, well, if you do that, I’ll pay for your flight instruction.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Barry: So, but, you know, you talk about getting to places one of the questions I get asked is, did I ever think about quitting? On the walk. Yeah. The answer to that is no, but, but I started wondering what I got myself into.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
I
Barry: wasn’t even outta Arizona. I was probably 150 miles into it, you know, like I said, this hurts, this hurts. and the problem I had was I was thinking about 1400 miles every day. I thought about, man, I got. 1300 miles to go. And so I just changed my mindset to I’m gonna walk [00:37:00] another three miles or four miles, take a break, see where we go from there.
And it’s these baby steps that take you a long way. ’cause you look at something and say, well, I could never get that degree, or I could never get to that position where I would be able to do that in my life. But if you take these baby steps. You focus on those baby steps, then the next thing you know you’re in Montana.
Gissele: Yeah,
Barry: right. I mean, that’s really the way I thought of it is I didn’t want, because you think about, oh my gosh, I gotta do this every day for the next four months. And I just started thinking, all right, my wife Bev met me about every three or four miles. She’d go up there and park and I’d go up and take a little break and then move on.
And it’s a great metaphor for life, I think.
Gissele: Yeah, absolutely. I have a friend who would say, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. [00:38:00]
Barry: Yes. When you are thinking
Gissele: about the whole elephant, you’re gonna be full. But if you just take it one bite at a time, and like you said,
That’s definitely a great metaphor for life. Is that how long it took you? Four months?
Barry: Yeah. It took about four months. I averaged about 90 miles a week. Just met a lot of wonderful people along the way. Mm-hmm. It just. The world is a little bit jaded, but there’s a lot of wonderful people out there that, that just want to help.
I had people bring me brownies and milk. People stopped every day and asked if I needed a ride. You know, what are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere? You know, it’s raining and, ’cause I, I walked in a fair amount of rain and get in the car. I’m like, no, I’m good. Whatcha doing out here? So then I have to tell ’em the story and yeah.
But you meet a lot of wonderful people. Mm-hmm.
Gissele: Yeah. It made me think of like, gump when he started running and there was a whole bunch of people that were running behind him. Yeah. And they’re like, what are running for?
Barry: You get [00:39:00] that, you get a lot of people. I think it was a lot easier to do.
I’ve actually driven the route, just drove it here a couple months ago. A fair amount of it. There really wasn’t nearly as much traffic as there is on those roads today.
Gissele: Oh wow.
Barry: You know, two lane roads, you’re walking that whole thing and you. It’s, it’s busy now. It wasn’t nearly as busy 20 years ago.
Gissele: Yeah. And was it all gravelly? Like some of those roads are usually gravelly where you walk, like there’s not paved.
Barry: These were all paved roads. They were all two lane roads. I kind of wanted to walk on the freeway because it was a straighter shot, but I could not get the Department of Public Safety in any of the states to tell me.
They wouldn’t kick me off the freeway. So I had to stay on two lane roads, which added a few miles to it. But you get to see a lot of country too when you do that. Mm-hmm.
Gissele: I mean,
Barry: you get to let your mind wander and Oh wow. Look at that over there. You know, when you [00:40:00] drive by stuff, you don’t really see it.
You
just
doing 70 miles an hour down the road. You don’t see it. But it was, and I tell everybody. Like, if I can pull off something like this, imagine what you can do. I’m not all that clever. I
it’s just one of those things that I tell students you could do something even cooler, I’m sure of it.
Gissele: Hmm. How did it feel when you reached the end? It’s a very emotional when you got to the end, what was that like?
Barry: You know, it’s funny you asked that question. So I wrote the book, it’s Kevin’s Last Walk. It’s on Amazon. But when I wrote the book, I wanted to get feedback and this is where I’m going with this.
And I had a, a group of book club. I printed it out and let ’em read it and I said, okay, I need everybody to tell me one thing you didn’t like about the book. One of ’em said, you told me more about your shoe selection than you did about how you felt when you finished the walk. [00:41:00] Because I hadn’t really, it was a relief physically, but at that point I didn’t know what was next and people would ask me, what’s next for you?
