The Vow

by Kim; Krickitt Carpenter; Dana Wilkerson

  Some very special people came to share our new beginning with us, many of whom we met as a result of the accident. We were blessed with the presence of DJ Coombs, the EMT who’d overcome her claustrophobia to treat Krickitt when she was still hanging upside down in the car; Bob Grothe, the flight nurse on the helicopter from Gallup to Albuquerque when almost everyone had all but given up on Krickitt; and Wayne and Kelli Marshall, the couple who had stopped at the scene of the accident and prayed for us.

  So on May 25, 1996, I stood in the front of the little mountain chapel at Pendaries, faced the great love of my life for the second time in the presence of God and a body of witnesses, and spoke with an assurance and love and deepest thanksgiving that I will never be able to describe. I could barely see Krickitt through the tears in my eyes as I pledged myself to her once again.

  “Krick, I stand before you once again, reaffirming the commitment of vows I once made. I thank God every day for sparing our lives and providing strength and will to endure these trials and tribulations. Almost three years ago I made a vow before God. And as I stated then and state now with greater love and desire:

  “I promise to defend our love and hold it in highest regard. I promise to be forgiving, understanding, and patient. I promise to tend to your every need. I promise to respect and honor you fully.

  “Most of all, I promise that no matter the adversaries we may face, I will never ever lose the vow of commitment to protect you, guide you, and care for you until death do us part.

  “Only one thing can surpass forever the painful events that we have felt. That is the love I have for you, and I thank the Lord for his guidance and faith in me to love you. I am truly honored to be your husband.”

  Krickitt’s vows were a lot shorter, but no less meaningful.

  “Kimmer, I love you. I cherish you as my husband. Thank you for being true to your first vows. I promise to be here for you, to encourage you and comfort you in your time of need. I pray that I may be the wife that the Lord desires for you to have.

  “I need you, Kimmer. And I love you.”

  Krickitt was wearing the same gown she had worn to our first wedding. I, on the other hand, was not able to fit into the same tuxedo. Although we had agreed to use the same rings, as a surprise I had also bought a new ring and planned to put them both on her finger together when the time came.

  After I slipped both rings on Krickitt’s finger, Megan handed Krickitt my old ring. When she opened her hand, I saw she had also gotten me a second ring. The new one was gold with the Christian fish symbol as a representation of everything the Lord had done in our lives. As she slipped the two rings on where the old one had been, Krickitt gave me the huge smile I had seen so many times before the accident. I was thrilled to see it once again.

  I took Krickitt back to the same hotel on Maui that we had gone to on our first honeymoon. As we drove to the beach we saw a sign that read, “Jesus Is Coming Soon.” Krickitt told me she’d had a flash memory of it but no context to put it in until now.

  We went to the place that had been our favorite spot on the beach during our first trip. “Something clicks,” she said, looking at a patio with some tables and chairs scattered across it. She even showed me the table where we had sat nearly three years earlier. “But it’s déjà vu minus me,” she explained.

  We never again tried to jog Krickitt’s memory. From that moment on we gave it up to God. Our lives were in his hands, and he was having us look to the future, not to the past. And our future, it turned out, was going to take us places and give us opportunities we never could have imagined.

  8

  GLOBAL IMPACT

  Our two weddings had a lot of things in common: the dress, the rings, the maid of honor, the honeymoon trip. But there was one huge element that was only present at our second wedding: the media. Yes, outlets such as CBS Television, People magazine, the London Times, ABC News, and Inside Edition were there with the hopes of getting a glimpse of our big day.

  After the second proposal, we had discovered that people who heard our love story were very encouraged by it. This, in turn, encouraged Krickitt to pray. She asked God to use our story in ways that would show others his amazing love and power. After all, he was the one responsible for us keeping our vows. We weren’t still together because of any special traits either of us had; it was all because of God. We couldn’t have done it without our faith in him.

  Mere days after Krickitt prayed that prayer, we got a call out of the blue from Van Tate, host of a TV show called On the Road on the CBS affiliate in Albuquerque. Van was doing a story on “Whatever Happened to Coach Carpenter?” At the time when I was head coach, I had been the youngest in the NCAA, and a lot of people had interest in my story. When speaking to us on the phone, Van remembered the accident, and he was excited about our plans to have a second wedding ceremony. He wanted to highlight our story on his show.

  A few days after Van’s show, a reporter from the Albuquerque Journal called and wanted to do a story too. On Sunday, March 17, 1996, we were front-page news in Albuquerque under the headline “Love Lost and Refound.” The article went into more detail about our accident and Krickitt’s rehab, but the main focus was that after all that had happened we were not only still married but were going to renew our wedding vows.

  Krickitt and I were both excited to see that the author and editors hadn’t glossed over or even completely failed to mention the importance of faith in our lives. On the second page of the story there was a large photo of the two of us praying in front of an open Bible.

