She’d already been ‘to hell and back,’ then came the derailment

For decades, Candy Kiehl carried a heavy load of painful memories and everyday worries. Then a billion-dollar company added to that burden by crashing a freight train and setting fire to more than a million tons of toxins in her community. A black cloud of poisons loomed over thousands of homes in East Palestine, Ohio, and the surrounding countryside. Those were the frigid nightmare days of early February 2023.

Since then, Candy’s husband, Lenny, has developed kidney disease. It’s at Stage 3B, she says, which is moderate to severe, and puts Lenny at a greater risk of heart disease and high blood pressure. Sometimes Lenny’s blood pressure rises to levels of a “hypertensive crisis.”

If you ask Candy the cause of her husband’s health problems, she rolls her eyes as if she’d been asked why ice melts on a hot sidewalk. To her the answer is obvious. Isn’t it strange Lenny became ill after Norfolk Southern crashed its toxic train? Last November her neighbor Mickey received a cancer diagnosis. He was healthy before all those chemicals were spilled and burned a mile away. Within months he could barely walk and was in constant pain. Asked about her own health, Candy shrugs. She doesn’t see a doctor. It costs too much, she says. Lenny needs the care now, so that’s where the money goes.

Medical bills pile up on Candy’s dining room table. She and Lenny, a welder, can’t afford all of their prescription medications, so they choose which ones are most critical and take only those.

She takes meds to cool the anxiety but, because of the cost, passes on drug treatment for her depression.

East Palestine seems the model of a peaceful rural town, a place to live a simpler, more care-free life. It’s a deception. There’s no protection here from pain and heartache. Candy is just one example. In her 64 years of life, she’s faced more than her share of difficulties. “I’ve been to hell and back,” she says. Then came the derailment.

Two weeks ago, Candy volunteered to help distribute donated food to people in need. In a sunny parking lot in Darlington, Pennsylvania, she joined friends and neighbors who carry their own painful memories and concerns, and together they placed canned goods and other nonperishable items into paper grocery bags and loaded them into waiting vehicles. News about the loss of government food benefits had spread through the region, and so the line was especially long.

Afterward, Candy and the other volunteers offered each other hugs and encouragement. Candy says her memories motivate her to do this work. She understands, in troubled times, the value of an outreached hand.

Candy was born in East Palestine in 1961 but didn’t stay long. When she was in fifth grade her family moved to Osceola County, Florida, to live in the shadow of nearby Disney World. Her father, Ralph, got a job there, upholstering the theme park’s furniture and props. Her mother, Joyce, worked as a hospital housekeeper.

Outgoing and energetic, Candy easily adjusted to the move. A 1978 St. Cloud High School yearbook picture shows her smiling broadly. Her blond hair, parted in the middle, falls past her shoulders. She looks every bit the perky teen she was — a cheerleader, a sprinter on the school’s track squad and a member of the debate team. 

At age 17, she met a young man named Edward Haught, another Ohio native who’d relocated to the Sunshine State. The relationship quickly blossomed into a proposal; the two married in 1979 and moved into Candy’s parents’ one-story home in St. Cloud. Candy was by then 18, two years younger than Edward. Within months Candy became pregnant. The idea of motherhood excited her. She and Edward added a crib to their bedroom, bought baby clothes and prepared to welcome a child into their home.

The baby arrived June 21, 1980. Candy lay draped and shrouded in a Kissimmee hospital delivery room. She’d been experiencing severe pain, and when her water broke the amniotic fluid flowed green. Her baby had passed its first bowel movement and inhaled the contents. Then the umbilical cord emerged before the baby and became squeezed, cutting off the child’s supply of oxygen.

Candy remembers the birth and the frantic activity it unleashed, the rush of nurses, an urgent voice commanding “breathe, breathe, breath.” Her uncrying baby was rushed from the room. Candy wondered, “What’s going on, what’s happened to my baby?”

She and her husband had earlier agreed to name the child Edward Michael — the family would know him as Eddie. The baby was taken to the neonatal intensive care unit of an Orlando hospital. For two days, complications kept Candy in the Kissimmee hospital, and she saw her son only in Polaroid photographs provided to her. The pictures showed a dark-haired child attached to a tangle of wires and tubes.

Doctors described Eddie’s condition: He’d sustained significant brain damage during birth. Candy learned her baby was blind and had severe intellectual disabilities.

Candy, still a teenager, struggled to process everything that had happened. On her way to the Orlando NICU to hold her son for the first time, she hesitated, ducked into a room and cried. Her mother remained by her side. “This wasn’t my fault,” Candy said to her. “This wasn’t Eddie’s fault. Why was this happening?” 

