Colors of Goodbye

by September Vaudrey

  Andrea’s grandma owned a condo in Las Vegas, and she offered to let us stay there for free. We bought plane tickets, booked a two-week stay, and converged on Sin City in early August.

  At first we tried to do what we normally do on vacations. We cooked favorite meals. We read good books and played games and lounged at the pool.

  But these were just distractions, brief respites from the ache that kept our souls as parched as the Vegas desert air. In between books and games and the pool, we just stared at one another in disbelief, or sat on the sofa, or sprawled motionless on the floor, or lay on our beds and cried. It was probably what we needed to do, but it was downright depressing.

  The first Friday, Andrea had to drive down to LA for work. She’d be gone a couple of days. That night, the rest of us loaded up in our rented minivan and drove to Red Robin for dinner. It felt a little like the olden days: a van full of Vaudreys. The atmosphere picked up, and by the time we bounded into the restaurant’s lobby, the kids were chattering away.

  “How many?” the host asked.

  “Seven,” Scott answered reflexively.

  And then it hit us.

  The kids grew quiet. Sam reached over and rubbed Scott’s back. We had been seven for so many years. I loved being seven. But without Katie, a van full of Vaudreys wasn’t seven.

  “Uh, six,” he said quietly.

  A deep, collective exhale sucked the air from our lungs. We were six.

  Around the Red Robin table that night, we were determined to rebound. We started out pretty somber, but the kids began telling stories, and our laughter reappeared, shyly at first, but soon without apology. We were test-driving the new normal—and discovering that sorrow and joy could be decent neighbors.

  For the second week of our Las Vegas vacation, the McConkeys flew down from Spokane and joined us. They saved the day! We moved from the condo to some rooms at the MGM Grand that Scott had scored at an amazing price. We floated on the lazy river in MGM’s fabulous pool complex. We saw a few shows, overate at buffets, laughed too loud in restaurants, and simply played together. There were tender conversations, too, and some tears. But an aura of fun prevailed, delivering a much-needed summer shower to the deserts of our souls.

  The collective sorrow that had permeated our first week in Las Vegas turned out to be a recurring vacation phenomenon. For several years to come, we would find that when we stepped away from the routine of life, the stillness of vacations gave our pent-up sorrow a chance to cut loose, and the first days of a trip were generally a bummer. We found it helped if we didn’t fight it and simply scheduled some downtime up front to allow sorrow to get its release so the rejuvenating part of the vacation could begin.

  Still today, for Scott and me, family trips are seasoned faintly by sadness. We miss our girl. We wish she were here to join us. While time with family brings wholehearted laughter and relaxation and fun, it’s not without a slight taste of sorrow. Both/and. Never one without the other.

  36

  I HAD BEEN WATCHING OUR MAILBOX all summer, waiting for a letter from Gift of Hope—the organ donation nonprofit that had coordinated Katie’s surgery and organ placement. We’d been told we would receive a summary of Katie’s donation sometime this summer, telling us of all the people Katie’s organs and tissues had helped.

  Around the second week of August, the waiting paid off. I opened the mailbox one afternoon and pulled out an envelope bearing the distinct purple-and-green Gift of Hope logo in the corner. I disciplined myself to wait until Scott and the kids were home—and then I ripped open the envelope and read its contents aloud.

  We learned these details about the anonymous people whose bodies now contained, in part, our daughter: A sixty-eight-year-old grandmother received Katie’s liver. A twenty-six-year-old woman received her lungs. (She had been given only twenty-four hours to live—the day before Katie’s accident.) A thirty-seven-year-old father of two received her pancreas and left kidney. A forty-three-year-old family man received her right kidney. A young man and a young woman received her corneas, giving them a second chance for sight. In addition to the organs and corneas, Katie’s femurs contributed “bone and adjacent soft tissue” to be used for a variety of orthopedic procedures—from spinal fusions to reconstructing long bones lost to cancer or trauma. In some cases, they were used for full joint replacement. All of the transplants had been successful, and each patient was recovering at home with family and friends.

