I'll See You Again

by Jackie Hance

“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 assure my passage 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 assurances 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 compassionately. 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 Compassionate 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 grassy areas along the side of the road. Drivers who passed 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?

  Warren and I were not yet capable of going anywhere on our own, so our dear friend Isabelle had driven us to the meeting at Elaine Stillwell’s house. Now as we hurried back into Isabelle’s car, she told us that reporters were mobbing our neighborhood again. Police had closed off our street after the accident, and they might have to do it again. The previous week, the “Wrong Way on the Taconic” story had grabbed newspaper readers and tabloid TV viewers with its anguishing human tragedy. Now the disaster had America’s other favorite element: scandal.

  Instead of driving us home, Isabelle decided we would head in a different direction. Looking for someplace safe to escape the press, we went to the suburban retreat of our friends Brad and Melissa, in the neighboring town of Garden City. Suddenly we were fugitives from our own lives. Too many times this week we had evaded reporters by having Isabelle take us to her house and help us get inside undetected. Then we would slip out her back door, sidle across the two yards, and sneak into our own home from the back. The furtiveness unnerved me. We were the good guys in the story, not the villains. We hadn’t done anything wrong. But I suddenly realized how the toxicology findings would sound to the rest of the world.

  “We have to make a statement,” I said, pani
cking now as we pulled up at Melissa and Brad’s house. “People are going to think I was an irresponsible mother.”

  Despite the powerful eulogy he had given at the funeral, Warren didn’t consider himself a public speaker, and he felt wrong talking to reporters. “I don’t owe them any explanations,” he said stoically. “I talk to the people I care about.”

  We called my brother and asked him if he would speak for the family. Three years older than me, Stephen had been the person I turned to when we were growing up. My mom suffered from postpartum depression, but the problem was so little understood forty years ago that she was hospitalized and given shock treatments—which only made it worse. My parents separated quickly and divorced when I was ten. Though I saw my dad every day, my mom and Stephen and I formed a tight threesome. When Stephen went to Annapolis for college, I was devastated. Now he lived in New Jersey, not far from where we grew up, with his beautiful wife, Caroline, and my nieces and nephew.

  Since Stephen had a job getting bigwigs positions in the financial sector, he was used to public speaking and agreed to appear at a press conference where he would read our statement but not take any questions. The reporters pounced. Like hungry birds, they were determined to peck at whatever they could get.

  In front of a throng of cameras, reporters, and commentators near our home, Stephen explained that he was speaking for Warren and me—but not for Danny. He said that we were “shocked and deeply saddened” by the information in the toxicology report, and that it was “the absolute last thing that we ever would have expected.” Then, speaking in our voice, he made the most important point of all:

  “We would never knowingly allow our daughters to travel with someone who might jeopardize their safety.”

  Never, under any circumstances. Never ever. I wanted him to repeat that line a thousand times. He continued with the words we had carefully chosen:

  “Because we have never known Diane to be anything but a responsible and caring mother and aunt, this toxicology report raises more questions than it provides answers for our family.”

  Listening intently, the reporters immediately sensed the first hint of a rift. And they were right. The Hances and Schulers had grieved together last week when our family bonds promised to trump all. But the toxicology report changed everything. Diane was buried alongside my girls, so we were connected to her forever, and realizing that brought a new, unexpected wave of pain and confusion.

  Four

  People began asking how I felt about Diane. No one can imagine how complex that question is. How does a person go from being like a sister to me, loved by my girls and cherished by my husband, to being the person who ruined our lives? Diane treated the girls like her own children—calling them before the first day of school, sending loving cards for Valentine’s Day, and stopping by just to see them and say hello. How could this person I loved and trusted have done something so unthinkable? Not to have any answers was torture.

  Grief is an overpowering sensation that fills every crevice of your heart and every synapse of your brain—and doesn’t leave room for anything else. But now another emotion began to creep in.

  Anger.

  The encroaching rage was like a surprise intruder on my grief, demanding a response I didn’t have the strength or emotional resilience to give.

  If the toxicology findings were correct, my children didn’t just die—they had been murdered.

  I began to discover that as torturous as grief may be, it doesn’t claw at your soul in the same way that anger does.

  “Why couldn’t they have just been in a regular car accident?” I whispered to one friend. “Then I could deal with the grief without having all this anger, too.”

  People began talking to me about “healing,” but the word rang hollow. It wasn’t as if I had scraped my knees and would start feeling better with some Band-Aids and lollipops. My life had essentially ended. Everything I cared about had been ripped away, and I grew increasingly angry at God for leaving me in this position. Our friends started looking for therapists who might help us, but many of the professionals didn’t even want to talk to us. Our tragedy was too much for them. They couldn’t begin to be helpful. Like the priests, they didn’t have any answers.

  • • •

  After the toxicology report became public, we wanted to take the high road, looking for answers while also expressing our sorrow and sympathy for everyone involved. Danny, meanwhile, fell prey to loudmouth lawyer Dominic Barbara, who had offered to represent him. That’s when the small rift between our families became a chasm.

