Diksha Sundriyal
Your entire life can change in one moment, and no one knows it better than Jackie Howard in Netflix’s ‘My Life With the Walter Boys.’ She was living a happy life in New York, focused on her career goals with not a worry in the world. However, when her family suddenly dies, she is torn away from New York and sent to Colorado to live with a family she’d never met before. It’s a big change for Jackie, but she has no choice but to go forward with it. As she tries to have a fresh start, we’re also given hints about what might have happened to her family and what led to their sudden departure from her life. SPOILERS AHEAD
How Do Jackie’s Parents and Sister Die?
In the first scene of ‘My Life With the Walter Boys,’ we find Jackie at a spring break charity event at her school. Despite being a freshman, she has shown incredible initiative and organized the whole thing, presumably on her own. This shows what Jackie wants from her future and how dedicated she is to getting there. But all that means nothing if her family is not there to share it with her. She keeps a constant eye on the door, waiting for her parents and her elder sister, Lucy, to walk in and see all that she’d done. But that moment never arrives.
Jackie’s sister, Lucy, lived in Bennington, studying at the Bennington College. Her mother, Angelica, was a famous fashion designer known for working with popular brands and creating costumes for movies. Her father was a Princeton graduate who made a name for himself in business. All in all, Jackie belonged to a family of overachievers, and she wanted to walk the same path her parents and her sister did. She looked up to them and wanted to share all of her achievements with them, which is why she expected her sister, who was to come home for spring break, to come to the charity event she organized.
Jackie’s parents left New York for Bennington to bring Lucy home, but on the way, they met with a terrible accident. It’s never mentioned what caused the accident; it was so brutal that all three of them lost their lives. Jackie doesn’t like to talk about the loss and how it makes her feel, which is why she doesn’t discuss it with anyone. She also drowns herself in work and extracurricular activities in school so she doesn’t have to think about her situation any longer.
The death of her family completely flips her life because not only does she not have her parents and sister anymore, but she also doesn’t have her friends and all the people she knew in New York. According to her parents’ will, it was decided that should something happen to them, their children should fall under the care of Katherine Walter, who was Angelica’s best friend. They’d known each other since college and had promised that should something happen, they would be there for each other’s families.
Jackie had to move to Colorado to live with the Walters even though she’d met Katherine only a couple of times in her life before. She would have preferred to stay in New York with her Uncle Richard, but the legalities of the will dictated something else. So, with her family gone, Jackie receives a complete rewrite, a new slate for her life, with all her friends from New York and past affiliations and acquaintances left behind in the city for the small town in Colorado where she has never been before and where she feels completely out of place, at least in the beginning.
Read More: My Life With the Walter Boys Ending: Why Does Jackie Leave?