  I smiled at the image of that twenty-six-year-old woman taking her first breath with Katie’s vibrant, healthy lungs.

  The news of our recipients brought gratitude and pride. How proud we were that our girl had cared strongly about organ donation. How grateful we were that her heart had been jolted back to life three times so that she could be a candidate for donation. The fact that her death had—in some cases quite literally—brought life to six different people, not to mention the many who received bone and soft tissue from her to restore their joints or legs, left a complicated surge of satisfaction in my soul. She would be so proud. And so am I.

  Because of the confidentiality regulations around donation, Gift of Hope acts as the intermediary for donor/recipient correspondence. Our letter included a consent form to release our contact information to any of Katie’s recipients who requested it, along with some guidelines for how to write a letter to our recipients.

  I called the Gift of Hope family services coordinator with a few questions. She provided helpful, compassionate answers and then added, “Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from your recipients for quite some time. They are recovering from major surgery. And in some cases, you may not hear from them at all. They may feel uncomfortable trying to say thank you when their gift came at such cost to you.”

  I guess that made sense, but I very much wanted to hear from those donors. I wanted to know how they were doing. To be honest, I wanted to hear how—hopefully—Katie’s gift had been a blessing to them. When I wrote my letters to them, I tried to minimize any awkwardness they might feel by emphasizing that, although we were heartbroken at our loss, it helped immensely to know Katie’s organs had helped others. I signed my letter and our consent form and mailed them back to Gift of Hope.

  Then the mailbox watching resumed.

  Katie’s coroner’s inquest, scheduled for late August, was fast approaching. We were not required by law to attend, but I wanted to go. Scott was the opposite of me in this; he had witnessed firsthand as many details of Katie’s accident as he cared to stomach. He needed no extra material to haunt his dreams, thank you very much. I knew it would tank Scott to sit and hear the crash and hospital scenes replayed, and on the day of the inquest I felt up to attending alone, so that’s what I did.

  Why did I want to know all the details of Katie’s accident? They wouldn’t change the outcome, and they would be gut-wrenching to listen to. But for me, knowing all the tiny specifics—as graphic as they might be—was better than wondering what had happened to my daughter in those dreadful moments after the crash. The cold reality of truth, I hoped, would be less horrifying than the CSI-inspired scenes that played regularly in my mind.

  Part of what drove me to know every detail was a maternal desire to be close to my daughter. I had been at Katie’s side during every significant transition in her short life—her first day of kindergarten, middle school, and high school; the move to Chicago; her first date; her first boyfriend; every graduation; her college orientation. But on May 31, for that most significant and final of all transitions, I had not been there. She had been alone. My daughter had passed from this world to the next all by herself. In learning about the final moments of her life, this part of her story wouldn’t be unknown. Someone who loves her would know all the details. Her mama would hold the details.

  I drove to the courthouse in Geneva, where Kane County inquests are held, and found the correct courtroom. I took a seat on a bench against the back wall. The county coroner presided as judge over an eight-person jury for each
case. When Katie’s case was presented, the investigating detective and the coroner’s assistant gave testimony, and I learned some details I’d not heard before: When Katie was extricated from the car, she had no pulse, her pupils were unresponsive, and she was not breathing. The paramedics started CPR, loaded her into the ambulance, and then shocked her to get her pulse back. She must have been unconscious and possibly not breathing for several minutes before the ambulance arrived. I learned that her seat belt had already been unbuckled when the ambulance arrived, likely by someone else at the scene. (She was maniacal about wearing her seat belt—a true child of an ER doc—and if she had been unbuckled upon impact, she would have been thrown around inside the car.)