And I’m like, I don’t know. But it turned out that. Now I can go tell the story about going on the walk and all the things that led up to going on the walk. And it’s evolved a lot through the years because my wife Bev was really helpful because when you, with the books, if you ever write a book, don’t have any family or friends read it because they’ll read it and say it was great.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Barry: Mm-hmm. That’s the same way my wife Bev would tell me. ’cause she would sit in the back of the room and tell me, now you lost the audience with that. You need to either redo it or get rid of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Barry: And so that helped me to [00:42:00] refine. Things because you need people that’ll actually, you need people in your life that’ll actually give you honest criticism.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Barry: Right? And, she did. She’s like, you lost them with that.
You know, and that’s, that’s how it’s evolved into what it is today.
Gissele: Mm. That’s beautiful.
Barry: Yeah.
Gissele: Thinking about your children, I mean, you talk about how you and your wife sort of manage the grief. What were your children’s journeys in losing a sibling?
And did your journey itself help them cope with a loss?
Barry: I think it did. One of the things that we did that not every family does, is we didn’t stop talking about Kevin. Because sometimes when a someone loses a child, nobody wants to talk about it anymore, which to me, and again, I have a different perspective on this.[00:43:00]
Yeah. That’s not healthy because that person was a part of your life for the last however many years. You don’t just stop talking about him. And I think that’s a healthy way to manage the grief. Right. we all talked about we’re not gonna play the blame game. Right. We talked about that stuff.
My one daughter, he had, Kevin had left a message for her that night, and I don’t know if to this day if she turns her phone off at night. I think she might, I’ll have to ask her. ’cause the last time I talked about it, she said, you know, I haven’t turned my phone off since then. when she goes to bed, she doesn’t put it on silent.
Because she missed that voicemail. Would she have done anything about it?
Speaker 2: Yeah. I
Barry: dunno. Right. But I think it’s kind of been probably been therapeutic for all of ’em, although I will say that I don’t know that any of ’em have read the book
Gissele: If you had something to [00:44:00] say to young people about the dangers of binge drinking what would that be
Barry: for me is to just know that it can happen to you. Nobody ever believes, including me, is that it’s ever gonna happen to you. I never believed anything would happen to him. And, you know, he had an attitude of, you know, 10 feet tall and bulletproof.
Right? Most people do. It can happen to you. don’t worry about what other people think about you. Yeah. If you think it’s the right thing to do, then you should do it right. Don’t worry about it. Because like you said, those people are worried about themselves, not you.
Gissele: [00:45:00] Yeah.
Barry: Yeah.
Gissele: Last few questions. So I ask all my guests what their definition of love or unconditional love is.
Barry: For me you have to have humility to be able to really bond with somebody. I think you need to let go and not have to be right about everything. In marriage and in life. You know, if you become one of those people that has to be right about everything. That’s, that’s harder to love. But really loving everyone is about caring about them and setting an example and setting an example of love.
Gissele: I think that’s what you’re doing with these presentations in the book and all the work that you do. I think coming at it from [00:46:00] a place of, I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just sharing my story in hopes that it will help you, that it’ll be of benefit to you. I think it’s the ultimate sort of act of love for your son.
So last question. Where can people find you? Where can they find the book? Where can they work with you or listen to your presentations? Please share anything.
Barry: The book is on Amazon. if you just search for my name, Barry Adkins, it should come up pretty close to the top. What I tell my big message is I still speak at schools.
And I would love to come to your school. I just need to get connected and we’ll make it happen. On Facebook. It’s Kevin’s last walk. You can certainly message me there, or it’s http://www.kevinslastwalk.com. Just reach out. Most of the stuff I do is. I end up getting speaking opportunities through podcasts.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Barry: People will reach out, or the podcaster
Speaker 2: mm-hmm.
Barry: Will [00:47:00] connect me with someone. And I’ve done a few of ’em that way, where we made the connections and we make it happen. and the big thing there is that I’m not looking to make money on this, Gissele, if I have to travel, there’s travel costs, but.
There isn’t a big speaker fee on that. I just want to come and tell the story and I don’t want money to be in the way.
Gissele: Yeah,
Barry: bring me in. We’ll do it.
Gissele: Sounds great. Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Love and Compassion with Gissele. Thank you Barry for being on the show and sharing your wisdom.
And thank you to everyone to tune in. Have a great day.

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