After fiery plane crash, a sister is held even closerby Jaimee Rose - Oct. 26, 2008 12:00 AM The Arizona RepublicShe knew just how to hold her sister.
Eleven years older, Page would slip across the hall and scoop that crying baby from the crib before their mother could stir.
Into the rocking chair they'd go, back and forth, Page and Stephanie together.
Don't cry, Page whispered,
I'm here.
"I had this feeling that I knew her and she knew me," Page says, "and we would help each other."
Now, Stephanie whimpers, and before the nurses come, Page is there. She climbs onto Stephanie's hospital bed, wraps her sister, now 27, in her arms.
"Don't cry," Page says, "I'm here." She knows just how to hold her sister.
Stephanie Nielson and her husband, Christian, 29, were injured when their private plane went down Aug. 16 in St. Johns, Ariz., while on their way home to Mesa. Christian, the pilot, was burned on 35 percent of his body, and Stephanie on 83 percent of hers. They were taken to the Arizona Burn Center in Phoenix.
In the hospital, Page winds the long bandages around Stephanie's burned arms and legs. She wraps Stephanie's face carefully so she can still see the freckle on her lower lip. Page Checketts, the oldest sister, is the strong one.
All three of Stephanie's sisters are here, at the hospital. One cries in the corner so Stephanie can't hear. Another stands by the bed, whispering in Stephanie's ear, her hand on Stephanie's strong heart. She likes to feel it beating.
As soon as Stephanie's three sisters heard about the crash, they came. There was a pull, a panic to be near her. There was worry for the four children Stephanie and Christian left at home.
The sisters decided to do all the things Stephanie couldn't. Her children came to their homes. Her care became their responsibility. They even inherited her blog.
For three years, Stephanie wrote the NieNie Dialogues, read by hundreds across the nation. It was a daily picture, both lovely and honest, of the life of a mom. There were self-portraits too, all red lipstick and green eyes, pale skin, a child often on her lap.
She shared sadness, also. One of nine children raised in Provo, Utah, Stephanie was the only one who moved away from home. Sometimes, she missed her sisters so much that she called Provo, found them giggling in someone's kitchen and cried into the phone.
Before Stephanie's sisters left for Arizona, they posted news of the crash on her blog and asked for prayers.
The first visitThe first August day the sisters came to the hospital, only Stephanie's toes and ponytail peeked out from beneath the bandages. Her eyes were swollen shut, her face wrapped, too. Heavily sedated, Stephanie was silent and still.
Her mother could only stand to be in the room for 15 minutes. One sister saw Stephanie's once-bouncy, happy ponytail and talked loudly in a weird high voice, trying to diffuse the angst.
"Stephanie! I'm just so excited to see you."
The nurses looked at her like she was insane.
The doctors said Christian would fully recover in months. After skin grafts to his arms, legs and one ear, he'd learn to walk again, to curl his fingers, to bend his arms. His face would heal on its own.
But Stephanie's prognosis was grave. She had a 60 to 70 percent chance of survival, her doctors said. Third-degree burns took almost all the skin from her back, chest, face, neck, arms and lower legs. Her organs were strong, her slender body working hard, but there would be months of recovery and years of pain.
Her hands were burned to the tendons. The doctors were able to preserve the cartilage of her nose, but that sweet face full of the freckles she shared with her sisters, gone. The sisters felt like Stephanie was gone, too.
The funny sisterCourtney Kendrick, the second-oldest sister, is the funny one.
In the hospital room that first day, she bent and whispered into Stephanie's ear.
"I'll take your kids," she said, "but you gotta promise me I'll be skinny in return."
Standing by Stephanie's bed, two thoughts crept into Courtney's mind.
Take care of Stephanie's children. And tell her story.
Courtney promised to continue her sister's blog. She knew Stephanie felt her message was important, that somewhere in the photos of Stephanie's laundry basket and dinners under the mulberry tree, other moms might find a laugh or even strength. Stephanie once posted a photo of Courtney nursing on her blog. Courtney forgave her.
The four children could come home to Provo, Courtney thought. They could attend Stephanie's grade school with their cousins, hike Stephanie's favorite mountain and feel their mother in the autumn air. The children needed to escape the worried visitors that kept talk of the crash in their minds.
Already the mother of a newborn, Courtney took Claire, 6, Jane, 5, and Oliver, 3. Another sister took Nicholas, 2.
Courtney and her husband packed the car so quickly that clothes and baby blankets flew off the roof rack somewhere near the Arizona border. She lost her voice in that car filled with little ones, but Courtney found her sister.
