A twenty-one-year-old senior at Illinois State University, engaged to an agricultural business major, she has come home to Grand Rapids on spring break and is now driving to Becker’s. She’s telling her mother how much she loves her current assignment student teaching in a kindergarten class. She says she has found her place in life: It’s in front of a classroom rug, with cross-legged boys and girls spread out before her, helping them learn life’s basic lessons. “This is what I’m meant to do,” she says.
Her mother, Laura, a former schoolteacher, is now, at forty-eight, a professor of education at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Laura remembers Megan as a girl, playing school with her dolls, vowing to follow in her footsteps as an educator. Megan took the Red Cross babysitting class when she was ten, the youngest age allowed. She worked in a day-care center at fourteen. Her senior year of high school, she was in a co-op program, working half days at a day-care center.
For Laura, whose job now is to teach future teachers how to teach, it’s rewarding to see her daughter so enthusiastic about her current role in children’s lives.
It’s been a nice morning of mother-daughter bonding, and that continues after they arrive at Becker’s and start picking through the dresses together. Megan is full of energy and enthusiasm, and Shelley gets a kick out of watching her try on dresses. Some brides go about their tasks with contagious smiles, and a real appreciation for the efforts of others: their mothers, the saleswomen. Even though Shelley has seen the process thousands of times, she still enjoys brides such as Megan.
Megan tells her saleswoman, Gwen, that she doesn’t want a dress that’s too showy; she hopes to find something without lace and beading. “Modest but classy,” Megan says, passing around photos she has printed off of the Internet. She certainly doesn’t want a heavy princesslike ball gown.
Soon enough, Megan has narrowed her choices to two favorites. The first is form-fitting—simple, sleek, and strapless, with a slight flare out at the hips. It has no train and there’s a pretty bow on the back. It’s just a bit too sexy for Megan.
The other dress she’s drawn to is also simple, but more elegant—a lightweight gown with shoulder straps and an uncomplicated skirt with a small train. She’s invited to wear it into the Magic Room, and her mother lets out a sigh when she arrives there.
“I love how it’s laced up the back,” Megan says, looking at her reflection at every possible angle in all the mirrors. “Now, if we can get this without the beading . . .”
“We can order it without the jewels,” Shelley promises her.
“That’s great,” Megan says, then smiles. She turns to her mom. “I think I’ve found my dress.”
Megan, born in 1988, is the Pardos’ third and youngest child. Her brother, Chad, was born in 1986. Her older sister, Melissa, was born in 1984.
It’s hard for Megan to even imagine what it would be like if her sister, Melissa, was also here at Becker’s, helping her find a dress. She can’t picture her sister, grown to adulthood, leaning against the mirrors in the Magic Room, weighing in on gowns.
To Laura and her husband Jack, a controls engineer, Melissa had been a much-loved first child, an easygoing baby with a nice smile. One day when Melissa was nine months old, Laura dropped her off, as usual, at a day-care facility operated out of a woman’s home. Laura shared a few pleasantries with the babysitter, kissed her daughter good-bye, and went to work. Later that morning, Melissa’s diaper needed to be changed and the sitter carried her to a table, put her down, and turned for just a second to grab the wipes. In that instant, Melissa stretched, rolled, and fell to the floor, landing at the worst possible angle, slamming the base of her spine. The injury turned out to be catastrophic.
Melissa remained in a coma for a week, and her doctors said pretty early on that there was no brain activity—and no hope. Eventually, Laura and Jack accepted this and made the gut-wrenching decision to remove her from life support.
They were twenty-three and twenty-four, suddenly childless again, and it wasn’t easy to resist feeling as if the world had ended. But in his grief, Jack eventually had an epiphany. A soft-spoken man, more comfortable discussing engineering than his own emotions, he somehow found his voice. As he fielded all the sympathetic calls and condolences, as he thought about this terrible loss, he began to tell people the same thing again and again.
“The main thing I’ve learned,” he’d say, “is that you bring children into this world, but you really don’t know how long they’ll be there. You really don’t know how long you’ll have them to love. Kids die every day. We don’t think about how many times we see stories in the newspaper about people who’ve lost their children in accidents or because of illnesses. But all of those stories add up, while we’re living our lives, not noticing. We just don’t have our children forever. That’s what I’ve learned.”
As a result of Melissa’s death, the babysitter, a woman in her thirties, lost her license to run the day-care facility. This saddened the Pardos. They knew it was a freak accident—it could have happened to any parent, any caregiver—and they forgave her quickly and completely. They’ve lost touch with her over the years, but they think about her often, knowing that she carries this loss with her, too.
“We’ve all turned away from our children to grab a diaper or a pacifier,” says Jack. “The doctors told us Melissa’s death was a one-in-a-million accident. She fell just three feet onto a carpeted floor. How many kids fall down a few stairs, or climb out of their cribs and fall? It happens every day, and the kids stand back up and are just fine. Our daughter landed on carpet, but she didn’t stand up, and she wasn’t fine. It just happened. I don’t blame anyone.”
