Three weeks before their high school prom, about a year before Ann was shot, she and Conor went out on a date. They had been dating for two years, and there was no doubt that they would attend prom together. I appreciated Conor for many reasons. He had a solid head on his shoulders, he seemed to really care about academics, and Ann was crazy about him. I developed a sweet, nurturing relationship with him . . . one that Andy did not strive to replicate. Andy is sometimes known as “Mister Uh-oh” at work because he’s called in when things have gone bad—or, if someone needs to be let go, people always say “Uh-oh!” when they see him. I’m not sure what kind of boy Ann could’ve brought home that would’ve pleased Andy . . . and the guys seemed to pick up on that.
I looked through the upstairs window and saw Conor pulling in to drop Ann off. It seemed like only five minutes had passed when I noticed Ann speeding out of the driveway in her car.
“Andy, where’s Ann going?” I asked.
“She just got a call from Conor,” Andy said. “He’s been in an accident.”
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I had just seen him with my two eyes in what seemed like seconds ago.
“Let’s go see if he needs help,” I said.
About a mile from our house, we saw Ann’s Volvo pulled over on the side of the road. The ambulance and the police car were already there, lights flashing. Conor’s vehicle had rolled over completely and was back on the right side of the road. The front of the car had been smashed down more than the back. The wind-shield was completely shattered.
Conor was conscious and sitting in the ambulance. His face was covered in tiny cuts, but otherwise he seemed fine.
“The car hit the tree and rolled over,” said the sheriff. “You can see the scrapes on the top of the car where it slid down the pavement.”
“How could he have survived that?” I asked while looking at the car. “It seems like a miracle.”
“Well, the Honda has side air bags as well as front,” he said. “It may have been a miracle, but those air bags helped. He must have been going sixty miles per hour.”
Ann told us that Conor had seen a deer crossing the road. He went off to the right, then overcorrected and hit the tree.
“I haven’t ever seen deer on this road,” I said. Though I didn’t say it at the time, it seemed sort of suspicious that a deer had caused such a bad wreck. Part of me wondered if he had simply been speeding on the road and gotten careless. Shortly after those thoughts went through my mind, his dad parked behind us and walked up quickly.
“Where’s Conor?” he asked, his voice full of concern and emotion.
He would be fine, of course.
I sat next to Ann and watched her in the hospital bed.
Oddly, I didn’t feel like I was helping her by being there. I was in the room with her, but I had no sense of her being there, or of her being aware of my presence. She looked asleep, but I didn’t feel any of the warm feelings of comfort I used to feel when she was a child who had finally drifted off.
Instead I felt cold.
When Andy came into the room, I looked up and smiled, welcoming the company. He had someone with him. I felt a hint of recognition. Someone from church? From Andy’s work? I was not familiar with all his coworkers and employees.
The man had slumped shoulders and a frown etched on his face. As he followed Andy into the room, I stood to greet him. The bed was between the door and my chair. When our eyes met, I gradually recognized him.
Michael McBride?
I paused.
Can I go to him?
Without even a second to contemplate what I was doing, my feet answered my own question. I walked around the bed. Even as I approached him, I thought, Can I embrace him? That was the word in my mind.
Embrace.
The Holy Spirit is sometimes described as a wind, without shape or form. In that moment this mysterious, unseen force propelled me across the room, around the foot of my unconscious daughter’s bed, to the father of the boy who put her there.
Can I embrace him?
Again, my body answered my own question. I don’t know what I would’ve done had I been the one to see Michael as he stood by the elevators. I don’t know what it would’ve been like if Michael had waited until the next day to come to the hospital. But in that moment, in Ann’s quiet, semidark hospital room, God’s grace moved me across the room, and my arms reached out and hugged him.
Crossing that room, I took the first steps of my journey of forgiveness.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I haven’t been able to talk to Conor yet. We were on vacation, so I drove straight here.”
After talking for a few minutes, I left to see who was in the waiting room. I hadn’t wanted to sit in Ann’s room for a long period of time, but I didn’t want her to be alone. Since Andy was there to take a shift, I walked out of Ann’s room and into the hallway teeming with people—congregants, friends, family. At the time, Andy had started a five-year program to become a deacon in the Catholic Church. Cindy, the wife of another man in the program, had seen the news online and told her husband, “We have to go to the hospital.” My husband knew her husband well, but the wives only got together one day a month for a retreat. Even though we wives weren’t terribly close, she did whatever was necessary to take care of the people in our group.
“We just have to be here,” she said.
This seemed to be the predominant sentiment for several people. When I walked out into the hall, I was overcome with love. Seeing so many people from my community—probably forty or fifty—felt like being wrapped up in a warm blanket.
They all wanted to help.
I used to teach parenting and breast-feeding classes, and when I counseled young moms-to-be, I’d say: “Keep a list. People are going to ask you what they can do to help, so write everything down that could possibly help you. When someone calls and asks what they can do, you can look at your list and say, ‘Thanks—we need toothpaste.’ ”
I would also tell them that it’s as much about friends wanting to help as it is about the moms needing help. People want to do for people in need, and it’s kind to let them. After all, in this terrible place Andy and I found ourselves, a tube of toothpaste was not going to salve our wounds.