"I felt Stephanie around me all the time, talking to me, whispering in my ear," she remembers.
The first week was long while Courtney learned how to mother Stephanie's children. She solved who wanted what on their toast, chanted "shoes, girls, shoes" over and over. And Courtney listened for her sister.
Have Jane help you vacuum if she gets too hyper.
Whisper something in their ears before they go to sleep.
One night, Courtney surveyed the day's mess with exhaustion. As she bent once more over a pile of errant toys, she heard her sister.
Thank you. Thank you. I know it's hard. Thank you.But I love this, Courtney wanted to say back.
"Ollie wakes me up, and I think what an honor," says Courtney, 31. "What an honor to make this guy Cheerios with one eye open and one eye closed."
At night, Courtney always thinks of Stephanie. She tucks the children into bed, whispering "your mom and dad love you" to each one. Claire and Jane take the longest, demanding story after story in the big bed they share.
Sometimes, when they listen to Stephanie's favorite lullaby, Jane clutches a photograph of her parents and cries into her pillow.
Sometimes Claire has bad dreams, she says, "so I snuggle with my sister Jane, and that makes me feel better."
Every morning, Courtney finds them huddled together, holding each other like only sisters know how.
"Sisters are the closest thing to you, the closest thing to yourself," Courtney says. "We knew we were as close as these kids could get to their mom."
The careful sisterLucy Beesley, the youngest, is the careful one. She looks just like Stephanie. The two share the same brown hair, peaked chin and pink puffed cheeks covered in freckles. They both worry over clothes and feelings and if the homemade pizza crust turned out right.
Lucy is caring for the 2-year-old, Nicholas. He calls Lucy "Mom."
"Mom! Mom-mom-mom-mom," Nicholas insists, toddling toward her with eyes bright, a new toy in his chubby fist.
She answers.
"A copter?" says Lucy, 24. "Oh, you lucky boy!"
Growing up, just three years between them, Stephanie and Lucy shared a bedroom. They shared dresses.
They slept in the same bed until Stephanie was 16. They would giggle under the covers until their mother came in, ordering everyone to sleep. Night after night, the sisters slept snuggled, born knowing just how to hold each other.
"I do miss her, I miss her so," Lucy says. "I miss asking her questions."
Sometimes, she hears Stephanie's voice.
I need you to teach Nicholas.
Sometimes Lucy talks back.
I took all your clothes, she tells Stephanie.
The clothes "remind me of her," Lucy says. "I want to feel her close to me."
When Lucy kisses Nicholas, she does it just like her sister: feasting on those soft, fat cheeks. She combs his hair and brings him to Courtney's house every afternoon for family dinner and story hour with his siblings.
"I put him down to bed and . . . we say a little prayer together," Lucy says. "I lie there until he falls asleep, and I know she's there with me. I can just feel her, and she's comforting him."
Nicholas turned 2 on Oct. 6, and oh, how Lucy worried over his party. Stephanie always made birthdays so magical.
Lucy and her husband held the party at their farm: chili, scones and a hayride to a pumpkin patch.
Stephanie always told her sisters that someday, she wanted to move back to Utah and live on a farm. She wanted grapevines and apple trees in the backyard, pumpkins growing and Christian by her side.
Standing in the farm, surrounded by family, about to release balloons into the air, Lucy felt that deep pang for her sister. How sad that she missed this. As a toddler, Nicholas changes by the week. He's a new version of himself every Sunday.
Stephanie's been sleeping for 10 Sundays. Nicholas is losing his chubby cheeks. His wispy tufts of baby hair have been trimmed, tamed, combed to the side. He's talking now. He's growing from a baby to a boy. Stephanie's missing all of it.
Lucy worries about time passing, about this boy who sleeps near his mother's photograph but calls Lucy "mom."
"What's going to happen," she wonders, "when he leaves me and sees Stephanie for the first time?"
His mother looks different, too.
Love and flying
Stephanie loved to dress up for Christian: a pink hat on Easter, his favorite skirt on a Friday night. Stephanie, the second-youngest, is the romantic one.
She liked to write her husband love letters, even posting them online. Her brothers teased her. She didn't care.
"You always knew Stephanie and Christian were going to be late for everything," Courtney says, "that they were going to . . . dress up, to look good for each other."
Stephanie and Christian fell in love when she was 19 and he was 21. Months later, they married in the Provo Mormon temple and started their family. While Christian finished his degree in facilities management at Brigham Young University, Stephanie stayed at home with the children. They moved from Provo to a job in New Jersey and later Mesa, where Christian was raised as one of 11 kids.
