Everyone knows that when your phone rings and it’s still
dark outside, the voice on the other end of the line will bear bad news. The
only question is what kind of bad news are you about to hear. So when our home
phone shrilled in the dark, and I saw that it was 5:15 am, my heart clenched
and my throat went dry. I said a groggy hello, not knowing that this would be
the most dreadful conversation of my life.
“Is this Mrs. Devereux?”
“Yes, who are you?”
“I’m a nurse at CHRISTUS Mother Frances Hospital in
Sulphur Springs. We have your daughter Victoria in the emergency room.”
I expected to hear terrible news about something like a serious
car accident, but instead she said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s
been a fire at her home.”
I gasped and grabbed on to Michael, who had walked
around to my side of the bed. “A fire?”
“Yes. The ambulance brought her in with burns and
lacerations. We’re treating her now.”
“What about the girls?”
“I don’t know anything about anyone else. They just
brought in your daughter.”
A few minutes later, as I tried to comprehend what I’d
just heard, Victoria came on the line. She spoke between heaving sobs, and I
could barely make out her words. The nurse came back on the line. “I think you
need to get here as fast as you can.”
In shock and disbelief, Michael and I clung to each other,
speechless.
Our bags were already packed because we were going up to Sulphur
Springs later that day for a weekend visit. Our granddaughters were celebrating
their birthdays with a joint party on Saturday. Heaven would turn 4 on the 31st
and today, the 20th, was Hayden’s first birthday.
We had packed the
evening before, so fifteen minutes after I hung up the phone, we got in our car
and drove north toward Victoria and, we prayed, toward Heaven and Hayden.
It was a five-hour drive from our house outside of Houston
to her North Texas home. We drove as fast as we dared, but it wasn’t fast
enough.
About nine, Victoria called us again. Still crying, but
much more composed.
“Are the girls there with you, Tori?”
“Not yet,” she said, “Before they took me away in the
ambulance, a fireman told me the house was too hot to go into.”
I couldn’t understand why the firefighters didn’t get
Heaven and Hayden immediately. Why would they wait?
“Just a minute, Mom, they’re here.”
Suddenly I heard Victoria give a low, sobbing moan that
shook my world.
“NO! NO! NO! Where are my babies? Please bring me my
babies!”
The children hadn’t survived the fire. Victoria was
beyond speech. We were an hour and a half away. All we could do for her was
drive faster.
The story of how we all coped— and are still coping— with the tragic loss of our two beloved girls is
far too long to tell here; it takes up several chapters in my memoir, The Requirements of Love. But tomorrow is
the 4th anniversary of Heaven and Hayden’s deaths. It is a time of
profound grief for everyone who loved them.
One element of that grief is the loss of them as children
growing up and maturing. Heaven had a saucy, lively, intelligence to her that I
can envision at an older age, but Hayden was barely one. A beautiful child, and
a happy one, she hadn’t had the chance to show us yet who she might become. I
feel that loss very deeply.
This year I decided to peek into the future that never
happened, to see the girls with fresh eyes. I got on my favorite AI program, Copilot,
and did an age progression of my favorite photo of them. I wanted to see Heaven
as an 8-year-old and Hayden as a 4-year-old.
It took a lot of tinkering. In the first round of
changes, the AI program left Hayden with her wispy bits of baby hair instead of
showing it grown out as it would have. And in the original photo, Hayden is
looking down. She had beautiful blue eyes and I wanted her to show them to the
camera, so I had the photo adjusted to make her look ahead.
That photo made me cry, but it also made my smile. I am
so glad to think of my girls growing and thriving. I don’t know what happens
after we die, but a happy afterlife certainly appeals to me. Just because they
are lost to this world doesn’t mean they couldn’t grow up in some other one.
Here are both pictures. Look closely and you’ll see what
I see: each of the pictures is real.
Ciao
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