The Ones She Left Behind

Despite Gallegos' assurances, Thomas felt uneasy. "My wife was in a fog," he said.

He called Goodall in Paris, but Carol refused to talk to him - her oldest and best friend. That was the first time Thomas got really scared.

Goodall was scared as well. Too late, he had picked up a message Carol had left on his Seattle answering machine a few days earlier. "She was quite distressed, in a fairly bad state," he said.

He told Thomas to get her to a psychiatrist. Thomas called medical centers asking to see a psychiatrist, but it was the weekend and none were immediately available. Several frantic hours later, he was referred to Fairfax Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Kirkland.

On the way to the hospital, she told him she was thinking about walking into the lake, or jumping from a balcony, but that she would never do that to him. He believed her.

"I trusted my wife," he said. "We had the strongest, unconditional love you can imagine."

The hospital evaluated her and consulted with the psychiatrist she'd seen many years earlier for depression and anxiety. They gave her the choice of checking into the hospital for treatment, or going home and seeing a psychiatrist the next day.

She wanted to go home. They cooked dinner together that night and she seemed better.

On the hospital's recommendation, they made arrangements for her to visit family in New York. They contacted a doula, a woman trained to help mothers through labor and the transition to motherhood, to come in a few days a week to give Carol some support. The doula put them in touch with a social worker and psychiatric nurse-practitioner.

A week later, Jan. 14, Carol saw the social worker who gave Carol a standard postpartum depression screening test with 36 statements. Carol had to indicate how she felt about each of them:

"Did not know who I was anymore."

She marked a 5, meaning "strongly agree."

"Felt like a failure as a mother."

Strongly agree.

"Started thinking that I would be better off dead."

Strongly agree.

Three times, in three different ways, the test probed for suicidal thoughts. Each time, she marked a 5.

Thomas never saw the test, or her scores. He was never told their implications.

"Nobody said anything to me except go home, this is normal," he said. "They said, `Yeah, everything's going to be fine.'"

The next day, they went together to see the nurse-practitioner. They left with a sample of Zoloft, an anti-depressant, and a prescription for more.

On the way home, Carol told Thomas he should take a little break to get some paperwork done at the restaurant. She dropped him off at 1 p.m. Forty-five minutes later, she was dead.

He found her hanging when he came home.