In Arizona, Stephanie and Christian lived with his parents while they saved for a house, but Stephanie felt that tug pulling her home to Utah, to her parents, five brothers, and three sisters. She tried to ignore it, her sisters said. She wanted to make him happy.
"She was just a softie," Page says. "She wanted fun and happiness all the time."
Stephanie and Christian mined the magic of life. They wanted each moment to matter. Stephanie wore her trademark red lipstick even to the grocery store and sent thank-you notes to the dentist. Christian liked to dance in the living room and pick Stephanie up and carry her to bed.
Stephanie knew Christian always had yearned to fly. He ate birdseed at age 6, hoping he might grow wings.
For Christian's 28th birthday, in 2006, she bought him his first flying lesson. Stephanie called him Mr. Pilot Nielson and loved to be his passenger. She played the
Out of Africa soundtrack on her iPod, lost in romance, pretending she was Meryl Streep.
He told her that whenever she needed her sisters, he could fly her to Provo.
He earned his pilot's license in July, and a few weeks later, Stephanie came to him with a request. On a recent vacation to his family's ranch in Bluewater, N.M., she had spied a pair of suede moccasins at an Indian reservation nearby. She mentioned how she wished she'd brought them home, and Christian said he'd fly her over on Saturday to get them. It would be good practice, he said. Their flight instructor, Doug Kinneard of Mesa, could join them, and they could leave the kids with Christian's mother.
It could be a date.
The flight homeOn the way home from New Mexico, Stephanie wore those moccasins. They stopped in St. Johns around 3:30 p.m. to refuel. During the landing, the borrowed Cessna's engine quit and wouldn't restart.
Christian and Doug pushed the plane to the fueling area and filled the tanks. The engine started easily, according to the National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report.
Christian stopped to call his mother and told her they'd be home soon.
He taxied the Cessna back to the runway, and the plane climbed slowly. Witnesses say it never got the altitude it needed. At the end of the runway, the plane veered to the left and crashed onto a residential street about a block away.
Neighbors heard the power lines snap as the plane came through. They heard the plane hit a truck parked on the street and then another. They heard the scrape of the plane's metal belly shredding as it skidded across the asphalt into a woodpile next to a home, where it caught fire. The power lines had sliced off the left landing gear. Then the neighbors heard footsteps, running.
Christian and Doug jumped from the plane, their clothes on fire. Christian ran across the street, still burning, calling for help.
"My wife," he cried, staring back at the airplane already lost to flames. "My wife."
Stephanie escaped, and neighbors found her beneath a tire swing.
Doug, burned on more than 90 percent of his body, called out instructions.
"Call my students," he said, "tell them I won't be there this afternoon." In the end, he talked of his family and how much he loved them. Doug, 48, died the next day.
Neighbors helped Christian across the street. He asked someone to call his aunt and uncle, who live in St. Johns. They arrived just behind the ambulance, and Christian sent his aunt to Stephanie.
Stephanie lay on the grass, her head in the lap of a man who happened by. Stephanie reached up and cradled his cheek in her singed hand.
"Thank you," she told him. "Thank you for being here."
Stephanie was worried about her injuries.
"My mother's going to be so mad at me," she told Christian's aunt. "I'm all burned. I'm going to die."
As they waited for the helicopters to arrive, Stephanie became quiet.
"I don't want to do this," Stephanie said. "I just want to go home and make dinner for my family."
'Come home'
Christian woke up in the burn center one month later asking about her, his injuries healing but his worry fresh.
"Where is she?" Christian asked, as he came out of sedation. "How is she?"
They waited a few days before they wheeled him into her room.
"He didn't really look at her," Page says. Christian kept his eyes in his lap. He wanted to touch her, but he didn't know if he could. A nurse picked up his hand, placed it on Stephanie's. And then, though his voice shook, he couldn't stop talking. He told her of his love, how all the good in him and the children was because of her.
"Come back," Christian begged that day in the hospital. "Come home."
For weeks, all he could talk about was her. He guided his walker to her side three and four times
a day to touch her, pray with her, talk to her. He tried to explain the magic of his wife to everyone who visited, to his mother every night, to his own sister when she came to sing him to sleep.
"She's just so wonderful," Christian said. "Nobody can really know how wonderful she is."
No one except her sisters.
The three women came to see him together one weekend, a quick flight to Arizona from Utah.
He smiled at their freckles, at their mannerisms so like his wife's.
