Oneida Goudeau and her granddaughter Diamond enjoy a relaxing moment at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Warwick.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

There was a message on my office answering machine a few weeks ago from a pleasant-sounding woman.

“You probably won’t remember,” she said in a warm voice with a touch of Midwestern sweetness, “but you wrote about me 20 years ago or so when I lost my daughter in a bad accident on the highway.”

I remember.

It was a sunny summer day in July 1987. Late in the afternoon we got word in the Journal’s Warwick-based West Bay news office that there had been an accident on Route 95 just north of the merge with Route 4.

I was sent out to the scene and it looked bad. A Bronco SUV had flipped onto its roof, sides buckled, windows blown out. A small trailer had broken free, skidded across the highway and spewed the family’s personal belongings over the highway and median strip.

I found out from police that Oneida Thomas was moving back to Indiana from North Kingstown and had just rounded the curve from Route 4 when the trailer began fishtailing and caused the Bronco she was driving to roll over.

Her 8-year-old daughter, Nikki, had been thrown from the truck and landed near a guardrail, where she died.

I also learned that other family members, including Nikki’s 11-year-old sister, April, had been traveling behind in a second vehicle and were helpless, horrified witnesses to the tragedy.

It was a story I didn’t want to write. And I certainly didn’t want to follow my editor’s instructions to go to Kent County Hospital so the newspaper could find out how the rest of the family was doing. There, I watched with sorrow as Oneida Thomas, huddled in grief in a wheelchair, left the hospital encircled by the loving arms of friends.

Her good friend Peggy Garrett was patient and referred my questions to her brother, the Rev. Robert E. Farrow, pastor of the Holy Cross Church in Providence. He was kind enough to let me know that everyone else who had been in the SUV would recover from their injuries.

I thanked him and left as quickly as I could, anxious for the end of a day that seemed 100 years long.

Every detail came back in a flash as I listened to the message on my phone a few weeks ago. Oneida, now Oneida Goudeau, had tracked me down via the Internet to let me to know that she was coming back to Rhode Island to thank the church members who had helped her so much during those darkest of days.

I called her back, and over the past few weeks Oneida, 51, and I have talked and talked and talked. We’ve talked about what happened the day she lost Nikki, how her life is now in Merrillville, Ind., and why she wanted to travel nearly 1,000 miles to come back here for the first time since the accident.

“I always felt in my heart that at some point I wanted to come back here to thank the people of the church for being there when I couldn’t be there for myself,” Oneida said. “I wanted to thank them personally.”

She told me of the first hollow years when she returned to Indiana to live in the suburbs south of Gary. For a long time, she said, it seemed that there would never be any healing or any hope after the loss of her younger daughter.

She tried visiting different churches but was haunted by a question “How could God do this to me? Why didn’t he take me?”

Oneida said she had to hang on to life to raise April, and as the years passed there were unexpected blessings.

She found the Salem Baptist Church in Chicago and she found her faith again. She also met Dennis Goudeau, fell in love and got married.

Then there was the birth of April’s daughter eight years ago. Named Diamond, she lives up to the sparkle of her name. And as much as Oneida loves Diamond just for being Diamond, she also sees traces of Nikki in her.

“Diamond’s an old soul,” she says, “and that’s what we always said about Nikki.”

Oneida said she wanted Diamond with her when she came back here, and she wanted April to come along in the hope of giving her a better memory of Rhode Island than the day she lost her little sister.

Oneida also brought her goddaughter Iraca, age 9, and promised the two little girls that they would only stay somewhere that had a pool.

Among the things she packed was an open letter to the congregation that she had labored over and a check for $500 to be given to the church in Nikki’s name.

“You were there to carry me when I could not bear the thought of living without my child,” Oneida wrote in the speech she delivered Sunday morning at the Holy Cross Church of God in Christ on Broad Street in Providence. “At that time, I could not understand why God had taken her from me, but now I understand that God makes no mistakes and he called her home.

“God spared me in the accident for some reason being that my work is not done. I can now continue my walk because my faith has been restored. I know that I am not where I should be just yet, but God knows that I am not where I used to be.”

Oneida also traveled with some pictures of Nikki — one showing her in a pastel-striped sleeveless shirt, a bunch of buttercups in her hands. She has a shy smile, high cheekbones and a face flushed with summer and round with youth.

I don’t ever remember any of my journalism classes preparing me for how to cover tragedy and grief. But I do know that, over the years, because I’ve had to encounter people at the worst of times, I’ve also gotten to see the very best of them.

Oneida, with her great heart, was not going to let her story fade away as just a sad memory. She came back to Rhode Island to write her own ending.

I was at T.F. Green Airport when she arrived Friday morning with April, Diamond and Iraca. It only took minutes for me to find the woman that I felt I knew, even though we had never met.

She was coming toward me with open arms, her face bright.

She was smiling. She was shining.

bpoliche@projo.com