‘It’s so hard to realize that she’s gone forever’
Selkirk mother opens up about daughter’s 2009 fentanyl overdose
By Austin Grabish
When Marie Walker looks out her office window she can see the house where her daughter took her last breath.
A plain white house on Dufferin Ave. across the back lane from the Selkirk Friendship centre is where Desiree Langlois, 26, died of a fentanyl overdose in February 2009.
Walker’s husband found Desiree lying on the ground cuddled next to her 20-month-old baby girl’s crib.
“I can see the house she died in from here,” said Walker, 60, during a two-hour interview with the Record at the centre last week.
The news of the mother of three’s death shocked Walker and left the community shaken.
For months, rumours about what or who could have killed Desiree swirled around Selkirk. Suspicious circumstances surrounded her death and RCMP did not initially rule out foul play.
Then several months after her passing, the much-anticipated news finally arrived.
“I finally got the coroner’s report and they said that she had fentanyl and a large amount of fentanyl, said Walker.
“And I didn’t understand it so I talked to anyone who would listen to me to try to find out what the dosage was, why she would even be taking that.”
“It’s so hard to realize that she’s gone forever.”
Walker knew her daughter, who had been hit by a car a few years prior, was struggling with an addiction to OxyContin and Percocet, but she had never heard of fentanyl, a prescription painkiller up to 40 times stronger than heroin.
“I said well where would she get that from?” recalled Walker, who said it wasn’t until after her daughter’s death that things started to make sense.
“When I think back the signs were there, but I didn’t connect them,” Walker said while looking at a photo of her late daughter.
“It’s so hard to realize that she’s gone forever.”
On one occasion, Desiree needed to leave for work and asked her mom to pass on a few hundred dollars to a woman who would be coming by to pick up money she said she borrowed from her.
Walker reluctantly handed over the cash and said she later found out it was the woman, a dying cancer patient, who was allegedly selling fentanyl patches to Desiree.
“This woman came for the money and I thought you know what I’m not even going to question it, because I probably didn’t even want to believe it,” said Walker, who is now raising her daughter’s three children and stepdaughter.
Walker said most of the kids were too young to remember or understand what happened to their mom.
“The little ones, they know something’s missing, but they don’t know what happened,” she said.
But Langlois’ oldest son does remember the day his mom died, and has been bullied at school about her death, Walker said.
“I just tell him mom took medicine that wasn’t right for her that’s what happened to her. It wasn’t something that she did intentionally.”
Walker said while rumours have swirled, she wants everyone to know it was fentanyl that took her daughter’s life.
“It’s important for people to know that it wasn’t OxyContins that killed her. Everybody says ‘oh ya she was addicted to this or that,’ but it wasn’t. It was those fentanyl patches.”
She said she isn’t surprised to hear about recent fentanyl-related deaths that have made headlines.
At least 655 deaths in Canada from 2009–2014 have been linked to fentanyl, the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse said in a report issued last month.
Fentanyl is given in precise doses to patients experiencing extreme pain and is often used when morphine is no longer an option.
“So when it makes its way out onto the street part of the issue is that individuals don’t have a way of measuring the doses in a precise format,” said Dr. Myron Thiessen, chief medical officer for the Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority.
“It’s so strong if you make a little mistake it ends up being a big problem and that’s where the overdosing comes from,” Thiessen said.
Walker said people need to be aware drugs like fentanyl aren’t hard to come by in Selkirk.
“You can’t close your eyes to it,” Walker said, before adding talking about her own daughter’s addiction and death has been taboo up until recently for her family.
“Only recently can we actually talk about it openly as a family without somebody getting upset tearing up.”
Walker said her daughter was well-liked, always put her family first, and was desperately trying to beat her addiction.
Before Desiree’s death she gave her daughter a journal she could use to write about her struggle.
She found it after her she died.
“She was writing in there about that she knew she had a problem and she was doing her best to try and kick it,” Walker said.
austin@selkirkrecord.ca
Twitter: @AustinGrabish
— First published in the Selkirk Record print edition September 3 2015 p.1