"When he looks at us," Page says, "he sees Stephanie."
Stephanie's choice
Page, Courtney and Lucy stop before they go into Stephanie's hospital room. Their arms find each other for a long embrace, like they're summoning all the strength they have and passing it to each other. It's still so hard to see her.
The sisters don't hear Stephanie's voice anymore, whispering in their ears. They feel her here, in this hospital room. They feel her fighting.
"We feel like she had a choice," Page says. "She could choose to go, and it would have been a beautiful life. Or she could choose to stay and fight. We feel like she's made her choice."
Stephanie is something of a marvel, says Dr. Kevin Foster, one of the burn surgeons leading her care. After 19 surgeries, her wounds are almost grafted completely, he says. Her body fought off the afflictions common to burn patients: infection, organ failure.
She will be in the burn center until at least December, he says, followed by months in a rehabilitation center as she learns to walk again and use her hands. There will be more surgeries over the next few years, Foster says, likely more than 100.
Just coming out of heavy sedation, Stephanie is dimly conscious and can wave her arms and shake her head. She is moving now, responding to her family.
The moccasins saved her feet from the fire, and her sisters like to stand at the edge of her bed, touching her toes.
In the hospital, Stephanie's sisters keep their voices happy and calm. They try not to mention the children too much because such talk makes Stephanie sit up in a white blur of urgency and worry.
"I think we tell her what we need to hear ourselves," Page says. She tells Stephanie to be patient and strong. Courtney keeps her voice light, tells her everything is going to be OK. Lucy tells Stephanie how many people love her.
The sisters have some news for Stephanie in the hospital this day: She's famous now.
Courtney kept her promise to tell Stephanie's story, posting news on her own blog and on Stephanie's. Sometimes, her words sound just like her sister's.
The news about Stephanie and Christian's crash spread quickly, and fellow bloggers offered their prayers.
The Today show and the
New York Times featured the family, and more than 50,000 readers now visit her blog daily.
Stephanie's hospital room is a scrapbook of love letters and photos from readers on each wall. Piles of packages from strangers arrive in Utah for the children every week. Fellow moms and bloggers have auctioned cookies and homemade dolls to benefit the family. Friends have held garage sales, carnivals, even concerts. They've raised more than $150,000 to help with medical costs, which will stretch into the millions. Insurance will pay some.
"Stephanie, do you want to be famous?" Courtney asks her.
Stephanie sits up and shakes her head no.
Apples and leavesOne day, when Page is tending to Stephanie in her room, Page whispers something else to her sister.
Page and her husband just bought Stephanie and Christian a house in Provo, in the tree-lined foothills where Stephanie grew up. There's a view of the mountains she loved, which fall is painting red and orange as Stephanie sleeps.
The house is in the center of her family: just a half-mile from Courtney, Page and their parents. Lucy is eight minutes away. There's a white picket fence on the side, an apple tree in front, peaches and plums in the back. The eastern fence is covered in grapevines.
In the hospital, Page hears her little sister crying once more.
Later, Page visits Christian in the Scottsdale rehab clinic where he is recovering, anxious to tell him about the house. In rehab, Christian is practicing walking, building his strength and professing his love for Stephanie to everyone. His mother stays with him nearly every night, even though he goes to bed at 8:30. He doesn't like to be alone. He says he doesn't want to publicly discuss the accident until Stephanie can talk about it, too.
Page is nervous to tell him about the house, afraid he won't want to leave his own family or that he won't understand how badly Stephanie will need her own.
A grateful Christian tells Page that what Stephanie wants, he will do.
"In my hardest, most difficult times, it's my sisters I want by my side," Page says.
Stephanie will need lifelong care, help with her children and all of life's routines and indelicacies.
Stephanie will need Page's strength, Courtney's laughs, Lucy's caution. She will need their freckles to remind her of her own.
One night, during a quick visit to Arizona, the sisters find each other at Stephanie and Christian's Mesa home.
Courtney is feeding her baby boy. Lucy is doing laundry. Page is comforting their mother. The day at the hospital was long.
One by one, they all stop and pile onto the bed in Stephanie's yellow guest room, drained. They lie on their sides like a row of spoons, their heads resting on each other's shoulders. They tease their mother, who is nestled in the middle, her hair suddenly much whiter than it ever was before. They laugh at Lucy's pajamas. They stay this way for a very long time, and then they are quiet.
Courtney says what they all are thinking."It feels like someone is missing."
(Original post on cjanerun by Courtney Kendrick, Stephanie's sister, on Nov. 11, 2008.)