  After an hour of testimony, the jury stepped out to deliberate. As I sat on my bench and waited, some comic relief wiggled its way into the inquest in the form of a defense attorney in a polyester pin-striped suit who was there for the next trial. He reminded me of Danny DeVito in his role as the used-car-salesman dad in Matilda, but he was also more of a lady’s man—at least in his own mind. He parked himself a little too close to me on the bench, his short legs dangling, and was very, uh, attentive.

  “I got four kids—two in their thirties, a teen, plus a toddler from my third wife,” he told me. “But I’m single now. So . . . how about you?”

  He peppered me with questions about why I was there and offered his legal analysis of my situation, “free of charge.” Lucky me.

  “See, what you want here is for them to rule her death accidental, even though the aneurysm means it was technically natural,” he explained, leaning in close enough for me to smell his Jōvan Musk cologne. “If it’s ruled accidental, you’ll get to keep all that insurance money!”

  Despite the heavy circumstances of why I was sitting in that courtroom, it was all I could do to not giggle at this caricature of a man. He was ridiculous. If only I’d brought a friend along today! I wanted someone else to witness this.

  The longer the jury deliberated, the longer I got to listen to my new friend. At long last—after about half an hour—the jury returned, and the coroner asked for a verdict. One of the jurors stood and read from a piece of paper: “In the case of Katherine Rachelle Vaudrey, we find the cause of death to be . . . accidental.”

  My lawyer friend jumped to his feet and did a fist pump in the air—mouthing “Yes!”—as if he’d just won a Supreme Court ruling. Turning to me, he whispered loudly, “This means you’ll get to keep that funeral money—cha-ching!”

  Oh. My. Gosh.

  After the trial, Danny DeVito pulled out his “money clip”—a wad of one-dollar bills held together by a weary rubber band—and thumbed for a dog-eared business card, which he handed me in grand gesture.

  “Ever need a little legal help (wink-wink), just give me a call.”

  I left the courtroom and bumped into the detective who had just given testimony. We chatted for a moment, and then I asked a question that had been bugging me.

  “Why didn’t you mention the witness who saw Katie passed out behind the wheel before the crash?” I asked.

  “We were never able to locate him,” the officer explained. “He left a voice message at the police station that told us clearly he had seen your daughter unconscious. He sounded shaken on the phone, and he didn’t leave any contact information. Perhaps he had a warrant out for his arrest, or perhaps he just forgot.”

  “Couldn’t you trace his call?” I asked.

  “We worked with the phone company for two days, trying to do just that,” he said. “But in the end, we were unsuccessful. That meant the witness’s testimony would be inadmissible as hearsay. I couldn’t use it.”

  I thanked him for his help and then found space down the hallway to be alone. I should have been relieved at the ruling since it meant her death wasn’t an “act of God” and the insurance lady wouldn’t be asking us to return the death-clause money that had paid Katie’s funeral expenses. But instead I felt angry. It would have been worth the funeral money to have my daughter’s death go down in the record books as “natural”—the result of the aneurysm—rather than her going on record as just another teen who died from being a careless driver.

  Nights were hard for Tember. In the stillness of Katie’s bed, she had space to feel her loss, and every morning I would find a small mountain of spent Kleenex piled next to her bed. It broke my heart to envision her crying herself to sleep night after night, but I was relieved that she wasn’t holding back. She was facing her sorrow head-on.

  Sam is a reflective, deep-thinking introvert like Scott. His youth pastor and close friends were checking in on him regularly. But it fit his wiring that on many mornings I would find him seeking solace alone in his room, eyes moist, lost in thought.

  When college started up in the fall, Bethany got sideswiped by the glaring absence of her kid sister. “On freshman move-in day,” she told me over the phone, “I awoke to the sounds of cheering. Outside on the sidewalk, Katie’s friends—the four girls she would have shared an apartment with this year—were waving signs and welcoming the new freshmen. Katie should have been down there with them, yelling and waving. She should be here, in this apartment complex with me. It’s moments like these when I really miss my sister. We were so excited to be neighbors this year.”

  The first issue of the Clause, APU’s college newspaper, featured a front-page story about Katie’s death.

