PART 2 – The Day My Husband Took Both Children to the Lake, I Never Imagined Only One Would Come Home

Then came the day everything changed.

My husband took Jeremy and Janice to the lake.

Both children went with him.

Only Jeremy returned.

I remembered the difference between those two sentences.

At the time, I couldn't understand what I was hearing.

One child was missing.

One child was home.

And my husband was trying to explain what had happened.

He told me Janice had slipped.

He said the current had carried her away.

He said he had gone into the water after her.

He had tried to reach her.

He had kept swimming.

But he couldn't catch her.

I wanted there to be another explanation.

Something that would make those words less terrible.

Something that would mean I had misunderstood.

But there was no comforting answer.

Janice was gone.

Her father had returned with Jeremy, but our daughter hadn't come home.

Her body was never recovered.

That fact became another kind of pain.

There was no final moment when I could hold her.

No chance to see her again and say the things I wished I had said.

There was only the knowledge that she had gone into the water and never returned.

The police investigated what had happened.

They called it an accident.

A tragic accident.

Those were the words used to describe the loss of my five-year-old daughter.

I heard them.

I understood what they meant.

But understanding the words didn't make the situation easier to accept.

I was a mother who had sent two children into the world together.

Now I was being told that one of them would never come back.

And Jeremy was still there.

My little boy.

The brother who had always been beside Janice.

He had been with his father that day.

He had come home without his sister.

I looked at him and tried to imagine what was happening inside his little mind.

He was only five.

Five years old.

Old enough to understand that Janice wasn't coming home.

Too young to explain everything he might have seen or felt.

I wanted to comfort him.

I wanted to take away whatever pain he was carrying.

But I was carrying my own.

And neither of us knew how to help the other.

There are moments in life when you wish someone could simply tell you what to do next.

I needed that more than I could admit.

But there was no instruction book for what happened to us.

No sentence that could bring Janice back.

No way to return to the morning before the lake.

The police had their explanation.

My husband had his account of what happened.

And I had a little boy who had lost his twin sister.

That was all I had.

At least, that was what I thought.

Click here to continue reading: PART 3: At Her Funeral, My Five-Year-Old Son Held My Hand and Made a Choice None of Us Understood