  The article also included this quote: “I’m not marrying the same person I married three years ago, but I’m not the same person either. For instance, baseball doesn’t mean what it used to mean to me. That was part of our old life. We’re closer now; we’ve got a different bond, a more meaningful connection than before. My friends say I’ve become a religious freak. No, I tell them, I’ve just seen the miracles that God’s work can provide.”

  We were glad that people were hearing our story and seeing the part God played in it, but we didn’t really think of our story as something that was special or compelling enough that it would be of interest to anyone outside of our little corner of New Mexico. We were wrong. We soon got a call from Tom Colbert, the president of a company called Industry Research and Development that looks for human-interest stories in the news and helps local reporters connect with national media. He had seen the article in the Albuquerque Journal and asked us if we wanted him to release our story through the Associated Press. He explained that once it was fed to the AP network, it would be available to hundreds of newspapers and other news outlets across the country.

  “You need to think carefully about this,” he advised us. “Because if we do this, your lives are never going to be the same.”

  Tom’s words sounded almost like a warning. But hadn’t it been only a week ago that we were saying, “Lord, we have this great story. How can we use it to show others how amazing you are?” So we talked, thought, and prayed about it, and we felt like it was what God wanted us to do, so we agreed. We honestly didn’t think much would come of it, since by that time it had been nearly two and a half years since the accident. We couldn’t imagine that our story was big enough for national news. But it turned out that Tom knew what he was talking about. As soon as our story broke nationally, our lives truly did change. But if anyone was equipped to deal with change, we were.

  The calls increased in number every day, until the phone would ring again as soon as we hung it up. The day before our wedding there was a feature article about us in the Los Angeles Times. And that night Jay Leno even mentioned us in his opening monologue on The Tonight Show.

  We talked to as many media people as we could during our second “engagement,” but it was overwhelming. We had to make some decisions because not only did we need to know how to respond to the various requests we were getting about media coverage for the wedding, but we were also trying to plan that wedding. It’s
no secret that weddings take time to coordinate, but we found that all of our time was being eaten up with dealing with the media.

  In the end, we decided to give Inside Edition the exclusive video rights to cover the actual wedding ceremony. They had offered to pay for the wedding and honeymoon in exchange for those rights. Though we had finally settled matters with our insurance company, our finances were still very tight, so we felt like Inside Edition’s offer was the wisest option for us to take.

  Though Inside Edition had the exclusive rights to the ceremony, that wasn’t all they would cover. They wanted to feature us several weeks before the wedding to give their viewers something to whet their appetites. They sent a reporter and crew to our house in Las Vegas and set up shop in our living room. They captured us on film as we watched the video of our first wedding and as Krickitt looked at pictures and other keepsakes from a day she no longer remembered.

  There wasn’t a bride’s room in the tiny log church at Pendaries, so Krickitt’s parents had parked their RV outside for her to use as a dressing room. True to their name, the Inside Edition crew was in there with her, squeezed in with bridesmaids and everybody else, talking to Krickitt about her dress, her feelings about what was happening, and all the other things that go along with a bride’s big day.

  While Inside Edition was the only video publication allowed on the inside of our wedding festivities, there were plenty of other people on the outside. Among many others hoping for a glimpse of us on the church grounds was a photographer from the London Times and another from People magazine.

  We had tried to keep the location of our honeymoon a secret, but we heard a rumor that Hard Copy had learned we were going to Hawaii and were going to have a crew waiting for us at the airport in Honolulu. While we wanted to share our story with others, that was not welcome news. We had no desire to share our honeymoon with anyone else, especially a television news show. So I called the airport in Honolulu and explained the situation. We didn’t see a trace of them when we arrived.

  The staff at the hotel where we stayed on Maui was under strict orders to keep our presence a secret. We registered under aliases, so they were telling the truth when they told callers that there was no Mr. and Mrs. Kim J. Carpenter registered there. But there was a radio station from California that had guessed we would spend our second honeymoon on the same island as our first one, so they started calling every hotel on Maui trying to find us. They had called all but two when they got to us . . . at 4 a.m. Hawaii time. It obviously wasn’t ideal, but we spoke to them. I never heard that interview, but I can guarantee it wasn’t one of our best.

  Inside Edition’s second feature on us ran while we were in Hawaii. As a result, people started recognizing us on the street in Maui. “Hey, didn’t I see you guys on TV yesterday?” So much for anonymity. We were thousands of miles from home and people knew who we were. It was a bit surreal.

  When we arrived at Los Angeles International Airport for a layover on our way home from Hawaii, we were shocked to see our faces in Star magazine. We hadn’t realized they were at the wedding, but it didn’t take us long to realize which of the people present that day had reported the story and taken the pictures for them. There had been one particularly obnoxious stranger hovering around the front of the church during the ceremony, getting in front of our family video camera and that belonging to Inside Edition. We had tried to keep an eye on him and told one of the ushers to make sure he didn’t get inside, but in the end there was too much going on to really worry about him. Thanks to our lack of attention, we were now stars of the supermarket tabloids.