  “Copies of that newspaper were all over campus,” Bethany said, “and everywhere I turned, I was greeted by a photo of Katie smiling up at me. Papers on benches and tables and the sidewalk—people were stepping on photos of my sister! Walking to class was like navigating a minefield of emotions.”

  Ugh. I had approved the Clause’s story and even been interviewed for it. But it had never occurred to me how hard it would be for Bethany to see her sister’s face plastered all around campus. The school’s attempt to honor one of my daughters had inadvertently created a hardship for another—and probably for Katie’s closest friends, too. It never occurred to me to forewarn Bethany. I had never stopped to think what it would be like for her when that article came out.

  Of all the kids, Andrea was the most similar to me in how she grieved. She, too, is a verbal processor, and talking about Katie’s death helped us both. She and Katie had been so close, and talking with Andrea about my middle daughter was a great relief to me. In too many ways to mention, Andrea had been a gift to our family—and in this one specific way, she continued to be a gift to me.

  Matt didn’t talk to me very often about his loss; he had Andrea, after all. But one day, more than three months after Katie had died, I learned about something he had been doing to cope.

  Katie had been on Matt and Andrea’s cell phone plan, and it was costing me forty-five dollars per month to avoid the difficult death chore of canceling her number. In late August, Matt sent our family a group e-mail:

  Hey, family,

  Today I called Verizon, and I discontinued Katie’s phone. If you have been calling her number to hear her voice message like I have been, then I wanted to warn you not to expect her anymore.

  Love you, Matt

  The mental image of Matt calling Katie’s number to listen to his sister’s cheery message and hear the sound of her voice brought tears to my eyes. I thought I had been the only one. Perhaps it helped Matt’s grief to complete this unpleasant task for me—and to take a step in his own grief process by severing this connection to his sister. It’s a bit of torture to be a parent of grown kids who have wounds you can no longer fix for them. Lord, help them, each one.

  When I finished up the freelance job at my church, I said yes to a permanent writing position on staff, twenty-five hours a week. My normal job of binge-watching episodes of 30 Rock in sweatpants would have to wait.

  Being around people regularly doing work that I loved proved good for me. I worked on the same team as Chris Hurta—the pastor who met us at the hospital and was so helpful on the funeral day.

 
Since Katie’s death, Scott and Chris had become close friends, but I had yet to meet Chris’s wife, Kaye. She and I met for a coffee date, and she was a delight. Her frank humor, tender spirit, and genuine sorrow over my loss left a lasting impression on my soul.

  “September, even though I didn’t know you in May when Katie died,” she told me, “I will never forget the moment I learned of her accident that Saturday night. I was sitting in Culver’s—the burger joint at the corner of Meacham and Algonquin Road—and Chris called me from church to tell me he was heading to the hospital to meet with you guys. And I prayed for you. Then a week later, after Katie’s funeral, Chris brought home the program, and I sat on my bed and pored over every word. And I just felt a connection to you as Katie’s mom. I’ve been praying for you ever since!” She smiled.

  “Thanks! We could use it,” I told her. “And your husband has been a great solace, especially to Scott. Thanks for sharing him with us!”

  “September,” she said, looking deep into my eyes, “I never got a chance to know your daughter. Could you help me get to know her now? What was she like?”

  How can you not love a woman like Kaye? I gladly obliged her request and filled her ears with a nice assortment of Katie-stories. She listened and laughed and wept.

  As we said goodbye that day and I watched Kaye walk away, I sensed I had just met a lifelong friend. And I was right.

  37

  I TOOK A SHORT TRIP TO CALIFORNIA that fall to connect with our college kids and see Matt and Andrea’s new place. They’d moved into a duplex with a nice backyard. Kati Harkin joined us for a barbeque on the last day of my visit, and seeing her was good for my soul. She had been such a faithful friend to Katie—she was like family to us. I wondered, Do we still hold a place in her life now that Katie is gone?