Anyway... we got the coroner's report. Apparently Emily had developed a rare heart condition, called Torsades de pointes, brought on by years of taking bipolar meds. Ironically she was wearing a monitor at the time, to try to figure out what was wrong with her heart, and they were able to determine the exact time and cause of death from reading the results. What can happen with this condition is that the heart will suddenly just stop, and unless you're actually in the hospital on monitors at the time, you will be dead within seconds. It's sudden and painless and it happened while she was sleeping. She would have had no idea what was going on, there wasn't even time to wake up and panic. Her heart just stopped, and that was it.
So, I suppose that's some comfort. I had been scared, thinking about her possible last moments, maybe panicking and terrified about what was going on, but apparently that would have been physically impossible. There was no panic and no fear; she was asleep, and then she just wasn't.
Of course this brings on all those "what-ifs" now. What if she had been able to turn in the monitor? They would have found the torsades and gotten her to a cardiologist? And, of course... what if she hadn't had to spend her entire life fighting demons; taking medication just to be able to function in the world. In the end, it was that fight that killed her; not even the demons, themselves.
Child 1 has been trying to process this, with his amazing autistic mind. It doesn't make sense to him that somebody's heart would just stop beating, so he has come up with an alternative explanation: she simply moved to a different planet, and he doesn't say that she "died," he says that she "became magical." So he'll say "When Emily became magical, she left the earth and went up into the stars. Then she found a new planet to live on and that's where she is now." He's also very concerned about Emily's sister Lizzie being sad and he asks about her a lot. He says "Lizzie doesn't need to be sad anymore, Emily is living on another planet." The amazing part of this, not only that he came up with all of this completely on his own, is that if Emily were the one to have to explain it to him, I'm 100% certain that this is exactly what she would have said.
She became magical and went into the stars to move to a different planet. If that's really where she is right now I KNOW that she has never been happier.
