We left the city last week, the day the news broke that Diane Schuler, the mom who killed her daughter, three nieces and two strangers driving the wrong way on the freeway, was legally drunk and high. (Schuler’s five-year-old son survived.) The Taconic connects New York state to the area in Connecticut we’re in and the talk has been about nothing else since, even as new tragedies have taken that story’s place. 

How Could She? asked both NYC tabloids and denials have emerged from her husband, who says his wife was never drunk, and his lawyer who suggests she might have been diabetic. Or had a toothache. There is conflicting evidence: the kids working at the MacDonald’s where they ate said she seemed fine (perhaps not the most reliable witness) while drivers complained of her tailgating and honking at cars on the freeway. She called her brother to say she was having trouble seeing (he told her to wait) and most heartbreaking of all, his daughter called him to say auntie was “having trouble seeing and talking funny.”

There is still some mystery surrounding this horrible story, and I don’t mean to pretend I know what happened and why. But dollars to donuts this woman had a major alcohol problem and kept it hidden for years. Alcoholics (such as I) know the lengths we’ll go to hide our addiction, and how good we get at it. There is a stranger inside us that we have spent countless days and years to conceal. Usually we just kill ourselves. You get a special seat in hell for taking others (your own child!) with you. 

I don’t think I ever drove my son anywhere when I was drunk — but I can’t swear to it. I do remember finding myself much more loaded than I had meant to be, often because the amount of secret vodka (the alcoholic’s drinks of choice, and seemingly Schuler’s) I had sloshing around in my system would suddenly get ignited by a socially acceptable, publicly consumed glass of wine or beer. That’s when the secret was no more, when the monster was no longer submerged. 

Here’s to all the sick and suffering waiting to surface and the survivors (her own child!) praying they won’t be drowned.