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A North Carolina business owner is asking for help five weeks after Hurricane Helene caused her family physical, financial, and emotional devastation.”I understand there have been so many lives lost, and there are more important things that people lost,” Terri Cox said as she got teary-eyed speaking with WYFF News 4’s Destiny Chance.Cox and her family own The Olde World Christmas Shoppe in the Biltmore Village, one of the areas of Asheville hardest hit by the storm.”There are some people who are local homeless people, and we worried about them,” Cox said. “We worried about just everybody, everywhere in the Asheville area, number one. And then when we realized that the store was just decimated, it was heartbreaking.” The store on the corner of Boston Way, near The Corner Kitchen and Estate Jewelry, and across the street from Well Bred Bakery, sells novelty holiday and decor items.”We looked at pictures and drone photographs and videos, it was completely covered. I think it was between about 15 feet high on the building, and inside, it was over nine feet high. The water was inside the building,” Cox says.She says when they were finally able to go inside, things had already molded.”We’ve already started the process to remediate, but that’s very expensive, and then to rebuild, because the whole building is gutted right now, down to the subcore. There’s a crawl space, and it has many feet of mud inside, and we’ve been told that the mud is dangerous. It has listeria. It has E coli biohazard, and we’re told that needs to come out also, which is going to be expensive but it’s dangerous,” she said.Along with the destruction of the building, Cox says she and her family are coping with the emotional toll the storm’s aftermath has taken.”My parents took over this Christmas Shoppe in 1989,” she said. My mom is gone now; she’s not here anymore. And she was such a huge part of the store, and we always kept one wreath up that she had made that we never took down. It was for sale, you know, before she passed away, but we kept it up. And when I knew that wreath was gone, and just everything that my parents had worked so hard for it was, it was devastating,” she said.Cox says the Federal Emergency Management Agency won’t be able to offer assistance to cover the demolition and remediation required. She also says the Small Business Administration says they do not have funding to help. So they started a GoFundMe in order to reopen.”We lost over $200,000 worth of merchandise, but we won’t use the GoFundMe money to replace any merchandise,” she said. “We just need it to remediate.”Cox is a teacher in Atlanta and says the outpouring from the community has been tremendous.”I had to let my school know why I was missing days, back and forth between here and North Carolina and they were devastated, too. I didn’t even realize half of my students had visited the shop and talked about so many memories their families have had in the area,” she said.WYFF asked if Cox and her family are still in the Christmas spirit, given the circumstances.”I’m hopeful, very hopeful we can be back up and running by summer of 2025,” she said. “But that’s being optimistic.”