June 2009
A Mother’s Re-Invention
Stephanie Nielson, her husband and her husband’s flight instructor were flying home, from St. John’s, Arizona to Mesa, Arizona. The newspaper described the accident. Shortly, after taking off from the airport, the plane’s engine stalled and the C-177 Cardinal Cessna augured into the ground. The flight instructor, Doug Kinneard, died of his injuries the next day. Stephanie and her husband, Christian were critically burned.
Stephanie is a Latter-day Saint, as I am, but we had never met. She is my great-uncle’s grand-daughter making her my second cousin. I found out about Stephanie’s website on blogspot. I visited her blog: www.nieniedialogues.blogspot.com. It is her personal website that allowed her to make regular entries about her life. I began to learn about her life and her family, though the two were really not separate.
As I went to Stephanie’s blog, I discovered that her writings were very popular and that her blog had had over 1,000 visits each day before the accident. She was widely known in the blogging community as she wrote upbeat notes about marriage, decorating, entertaining, and parenting.
She was known as Nie Nie on her blog. This blog helped me begin to know Stephanie. Most of her entries were about her young children. There was Claire Elizabeth (7 ½ ), Jane Bronwyn (6), Oliver Christian (4) and Nicholas Jones (2 ½ ). Stephanie had written, “I am fortunate to have two of each (sex). Each child brings a different forte to our family. Each one has a very unique life with different ideas.”
Stephanie explained how she thought that each of her children symbolized a different color, and together, their colors blend into a rainbow to, “use these colors and lights to make a very peaceful, active, and very blissful home. I am so lucky I was given these children.”
Her love for parenting, for her husband and for life was inspiring to many readers. You could see this in their comments on her posts. They felt inspired, and I felt inspired. When I interviewed her and asked what her favorite thing was in being a mother, she responded simply, “being needed.” Her greatest joy was in helping her children to blossom. She wrote that she loved being able to stay at home with her children, so that she could be the best possible mother she could, in today’s world.
These four children have a wonderful and caring mother, who teaches them crucial lessons through everyday activities. On one particular afternoon, Stephanie and the children wrote anonymous notes of wisdoms on strips of paper. They then drove around town and left the notes in secret hiding places, where a passerby would later discover the insight. The notes said things such as, “God loves you,” or, “someone loves you,” or, “Rainbows love you.” Her children had continued on their journey of learning to be kind to others. The importance of kindness and love was inculcated into the children through innumerable other acts of family kindness.
Often, the Nielson family had a get together with their extended family. These fortunate children have gotten to know their extended family very well, much better than I have, and they know the important role that family plays in one’s life. They have learned this lesson through opportunities to be close to their family. Stephanie had given her children these valuable teaching examples by being the kind of person they can look up to.
Now, it has come back to her. Stephanie remembers the plane crash that left 80% of her body burned, and she says, “I remember, as our plane violently crashed to the ground, I tucked my head down on my knees and prayed. Then I was not alone. I felt rather calm in a … troubled moment that seemed to last forever. The plane spun and whistled downward and in my heart I saw my children. I saw them as they laughed. I saw them smiling. It was calming that in such a terrible moment, I had a reminder of the peace of my family. I was not alone then. And I am certainly not alone now!”
The plane crashed into a pile of wood that was lying near several houses. Stephanie went on to explain how she was saved by her husband. She says, “…he saved my life; he opened the airplane door, which was on fire, and he cleared a path for me even though he had a broken back. It was heroic and knightly. He was motivated by love. He found his way to safety and looked back only to realize that I was not following.” Stephanie says that they yelled for one another and soon after, she was able to find her way out of the flames and wreckage.
Her husband, Christian, awoke from a coma about a month after the crash in the Arizona Burn Center. Stephanie was able to awake from her coma about a month after Christian. She said that her family relied heavily upon their faith in the Gospel of Jesus the Christ, just to make their way through their difficult times.
Stephanie has recovered. Not completely, but she has improved so much. She still has trouble with her hands because the tendons were burnt. She can’t cook. She can’t do Jane’s or Claire’s hair yet. She can’t button Nicholas’ or Ollie’s shirts for Church. Stephanie has faith that at some point in the future, after her next operation—and there have been so many and will be so many more—that she will be able to use her hands again. For now, though, she does what she can to be the wife and mother she intends.
At first, her children had difficulty in trying to understand how badly their parents had been hurt in the accident. They had a particularly hard time understanding why their mother could not do all that she had done before. The second oldest child, Jane, was the most deeply troubled. After about five months in the hospital, Stephanie received a visit from Jane, who was then 5 years old. She had come to see her “new” mother for the first time. Jane was not prepared for the change, and she would not look at her mother again for two more months. “These were the hardest days of my life,” Stephanie told me.
Moms don’t want to scare their children. Moms don’t like seeing their children hurt and confused. At least moms like Stephanie don’t. But her children, as she says, “…stepped up since the accident. They are very therapeutic and engaging for me. I need their love and their need of me, to help me heal. I just hope I can make them feel as safe and secure as they do for me!”
As her children understand more and more of what happened, they still have their struggles. They wonder why their mother was hurt. They don’t understand what made the plane crash. One evening, just before bedtime, Stephanie says that she called her two daughters into her room and they jumped into bed with her. Stephanie explained to her two girls how sorry she was that the plane had crashed and she began to cry.
As Claire stroked Stephanie’s hair in a gentle manner, Jane squeezed her arms around her mother. No words were exchanged, just silent tears flowed between them. After some time, Stephanie had her girls and her make a “pinkie promise,” that Stephanie would never let anything upset their happy family again. Stephanie says that the girls smiled. Some would say that they smiled with the relief of little children, but I prefer to believe that they smiled for more. Their mom was back to being mom. Stephanie then told her daughters that their Father in Heaven loved them and she explained that He has “big plans” for their family, so they should not worry about the future. Stephanie then said that Jane looked at her and asked, “Is that why the airplane fell out of the sky? Did He do that?”
Stephanie says that she was confused by the question because she had not yet found the answer to it for herself. She says that she only found the answer when she told her daughter that people fix planes and make mistakes, but Heavenly Father makes miracles. He saved their lives and that was part of the beginning of the big plan for their family. Their family is in the middle of that plan now, and it will get easier. It has to get easier.
Stephanie and Christian continue to heal. There are still challenges. There are still tender and precious moments. The two of them have matching flesh colored gloves on their hands during the day, and wear clear plastic face-masks to bed every night. Stephanie has been able to gain some weight and is now up to 113 pounds. Her hair is growing back in swatches. What had once been beautiful and pure skin now is traced with pink and sometimes angry scars. Her naturally freckled face is concealed by transplanted skin. But she still has sparkling green eyes and they remind her of who she is, was, and will be in the future—even if the scars on her skin never disappear.
She is also my hero, but mostly, she is a hero to her children. She says that sometimes she regrets what she lost in the fire, but she also says she doesn’t feel that way as often now that she is back home with her family. She expects there will come that day when she will dimly recall when she struggled to do the simple things. She appreciates the simplest motherly tasks more now than she ever imagined before the plane fell out of the sky. She tells me, and she writes in her blog, that the longing for what she lost has been numbed by the delight she feels, when she is with her children and they approach her again—without fear of the changes to her appearance.
At least, that’s what she tells me.
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