I'll See You Again Part 7

When I called him, he'd already been briefed by Tricia.

"I'm so sorry," he said as soon as I told him my name.

"You have to help me," I blurted out. "You have to tell me this pain is going to go away. G.o.d won't let me live like this, right? If you're sick, you get pain medicine, so what do I get? I need to know he'll take me quickly, otherwise I'll have to kill myself."

He waited until I finished, then spoke firmly. "Jackie, everything is chaotic right now, but we need to stop the bleeding first. Then we can figure things out. It's like triage. The bleeding is so severe that you can't think rationally."

"If I kill myself, would I go to h.e.l.l?" I asked, getting right to the point.

He stayed on the phone with me for almost two hours, as I barraged him with questions.

"All your questions are reasonable," he said finally. "I need to get back to you. Please don't do anything until I come talk to you. In the meantime, remember that the pain you feel now won't be the same you feel in six months."

I thought that was ridiculous. Of course this pain would never cease. And how could this priest know, anyway? He wasn't a mother. He didn't understand.

But I promised Father Barr I wouldn't do anything drastic until we spoke again. After all, I needed to confirm that taking my own life would reunite me with my girls. I got through the next few days by waiting for him to arrive. Without solid answers, I was afraid to act.

He pulled up to the house one afternoon in a Jeep, wearing khaki shorts, an open-necked s.h.i.+rt, and flip-flops. Like all the others, he didn't have an explanation as to why all three girls had been taken. I moved on to my next series of questions. My plan to see Emma, Alyson, and Katie made perfect sense to me, but I needed to confirm the entry requirements to the Kingdom of Heaven.

"You can't enter heaven if you commit a mortal sin," he said.

"G.o.d would send me to h.e.l.l for wanting to be with my children?" I asked in disbelief.

"Suicide is a mortal sin," he reminded.

"Isn't G.o.d kind and compa.s.sionate and forgiving?" I asked, near tears.

"Yes, of course."

"Well, wouldn't a forgiving G.o.d understand that a mother needs to take care of her children? Are you telling me G.o.d would keep me from my children?"

"I can't answer that," Father Barr said finally.

"But this doesn't make sense!"

"You're speaking like a very rational person," he said. "If you're rational when you commit suicide, then you won't go to heaven."

"But I'm crazy, I really am. You're just not here when things get really bad!" I said ardently.

How did it get to this? Did I really have to convince a priest that I was crazy in order to a.s.sure my pa.s.sage to heaven?

My search for straightforward answers seemed to leave all the priests I confronted shaken and uncertain. Catholicism is based on belief, not careful reasoning. If you try to treat the articles of faith like a mathematical equation, you discover they just don't add up. The priests were willing to offer comfort, but they didn't want to engage in carefully calibrated conversation. They balked at offering literal a.s.surances that heaven existed-and that the girls and I would find each other in that better spot.

Was it really better? When my father got sick and quickly died of cancer, a year before Emma was born, the priestly intonement that he had "gone to a better place" made sense. We all nodded compa.s.sionately. However sad and painful his death, I liked thinking of him smiling down at me from heaven. And I got pregnant so quickly after he died that I was sure Emma was Dad's gift to me.

But with my daughters, none of the bromides about a "better place" made sense.

To add to the heartbreak-and my confusion-Katie had survived the crash and was the only one still alive at the hospital. At first, I had thought it was Alyson who had fought on, which made sense to me because Alyson had the biggest heart-one so big and open and generous that it would keep beating forever. But then Warren told me I was wrong-our little Katie had been the one who struggled for life in the hospital.

Thinking about that sucked the air out of my lungs. What had happened to Katie in those moments when she teetered between life and death? I remembered stories I had read of people on the precipice of death choosing whether to stay on earth or go to heaven. One man who had suffered a heart attack described that he was on his way to the other side when he suddenly realized how sad his wife and daughter would be. He fought back to be with his family.

