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Jackie Hance

July 14, 2011 by · Comments Off on Jackie Hance 

Jackie HanceJackie Hance, Two years ago, Jackie Hance lost everything when her three daughters died in a terrible car accident Taconic Parkway astray in New York. But today, she is pregnant again after undergoing in vitro fertilization in a twist of fate they say came from a dream about her beloved daughters.

Hance, 40, of Floral Park, New York, announced her pregnancy just as HBO is willing to air its own documentary, “Something’s wrong with Aunt Diana,” the drunk driving accident.

The girls were murdered in their home after a camping trip in upstate New York when her aunt, Diane Schuler, 36, was 70 mph on the wrong side of the avenue two miles before hitting her truck off against another vehicle.

Toxicology reports showed that the level of blood alcohol Schuler was twice the limit – the equivalent of 10 shots of vodka – and was high on marijuana.

Just minutes before the fatal accident, daughter of Hance, Emma, had called her mother saying: “Something’s wrong with Aunt Diana.”

Girls Hance, Emma, 8, Alyson, 7, and Katie, 5, and Schuler and her 2-year-old daughter Erin died on the spot. Three men in another vehicle also died, a total of eight people. The only survivor was the son of Bryan Schuler, 5.

“Fatherhood is not something that can never ignore, even if their kids are gone,” Hance wrote in the Ladies Home Journal this week.

Hance is expecting her baby in September. But psychologists say that having a baby too soon after the death of a child is not a panacea for pain.

Hance says her friends persuaded her to have another child as a way to deal with the “torture” has felt since her daughter died, unable even to cook, and he remembers the excitement of her daughters to lunch.

“After the accident many people suggested that Warren and I consider having another child. They said a baby was what girls want and to give us a future,” he writes.

Experts say that the term “replacement child” is a cruel, suggesting that a parent eliminates the agonizing pain of the death of a child with the birth of another.

Last year, actors John Travolta, 57, and his wife Kelly Preston, 48, had a son, Benjamin, after the loss of her son Jett 16 years old in 2009 after he had a seizure on your holiday villa in the Bahamas.

So too did former presidential candidate John Edwards and his then wife Elizabeth after the death of their son Wade in a car accident in North Carolina. He had two children, Emma, now 13, and Jack, 11.

When a child dies, many parents have a “natural necessity” to have another, according to Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry and social work at Columbia University who specializes in complicated grief.

“Many parents want another child to come to terms with the loss,” he said. “Once you have accepted the loss is a very natural part of life and can be a very healing thing to do.”

“When they do this, usually with a bit of sadness and fear, even when they know what is right for them, and I think we should judge them,” he said. “When you make that decision, it is hard to do and all their supporters.”

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