  We had no sooner returned to Las Vegas than we were flooded with requests and invitations from syndicated TV shows. We wanted to accept as many of the offers as we could, which meant life was going to get more hectic than ever. For the first shows we did, crews came to interview us in New Mexico. It wasn’t long before we got invitations to New York and L.A. to be interviewed in person by the hosts. Except for Krickitt’s mission trip to Hungary, neither of us had traveled much, so it was a new experience for us. We sometimes traveled to two or three different places in the same week. When we were in Seattle for a show, some Japanese tourists approached us outside the studio. Apparently our story had gone global; they had seen our story on television in their home country. We also learned that we had been featured on a television show in Germany.

  We were fortunate to do some television interviews with celebrities we had watched over the years, and we enjoyed meeting them and getting to know them on a more personal level. It was interesting to see what they were like when they weren’t on camera.

  One of our most memorable interviews was with Sally Jesse Raphael. Her producers asked us to appear on her show because Sally has a son with a head injury caused by a motorcycle crash. Sally saw our story as a way to help educate the public on the devastating effects of such injuries. As tragic as it was, her experience gave us a shared understanding of what a life-changing event a head injury can be. She could talk to us on a deeper level than others could because she knew firsthand what we were going through, and vice versa. Because of this connection she was able to interview us with extra insight and sensitivity.

  We also got a call to be on Oprah. We were able to share our faith with her audience, which made it possible for us to reach more people at once than we ever had before. We also appeared on Leeza Gibbons’s talk show, Leeza, and we found that she was truly an elegant and classy lady. In addition, Anne Curry interviewed us on Dateline and Maury Povich and Montel Williams invited us on their shows.

  Though we spent much time on the talk show circuit throughout the rest of 1996, we also continued to do interviews with newspapers and magazines. There were major stories published about us in McCall’s (“The Wife Who Forgot She Was Married”) and Reader’s Digest (“For Better, For Worse”), among others.

  During all of our trips we were taken to the best restaurants, chauffeured around town in our own limousine, and generally treated like celebrities for a day or two. The best thing about it, though, was that having a taste of show business was a great way to reaffirm what was truly important to us in life. For all the attention we started getting, we were the same people after we went on TV as we were before. We were just two people trying to work out our lives together, keep our promises to each other, and make sure God was in the middle of it all.

  We also got wonderful support from the Christian media. James Dobson of Focus on the Family wrote about us in his “Family News” newsletter in June of 1997. He said:

  In this day when the culture teaches us to bail out at the first sign of frustration or pain, it is uplifting to see this young couple work to recapture what they had lost and to remain committed to each other even in the face of tragedy. Their example will, I hope, be relevant to many of my readers who have lost the passion in their marriages—not as a result of brain injury, but from whatever has driven them apart. Perhaps Kim’s decision to win Krickitt’s affection anew will be especially helpful to those who have misplaced the “memory” of love. If you have been considering a divorce, wouldn’t it be better to begin courting your spouse again and seeking to rebuild the marriage from the ground up? That is never easy and I’m sure Kim and Krickitt have not yet faced their final challenges. But it is the right thing to do, and ultimately, the most rewarding response for disengaging husbands and wives. And it is definitely in the best interests of children.

  Let me conclude by offering a word of advice to young men and women who will be joining hands in holy matrimony during this summer. . . . I urge each of you to enter into marriage with an unshakable commitment to make it last a lifetime. Let nothing short of death separate what is about to be consummated. When the hard times come (and they WILL come), I hope you will remember the story of Kim and Krickitt who are weathering the storm together—hand in hand and soul to soul. That is God’s plan for the family—and for your family.

  A year and a half after our second wedding we were surpris
ed to be the cover story for Christian Reader magazine’s November/December 1997 issue. Soon after that we began working on our first book The Vow: The Kim and Krickitt Carpenter Story, which was published by Broadman & Holman Publishers in 2000.

  In the midst of the media frenzy surrounding our second wedding, Hollywood came calling. Tom Colbert, who had helped us with media relations from the beginning, stepped in to guide us through the motion-picture industry maze. Several studios wanted to take an option on our story.

  After a lot of prayer, we made a decision to go with Paul Taublieb and his LXD Productions. Of everyone we talked to, Paul had the best understanding of what we had been through and what we wanted a movie about us to accomplish. He ultimately got us connected with Roger Birnbaum and Caravan Pictures, which is now Spyglass Entertainment.

  After we signed the movie deal in 1996, we prayed for many years about when and if a movie would ever actually be released. Fourteen years later we learned that the movie would, indeed, be produced. The Vow, starring Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum, will be released in the United States and various other countries in February of 2012. Sony Screen Gems will be marketing and distributing the film.

  We were invited to visit the movie set during filming and had the opportunity to spend some time with both Rachel and Channing. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Four months after shooting wrapped up, we traveled to California to watch the movie that was inspired by the events of our lives. Though many changes were made, as is typically the case when true events are adapted for the silver screen, the basic framework was still in place and Krickitt and I felt it to be an excellent portrayal of the message of our story. I even cried while watching the movie.