After a while, Candy braced herself and entered the NICU. Eddie lay in an incubator.
“Do you want to hold your son?” a nurse asked. “It’ll be good medicine for you, good medicine for your baby.”

Candy sat in a chair. A nurse lifted Eddie and placed him in Candy’s arms. All those wires and tubes made Candy nervous. She remained still as she cradled her child for the first time.

Candy returned to the hospital daily to visit Eddie, who was eventually moved to a step-down unit. Sometimes Candy and her mother, Joyce, spread blankets and sleeping bags on the floor so they could remain at Eddie’s side at night. His condition remained fragile. To prepare for the day she’d take her baby home, Candy learned infant CPR. She’d have to feed Eddie through a tube and give him injections.

A month after the child’s birth, Candy carried Eddie into her family’s St. Cloud home and placed him in the crib she and Edward had prepared. The baby’s health problems persisted, and over the following weeks and months he returned to the hospital a number of times. In early December 1980, Eddie contracted double pneumonia, received treatment and then returned home.

A few days later, Candy remembers, she and her mother and Eddie were in the family’s living room. Candy was busy, moving around the room. Joyce watched her grandson closely.

“Candy,” Joyce said. “Walk back this way.”

Candy turned around, saw what was happening and took a few steps. Eddie’s eyes seemed to follow her. She felt certain her son could see and hear her. He’s getting better, she thought.

Later that night, Candy awoke to a chill in her bedroom. If I’m cold, then Eddie will be cold, she thought. She rose to check on her son. She found him sleeping face down. She moved his head several times. Something wasn’t right. “You’re scaring me,” she said quietly to herself and her son. Then she reached down and moved Eddie again and felt a stiffness in his body. 

Candy doesn’t recall what happened after that moment. Her father, Ralph, later told her that he awakened to hear her whining, and when he entered the room, Candy was holding Eddie. Ralph took the child and began CPR.

Since there was no phone in the house, Candy ran out the door and across the street to her grandparents’ home to place an emergency call. She pounded on their front door. Her grandfather answered. He saw Candy’s face and needed no words to understand what had happened.

Eddie died Dec. 7, 1980. He had lived 5½ months.

Candy tells this story while sitting at her dining room table on a warm September day, and at times she weeps. Her friend and neighbor Diane Biggins sits across the table from her and listens quietly. The two have become good friends, but the relationship didn’t start out that way.

Candy used to work as a waitress at Ponderosa Steak House, and when she’d come home exhausted after her shift, Diane would call out and wave to her. Candy didn’t respond. Diane thought her neighbor was a bitch. Truth is, Candy was not even looking up. She just wanted to go inside, take a bath, put on her pajamas and collapse on the couch.

But that was years ago. Now Diane stops by every day to chat. Her husband, Mickey, was diagnosed with cancer in November. The disease spread to his lungs and spine. He’s in a lot of pain. Mickey had planned to retire, then came the diagnosis. He and Diane have been together since 1969. They’re both in their mid-70s.

While talking about her husband’s illness, Diane sometimes pauses and stares into the distance. Candy lets the silence linger. Diane says her husband used to chop wood the couple stored down by the creek that flows past the derailment site. In the weeks and months after the disaster, she and Candy would look down into their back yards and see people by the water wearing hazmat suits.

On this day, Candy and Diane visited for 30 minutes, then Diane rose from her chair. “I’ve got to go check on Mick,” she said, and then she departed.

Candy turned her attention to an array of family pictures placed on a cabinet in her dining room. She lifted one and held it closely. The picture showed an infant wearing knitted shoes and a gray T-shirt on which was printed “Little Ed.”

***

After the loss of Eddie, Candy and Edward persisted in their efforts to have a family, and within a decade were raising four children. Eddie worked in construction, Candy as a waitress. Candy’s father, Ralph, grieved his grandson’s death, developed asthma, lost his job at Disney World and went to work as a custodian at a local school. In the late 1980s, he and Joyce decided to move back to East Palestine.

Candy and Edward and their children remained in Florida for another year, then followed Candy’s parents back to Ohio. They bought a home on Taggart Street. Candy was thinking perhaps the move back to her hometown would save her troubled marriage. It didn’t.

A few years later, in 2002, she met Lenny Kiehl. He’s been a working guy all of his life. After high school, he worked a grease rack, changing oil and lubing vehicles, then worked at a brickyard. For a while he drove a truck for a living, and he’s worked as a bouncer at a local bar (he’s a big guy but soft spoken). In 1994 Lenny took a job as a welder at a local company that makes crucibles and hearths for the specialty steel industry. He and Candy clicked.