But the love of a community could.
That advice came back to me as I was surrounded by people who wanted to show me love.
What can I do to help?
Is there anything I can do?
“I don’t think the cats have any cat litter,” I said, ever practical . . . and still in shock. Amid all the drama, the first thing I remembered was that I hadn’t been able to buy cat litter that afternoon for our three cats.
I’m sure people were flummoxed by the request, but everyone received it as if it made all the sense in the world.
Cat litter? Okay.
Several priests were at the hospital to tend to us. Father Chris had stayed the whole evening. Father Will, not even ordained a year, Father Michael, and Father Kevin all came to the hospital to be with us.
As I looked at these men of God, with their clerical collars and kind expressions, it made me thankful to be a part of the Catholic Church.
I had a soft spot for Father Mike, an Irish gentleman with snow-white hair, kind blue eyes, and a compassionate, loving manner.
“Do you want to see Ann?” I asked him. As we walked back to the intensive care unit, he took about five or six steps then stopped.
I followed suit by stopping and waiting with him.
He took five or six more steps before stopping again.
I stopped with him and silently waited. That’s when I noticed that his eyes were full of tears.
“Father Mike,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“Kate, it’s not okay.”
When I looked into his eyes, it felt as though God was speaking to me.
This is not okay with me. This is not what I want. I’m grieving this too. I feel this loss just as greatly as you do.
It wasn’t a long moment. It only lasted a second or two. But that’s when I strongly felt God sharing in my grief—that he cried with his children, that this was definitely not okay. People sometimes ask if we ever blamed God for this tragedy. We haven’t. Perhaps any brewing anger dissipated when I saw the tear-filled eyes of Father Mike, who shared in our sorrow just as he’d rejoiced in our past triumphs.
Hours passed, filled with beeping machines, nurses coming in and out of Ann’s room, visitors, and whispered conversations about what exactly happened that had made Conor do this. By 11:00 p.m., I was absolutely exhausted.
I felt a little like I did after I brought Ann into the world so many years ago.
After a successful labor and delivery, the nurses had let her stay with me in my room. She nursed and suckled until I needed a break. Finally, I said, “Is there any way you could take her? I’m so tired.”
“Oh,” one said. “We thought you would want to keep her in the room.” The nurses knew me because I taught breast-feeding classes at the hospital.
“Yes,” I said, handing the tightly wrapped bundle to the nurse. “But I just need some rest!”
Nineteen years later, I was in another hospital, during a less joyous time, realizing once again the limitations of my body.
“I want to go home,” I said to Andy. We’d been sitting by Ann’s side for hours.
I knew there were mothers who would not have left their child’s hospital bed under any circumstance. They’d vow to stay right beside their injured child’s side, hoping against hope for a miracle. They’d sit stoically in the stiff chair. They’d go without rest on the off chance that their child would wake up and see they’d been there all along.
I needed sleep—real, deep, restorative sleep, not the constantly interrupted hospital sleep. I’d just received the most shocking and horrible news, and I knew the disruption to our lives had only begun.
“That’s fine, I understand you want to go home. But first, you stay here while I go home and take a shower, and then I’ll come back and spend the night. I want to be here when Ann wakes up,” Andy said, kissing my forehead. I looked in his eyes and saw something I didn’t possess. Hope.
I nodded, knowing God could perform a miracle. It wasn’t as though I was overcome with hopelessness, but I couldn’t shake the belief that she’d die of her injuries. Part of me loved how Andy still had hope, and part of me was deeply saddened by it.
Andy reached into his pocket for his keys, when his fingers landed on some change. He pulled out the coins and saw that one of them was a gold piece about the size of a quarter. He picked it out from the others on his palm to look at it more closely. On one side was an image of an angel rising out of the clouds.
“Look at that,” he said, marveling at the coin.
“How’d that get in there?” I asked.
“Maybe that’s what Father Will was talking about when he said, ‘Be open to seeing glimpses of God,’ ” he said.
That little coin convinced us that—somehow—God was very close in that moment.
When we emerged from Ann’s room, to our surprise the four priests and our deacon were still there. These men are early risers, so their remaining there touched Andy deeply. We came out and hugged each person. With every hug, Andy thought, This is why I go to church. This is why I belong to a community.
Deacon Tom took one look at Andy’s weary eyes. “Need a ride?” he asked when he heard of Andy’s plan to go home and return.
A hug. A ride. A comforting word.
We never felt more loved and taken care of by our community.
That is, until I got home.
Just a few hours earlier, a deputy sheriff and a victim’s advocate had shown up on my porch and shattered our world. That night—at one thirty in the morning—I arrived to that same house, to the place that would never quite be what it had once been.
And on the porch I found cat litter—one hundred pounds of it.