When the police called, Marlene and Tom raced for the hospital.  On the way, they spotted their eldest daughter’s overturned  vehicle.  Marlene ran to it, screaming.  The high heeled pumps of her fun-loving, fashionable daughter sat upright, side by side, by the driver’s door, “as though she had just flown out of them,”   Marlene says.  “I felt her watching me from above.”

Five days later, Tom was reading the paper.  He said, “Oh, my God.  Another 25 year old girl was killed on the thruway.”  Marlene found the number in the phone book.  “I know what you’re going through,” she told Ann Marie’s grieving mother, Mary Ann.   She promised to call again after the funeral.  “We cried on the phone for four months,” she says.  Although the two families lived 45 minutes apart, Mary Ann suggested they meet.  They did so, at Mary Ann’s church, and decided to attend their daughters’ Masses together.

As a friendship grew, Mary Ann insisted their daughters were in heaven and wanted them to help each other.  “The girls worked fast,” Marlene says.  “Their mothers still keep in touch.  We call each other angels.”

The year after the girls died, Marlene prepared to attend a Mass for Ann Marie.  She realized something that, she says, “jolted me.”  Jackie had died on the day of The Feast of St. Catherine of Siena.  The Official Roman Catholic Church assigns one day to celebrate every canonized saint.  St. Catherine, one of two patron saints of Italy, died on April 29^th, the same day that Jackie died.  The name of Mary Ann’s church:  St. Catherine of Siena.

The Godsigns continued.

Jackie died two weeks before Mother’s Day.  The Friday before the holiday, Marlene asked her daughter to for a sign that she was okay.  She said: How about flowers from someone unexpected?   On Saturday afternoon, the doorbell rang.  Al, Jackie’s good friend, held out half a dozen red roses.  He kissed Marlene and wished her Happy Mother’s Day.  For the next three years, Marlene received flowers from Jackie’s friends.  More than two decades later, Marlene says, “I still have those flowers.”

Jackie loved the beach outside her parents’ condo on Siesta Key in Sarasota.  The winter after their daughter died, Marlene and Tom had trouble returning to that condo with its memories of happier times.  They stopped at an open house but had no plans of moving.  Tom made an offer.  Spotting a garden angel sitting on a wall of the lanai, Marlene said, “There’s Jackie.”  They purchased the townhouse.  “It was the best medicine.  I always felt Jackie there.”  After 20 years, they moved to their present home on a golf course in Sarasota.  Their garden angel sits on the mantel in their great room.

Recently, Marlene and Tom decided to downsize up north.  As Marlene walked the lot they were considering, she asked Jackie for a sign they were meant to be there. Playing golf had gotten Marlene out of the house and helped save her sanity during years of grieving.  Escorting her out of the wooded area, the builder said, “You wouldn’t believe how many golf balls I found on this lot.  Even a pink one.”

Pink was Jackie’s favorite color.