  In the part of New York where we lived, Barbara’s name would always be linked with Joey Buttafuoco, the unsavory car repairman who had an affair in the 1990s with Amy Fisher—a teenager who shot and seriously wounded Joey’s wife, Mary Jo. Dubbed the “Long Island Lolita” by the media, Amy went to jail for seven years, and Joey got six months for statutory rape. The story was a favorite in tabloid TV for years and was even made into a movie, with Dominic Barbara fanning the flames however he could.

  In other words, he was not the person you would turn to if you wanted to prove your family’s high moral integrity.

  Dominic Barbara called a press conference almost immediately. Danny asked Warren’s father and his brother David to be there at his side, but they declined. Danny was upset—not understanding how sordid it felt to the rest of us that he was going on TV. He wanted to defend his wife, but recklessly spinning the story just added fuel to the already-burning press fire.

  Famously flamboyant Barbara seemed delighted to play master of ceremonies at the press conference, chatting happily and setting rules. He said a few sentences about what a terrible tragedy had occurred, but the words rang false. Standing outside in the sunshine, he told reporters that Diane Schuler could not possibly have been drunk. He turned to Danny for confirmation. “I never saw her drunk since the day I met her,” a tearful Danny announced.

  Barbara suggested that something else must have caused Diane to go the wrong way. “Something happened to her brain,” he said. He talked about a possible stroke and raised the issue of a tooth abscess that caused her pain. He didn’t say that the toxicology report was wrong, but he introduced his investigator, Thomas Ruskin, who had been on the case only twenty-four hours but confidently announced that what happened was “so out of character for this woman, [there] has to be some other explanation.”

  Danny seemed slightly out of it. He looked uncomfortable, staring off into space as he spoke, but his lack of eloquence at least made him sound genuine. Rumors had swirled that Danny and Diane had fought the morning of the accident and that she was distraught driving home because he told her he wanted a divorce. “Not so,” the lawyer declared.

  “I love my wife, we loved each other,” Danny said on cue. “She was a perfect wife, outstanding mother, hard worker, reliable person, trustworthy. I’d marry her again tomorrow. She’s awesome. The best.”

  When Danny faltered a few times, he was helped out by his sister-in-law Jay Shuler, who is married to Danny’s brother Jimmy. Angular, slim, and well-spoken, Jay was supportive—and sounded smarter than Danny. Barbara quickly pulled Jay in front of the microphone, where she said all the right things: Diane had been a nanny before she became a Cablevision executive. She treated her nieces as if they were her own girls. Family was the most important thing to her. There was no way she would jeopardize the children.

  Except that Diane had jeopardized the children.

  Danny wouldn’t apologize for his wife’s actions. Whatever the reasons behind the tragedy, the results were horrific—eight people dead. Instead of acknowledging that, he made it worse.

  “I go to bed every night knowing my heart is clear,” he blurted at the end. “She did not drink. She is not an alcoholic. My heart is resting every night when I go to bed.”

  The words curdled in the warm air. His wife and baby daughter were dead, and his heart rested comfortably every night?

  Dominic Barbara seemed obliv
ious to the blunder. Pleased with the press conference, he decided to take his sleazy show on the road. With Jay as his new foil, he showed up on Larry King Live and CBS’s The Early Show. Hearing about the media circus, I felt vaguely nauseous. Barbara was a clown, happy to perform, and I couldn’t bear to watch or listen. Why would Danny be doing this? Could he really prove that the toxicology was wrong and something else had been behind the accident?

  But I also felt just the tiniest speck of relief. Though it wasn’t the way I would have handled the situation, or how I would want to investigate, I desperately needed to believe that something else had happened. I didn’t want to be angry at Diane, and any explanation that could release that fury and make sense would be okay with me—whatever its source.

  One comment, though, jumped out at me and I couldn’t make it go away. Barbara had begun the press conference by announcing that Danny would not answer any questions about marijuana use.

  Which immediately caused everyone to jump to their own conclusions.

  I knew Danny had problems with anxiety and he’d had a bad reaction to the antianxiety drugs a doctor had prescribed. Was he self-medicating with pot? I could believe that, but Diane was a different story. She was a hard worker who took care of everything in the family.

  Danny said he and Diane had a couple of cups of coffee together the morning of the accident. Everything was fine. A few hours later, Diane had done the unthinkable.

  We all wanted to know what could possibly have happened between that last cup of coffee and Emma’s call. Days later, the cell phone would be found, discarded at the side of the road, near a small truck stop. I had envisioned the children at a busy McDonald’s when I last spoke with Emma, but that wasn’t quite right. At that point, Diane had simply pulled over at an unattended spot by the side of the road.

  The police investigation found she had made two other stops. First, early in the trip, she went to a McDonald’s to buy everyone breakfast. Everyone remembered her because Bryan had wanted Chicken McNuggets and the guy at the counter insisted they didn’t serve them that early. Wanting to make sure that the children all got what they wanted, Diane asked to talk to a manager. She had been completely rational—and determined—in the conversation.