A nine-month-old baby doesn’t yet have a full personality, of course, so Laura and Jack don’t have a great many memories of her. Near the end of her life, Melissa had begun sitting up, walking around furniture, holding on to things, giggling playfully. Two weeks before she died, Laura had brought her to watch Jack in a softball game. She forgot to bring Melissa’s sun bonnet, and so the baby got a bad sunburn on her head. In the last photos they took of Melissa, she’s smiling but sunburned.
Even though they were still grieving, or perhaps because of that, Laura and Jack decided they wanted to have another baby as quickly as possible. Their son was born just eleven months after Melissa’s death. Megan followed two years later.
Jack and Laura would talk about Melissa to their surviving two children; they were committed to keeping her part of the family. A photo of Melissa hangs prominently in the house. While the other two kids got older, and new photos of them were displayed every year, Melissa remained forever a baby. Some people who visited the home, not knowing about the tragedy, just assumed the little girl in the photo was Megan.
The Pardos saw quickly that Megan had a different disposition from the more-easygoing Melissa. Megan turned out to be a strong-willed child, the sort of toddler who was assertive and argumentative. She never liked wearing a seat belt, and so her parents often had to stop the car, rebuckle her, and remind her of the importance of seat belts. Somewhere up the road, they’d see her in the rearview mirror, unbuckling herself again, and they’d have to pull over to the side of the road and start the process over again.
“She just has a mind of her own,” Laura would tell people. “She’s different than Melissa and Chad. It’s hard to deal with her.”
“Well, that will be a great trait when she’s an adult,” a friend once replied. “She’ll be a leader. She’ll have confidence. She’ll think she can conquer anything.”
Megan’s middle name is Melissa, and she has always known that she carries that name in memory of her late sister. From an early age, she took it as a badge of honor. In first grade, there was another Megan in her class, and so she told her teacher and classmates to call her “Megan Melissa.” That’s the name she wrote on all her tests and homework. (Today, she uses it as her name on Facebook, and many of her friends and acquaintances don’t know the origins of it.)
They eventually took her to a therapist who asked Megan to create a book of things that made her happy—her safety blanket, sucking her thumb for comfort—and the things that made her sad and worried. Megan was also given the outline of a person, and was asked to shade in different parts of the body. She was told to use a red crayon for the body parts that were sad or hurting, and a pink crayon for the rest of the body. Her stomach, her heart, her head—all were colored red.
Through this process, the therapist learned that Megan was fearful about losing her mother. “I had a sister and she died,” Megan told the counselor, adding: “My mom goes away a lot.” Megan didn’t say it, but the therapist figured out what she was thinking: “Maybe my mom will die too, and she’ll never come home to me.”
Jack also was frequently out of town. He’d spend a week or two at a time working as an engineer, often at out-of-state warehouses, programming conveyor belts for companies such as Frito Lay. In that case, his job was to figure out how to get thousands of packages of potato chips into boxes, onto pallets, over to the loading dock, and into trucks. People thought he had a cool job, especially if they loved chips, but Megan missed her father and worried when he was gone, too.
Laura realized that she needed to spend more time with Megan, reassuring her, especially because Megan had trouble sleeping at night. “I’d lay in bed with her,” Laura recalls, “and we’d sing songs like ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ We’d pray together. A mother and daughter can’t lie together in bed like that, every night, and not bond.”
By third grade, Megan’s most strong-willed urges and her most vexing fears had begun to dissipate. She went to school happily and grew into a compassionate teen and a student leader. She sang in the choir and played softball.
Megan and her mom remained close. They’d bake together, and could talk about most everything, including sex. At one point, Laura stopped working for the textbook publisher and went to grad school. She and Megan sat each night at the kitchen table, doing homework together. “Some teens don’t like having their mother around, especially when they’re out in public,” says Laura. “I remember being embarrassed by my mom when I was younger. But Megan wanted me with her, and so I’d chaperone school trips.”
Over time, Jack and Laura saw that Megan had a good head on her shoulders. They didn’t worry much about her. About the only thing that gave them pause was when she began learning to drive. She seemed naïve and a bit distracted. In Michigan, kids can get their permits at age fourteen and eight months. For some teens, including Megan, that could feel too early.
The first time she got in the driver’s seat, she didn’t even know there were two pedals. “Put it into drive,” her father said.
“What does that mean?” she asked, and he explained, although not well enough.
They were in an empty school parking lot, and Jack had her pull into a parking space. “OK, let’s back out,” he told her. She put the car in drive, and flew over the curb, into the air, landing on the sidewalk.
She passed her driver’s test and got her license at sixteen, but Laura worried that she didn’t always focus on her surroundings as she drove. Early on, she hit a car at school. She also had a couple of speeding tickets. Then on her first day of class at Illinois State, she got in an accident and totaled her car, though no one was hurt.
All parents worry about their children driving, and the Pardos were no different. They were relieved that as Megan got older, she became more careful and alert at the wheel. Still, they kept reminding her about safe driving. “Even though we lost Melissa, I don’t think that made us overprotective parents,” says Jack. “But I’ve always told my children: We all make mistakes and some cost us more than others. You want to help your kids avoid mistakes, though of course, so much is beyond our control.”