Had Katie had that experience? Did she elect to be with her sisters instead of with me?

Katie and I had always been inseparable. I loved to find special ways to bond with her, and one day when the big girls were in school, we went off to get manicures together, giggling from start to finish. When Emma and Alyson saw our sparkly nails, they'd begged to get their nails done, too, so I set up another date for all of us. I couldn't deny Katie that second round of laughing together with me and her sisters. She must have been the only five-year-old in town who got two mani-pedis that week.

As close as she and I were, Katie also adored her older sisters. Emma and Alyson always carpooled to school with their best friends and neighbors, Kailey and Ryan. On days that I drove, Katie of course came along, happily sitting in the car for the round-trip to school and back. But even on the other days, Katie didn't like to be left behind. She'd walk next door with her sisters, and Isabelle would pop her in the car to take her along-then drop her back at our house. She kept a car seat longer than she needed to just so Katie could ride in the car with her.

Katie had always been inseparable from her sisters. I couldn't shake the idea that after the accident, she had been given a choice. On some level, I understood her wanting to be with her sisters. I wanted to be with them, too.

With these thoughts of ending my life to see the girls, I thought that I'd hit the absolute depths of despair. Then I learned that I hadn't even come close to rock bottom.

The next blow happened the Tuesday after the funeral, as Warren and I sat in the Long Island living room of a woman named Elaine Stillwell. We had connected to her through Compa.s.sionate Friends, a national organization for grieving parents. She was telling us about her own loss many years earlier and the comfort and support her local bereavement group could offer. I'm sure she ran a warm and sympathetic group, but I already knew that Warren and I couldn't join. The meetings were open, and we needed to protect our privacy. Our story-and our pain-had already been made too public.

In the midst of the conversation, Warren got a call on his cell phone and stepped out of the living room to take it. When he came back, his face was rigid.

"We have to leave," he said.

"Why?" I asked. It had been a long drive to get here, and I wanted to stay in Elaine's living room, hearing her comforting words, for a while longer.

"Now, Jackie," he said. His whole body was tense and I heard the urgency in his voice.

We made a quick exit.

"The toxicology report is going to be released," Warren said as he led me to the car. "It's not good."

Up until now, the police had been calling the accident a "mystery" and saying that alcohol didn't seem to be involved. Diane had driven down an exit ramp to the Taconic Parkway that was isolated and poorly marked. Local residents had long worried about people getting confused. But once on the highway, with cars whizzing by, Diane could have pulled over to one of the gra.s.sy areas along the side of the road. Drivers who pa.s.sed her honked their horns and tried to gesture. Some said she was staring straight ahead, holding the steering wheel in the correct 10-2 o'clock position, and seemed calm. Others said she straddled lanes and seemed erratic.

Why did she keep driving?

Warren and I had been too dazed and distracted to come up with any theories of our own. Seizure or stroke, probably. Some other neurological disruption. Something must have happened to leave her muddled or disoriented.

Now police had an answer so shocking we found ourselves tumbling down another rabbit hole. A state trooper had hinted to Warren a couple of days earlier that horrifying findings might be released, and Warren had tried to warn me of the possibility. But we had both stayed in a state of denial.

"The toxicology report says Diane was drunk," Warren said.

When I gasped, he added, "And high on pot."

Diane's blood alcohol level had been 0.19 percent-more than twice the legal limit. Police described it as the equivalent of ten shots of vodka in an hour. She had six grams of undigested alcohol in her stomach, and police found an opened vodka bottle in the wreckage. There was also evidence that she had been smoking marijuana just an hour before.

"No, no, it's a mistake," I said.

"It's an official report," Warren said.

"But it must be a mistake. Diane doesn't drink. It's impossible."

This latest news was almost too horrifying to handle. Diane drunk with five children in the car? Was that why Emma had been crying? Is that what she meant when she said that something was wrong with Aunt Diane?