The couple married and moved into a two-story home on West Main Street. Candy’s parents eventually moved in with them and lived in a downstairs space that functions as an apartment. 

In 2009, Candy’s life took another abrupt turn when a nurse pulled her and Ralph into a hospital hallway and informed them that Joyce had Stage 4 lung cancer. Candy looked at her father, then walked away, down the hallway and into a room, where she cried. “I have six months to a year with my mom,” she said to herself. “What do I do?”

That was on a Tuesday. A hospice organization arranged for a hospital bed and a lift chair to be delivered to the family’s home. Joyce’s health quickly declined after she returned home. In the morning of Jan. 26, 2009, less than a week after the diagnosis, Candy descended the stairs into her parents’ apartment. She’d come to check on her mother. Joyce wasin bed and barely breathing. Ralph stood nearby, uncertain what to do.

Candy called hospice and explained what was happening. A hospice employee arrived with a local pastor. The hospice employee checked on Joyce and told Candy, “Call your family.” Joyce died within 30 minutes. She was 64.

***

Eleven years later, Candy again found herself in a hospital, this time looking down at her father, Ralph, who was lying in bed with a breathing tube in his mouth. He’d come out of surgery to repair an abdominal aneurysm. His problems started with a burst appendix, which led to an infection. After treatment, Ralph was unable to walk or effectively move his arms. Still, he was discharged.

A few days later, he was back in a hospital room. Candy visited him every day and finally got him to eat — she fed him peaches and ice cream.

The next day, a phone call jarred Candy from sleep at 4:30 a.m. on March 4, 2020. It was her brother with news about the aneurysm. She needed to get to the hospital quickly. After Ralph’s surgery, she and her brothers were gathered by their father. Candy knew he wouldn’t like the breathing tube.

A doctor gave the family grim news: Ralph was brain dead. Someone brought cookies and snacks into the room. Candy knew what that meant. Then one of her brothers said, “Candy, he’s looking at you.” She turned around to find her father awake. She thought, He’s brain dead, huh? Nurses rushed into the room. One called to him, “Mr. Blake, Mr. Blake, give me a thumbs up if you can hear me.” Candy could tell her father was distressed by the breathing tube.

“Do you want me to tell them to pull the tube out?” she asked him.

She clearly understood his reply: “Yes.”

She and her brothers made the difficult decision to comply with his wishes. And the man who had tried to save his grandson by performing CPR, who had labored as an upholsterer at Disney World before losing that job and then worked as a school custodian, the man who finally, after more than a quarter of a century of Florida life, became homesick for his Ohio hometown, died on what would have been his and Joyce’s 59th wedding anniversary, March 4, 2020.

***

Candy’s anxiety has worsened since the derailment. 

“Sometimes it comes out of nowhere,” she said. “If you ever see me just step away, it’s because I’m having an anxiety attack and I’ve just got to breathe. You wonder, what’s going to happen next? We don’t know, and nobody will tell us the truth.”

Lenny works at a company located near the derailment site, and every day he walks into the house after his shift and Candy wonders about the chemicals he could be carrying with him.

“They say, ‘Why don’t you just move?’” she said. “How am I going to move? I can’t do it. Financially? No, we cannot do it.”

***

Two weeks later, on Sept. 17, Candy’s phone rang. It was a little after midnight. Diane was on the line.

“Can you help me get Mick up?” she asked.

“I’ll be right over,” Candy said.

She found Mickey in bed, unable to move his legs. She’d helped her father in a similar situation by grabbing tightly onto the back of his shirt and helping him use a walker, so she did the same thing with Mickey. Candy got him to a chair and then called an ambulance.

Six days later, Mickey lay in a hospice facility in Boardman, Ohio. He was surrounded by his family — Diane and the couple’s children and grandchildren. The room was beautiful, with two big beds and several recliners.

“We all decided to lay down and be quiet,” Diane says. “Some of us might have drifted off. I was laying there in a bed beside Mick with my eyes about half closed. I watched the nurse come in through the door. She walked over to him and started checking him out.”

“Then she turned around, and came right over to me and said, ‘I’m sorry, he’s gone.’ I started crying. We all cried. We didn’t know what to do.”

Diane looks up at Candy. She recalls their earlier interactions, when she thought Candy had ignored her.

“Now we’re joined at the hip,” Diane says. “I guess that’s how you get through some of these things. I’ll tell you what, if it wasn’t for her, I don’t know if I’d get through it, because she cries right along with me.”