In the days after her visit to Becker’s, Megan spent a lot of time on the phone with her fiancé, Shane, back in Illinois. Some calls lasted for hours. Her mom would hear her on the phone at one a.m. and tell her, “You’ve got to get some sleep. All these late nights are going to catch up with you!”
It was a prophetic warning.
Megan woke up on Sunday morning without a full night’s rest. She went to church, kissed her parents good-bye, and then spent the next five hours driving herself back to college in Illinois. She stayed up late that night again, and woke up early the next day to teach. That Monday morning, March 29, 2010, she felt both exhilarated and exhausted from the excitement of her dress-shopping and wedding-planning excursions. She was in a good mood, looking forward to returning to her kindergartners.
On her way to the elementary school in Farmer’s City, Illinois, feeling a bit groggy, she opened her window to let in fresh air to keep her awake. It didn’t help. At about seven thirty a.m., she fell asleep at the wheel, maybe for a couple of seconds, and the car began drifting to the right, heading straight for an open field. She awoke with a jolt, and quickly tried to get back in her lane but overcompensated, and the car rolled completely over before landing on all four wheels on the opposite side of the road. She was just a mile from the elementary school.
An hour later, Laura Pardo got a call: Megan had been in a car accident. She was conscious, but her right hand was seriously mangled, with one of her fingers totally severed. She had serious lacerations on her forehead, nose, and elsewhere, and doctors were checking for internal injuries and brain damage.
Laura had already lost a daughter to an accident—a simple fall of just three feet. Laura couldn’t protect nine-month-old Melissa as she fell those three feet. Now her other daughter had been in her own terrible accident three hundred miles away. She couldn’t protect Megan, either.
She cried, she prayed, and too distraught to get behind the wheel of her car, she had her father drive her to Illinois.
That day, over at Becker’s, Shelley was sending in the rush order for Megan’s dress. She had no way of knowing that the wedding, slated for August, was now very much in jeopardy.
Chapter Nine
Life Preservers
It is not lost on Shelley that so many Becker’s brides come into the store trying to smile in the wake of personal setbacks and family tragedies. They have parents who are terminally ill or loved ones they’ve recently lost or they’ve been diagnosed with their own serious illnesses.
A wedding is a happy life-cycle event, yes, but the harsher life-cycle moments aren’t kept at bay until after the wedding. Those moments keep coming, without warning, reminding brides that they can plan a wedding, but not how their lives will unfold.
Shelley is unable to shake her memories of the toughest stories she’s witnessed over the years at Becker’s. In her head, she holds on to images of certain brides, smiling in front of the old mirror by the front desk or hugging their mothers in the Magic Room. Those unlucky brides couldn’t have fathomed what would happen next.
There was the ebullient bride-to-be who was hit by a car and killed while crossing the street to go to the post office. She was mailing thank-you notes to her bridal-shower guests.
There was the bride whose dad wasn’t feeling well while they shopped at Becker’s. That night, he ended up hospitalized. The bride came back the next day, found the perfect dress, and said, “I’d love to have my dad see this.” She took a cell-phone photo of the dress and sent it to her father in his hospital room. He took a look at it on his phone, then called her to give his approval and to tell
her she looked lovely in it. Right after he saw the dress, he died. She walked down the aisle without him, but appreciated that at least he’d seen her in the dress, if only on his cell phone, and had told her she was a beauty in his eyes.
Shelley sees plenty of giddy, happy brides, yes, but she also sees those who approach the dress search very soberly. When she detects sadness, she naturally wonders what’s going on in a bride’s life. Unless she senses they’re willing to open up, however, she doesn’t ask them “What’s wrong?” She just tries to be as jovial as she can be, and hopes that will lift the bride’s mood.
Once in a while, a bride will go into a dressing room, close the door, and Shelley hears muffled crying. She’ll wait a little bit, then she’ll knock on the door. “Honey, are you OK in there? Can I come in?”
And that’s when she hears stories.
She has helped numerous brides with cancer find dresses that will cover their scars and the ports in their chests. She has found gowns for brides in wheelchairs, sliding dresses over their heads, apologizing that she can’t get them up the stairs and into the Magic Room.
Shelley knows, from all her years at the store, that weddings are often optimistic islands surrounded by oceans of uncertainty, loneliness, and grief. For some women, a bridal gown can feel like a life preserver.
Given the changes these days in mother-daughter interactions, Shelley and her saleswomen find it refreshing when a bride shows great deference to her mother. One recent bride who stood out for them was Courtney Driskill, who drove in from Owosso, a town of 15,700 people forty-five minutes from Fowler. Courtney arrived without the usual entourage of bridesmaids. Her mother was her only companion. “There’s no one else I’d want to share this moment with,” she said.
A pretty twenty-nine-year-old with blond ringlets, Courtney has had serious health issues since her teens, when strep throat and mononucleosis often kept her out of school. It took until her early twenties for doctors to figure out why she was sick: rheumatic fever, an inflammatory disease that can affect the heart, joints, skin, and brain.
The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters Page 9