The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

by Jeffrey Zaslow

  Over a beer, Jeff once told his brother, “You know, girls can be trying at times. So you’ve got to figure ’em out. That’s the secret. In my case, I’ve got these four daughters, and I’ve come to realize that two of ’em are dogs and two of ’em are cats. The two that are dogs, I’ve got to give them a lot of attention. I’ve got to caress them. The two that are cats, they go their own way. They’re happy to be left alone. So I’ve adjusted, see? When I’m with the dogs, I caress and I play. When I’m with the cats, I give them room. And either way, I just remember to love them.”

  Some fathers have trouble communicating with their daughters because, as researchers explain, males in conversation are hardwired to try to solve problems, while females usually want to first discuss their feelings. Jeff had a sense of how to talk to his girls when they had an issue. “Do you want me to help you find a solution,” he’d say, “or do you want me to just listen to you?”

  Jeff was certainly a man’s man, and he raised the girls to be tough—to hunt and fish and know a thing or two about lumber—but he also recognized their femininity, their needs, the longings they felt.

  Through most of the marriage, Jeff wasn’t an especially demonstrative husband—he didn’t always say “I love you”—but it was important to him that his daughters understood how much he loved Julie.

  In November 2008, when Camie was fifteen, she went on a deer-hunting trip with Jeff, and they had a lot of light conversations about school, her friends, sports. He entertained her with impressions. But one night, in the middle of the woods, almost out of the blue, Jeff asked Camie a question: “Do you know how much I love your mother?”

  Camie smiled at him. “Yes, I know you love her, Dad.”

  Jeff looked at Camie for a moment, and she sensed he wanted to say something important. The joker was being serious. “I don’t think you and your sisters fully realize it,” he told her. “I don’t think you get just how much I really love your mother. And that’s the love I want all of you to have, the kind of love I feel for your mom.”

  Julie and Jeff later in their marriage

  Long ago, Jeff and Julie had attended a “marriage encounter” weekend with other couples. It made Jeff uncomfortable. Each couple had to tell the story of how they fell in love. When it was Jeff’s turn, he couldn’t bring himself to go too deep. “I am a friend of Julie’s brother,” he said. “One day he promised me five dollars every time I dated Julie. Then he offered me a twenty-five dollar bonus if I married her.” Jeff later told Julie: “No one needs to know our love story. You know how much I love you.”

  “I do,” Julie told him, “but it’s always good to hear it.”

  After he reached his midforties, Jeff had a lot of back pain, but he’d grimace through it and not say much. His back problem gave him an even greater appreciation for Julie, who as a nurse was able to offer advice and loving, patient attention. Jeff had three operations on his back, but the pain persisted. Doctors were so focused on his back that when they perused his MRIs, they never noticed that he also had heart issues.

  On February 6, 2009, Jeff was in the basement in the family home in Fowler, building sections of a fireplace that he could take up to the family cottage on the lake. Julie was always complaining that she was cold in the cottage, and Jeff thought adding a fireplace would be a nice surprise for her. He was down in the basement for a while, awfully quiet, and when his twenty-year-old son Lee called down to him, there was no answer. Lee headed down the stairs and found Jeff dead. He was forty-seven.

  Pathologists later determined that Jeff—the guy everyone always described as big-hearted—had died from complications of an enlarged heart. “An enlarged heart,” Julie repeated when given the news. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  More than 2,000 people showed up for Jeff’s wakes and memorial service in Fowler, which was pretty incredible for a town of 1,100. As people reminisced about him, everyone had a story. At one of the wakes, the stories went on for almost two hours.

  “Uncle Jeff taught me to drive,” one nephew said, and paused for a punch line. “When I was eleven.”

  A middle-school math teacher in Fowler talked of how Jeff always volunteered to be chaperone on his daughters’ field trips. “It was Jeff and all these mothers.”

  One of Jeff’s pals spoke about what made Jeff a true friend: “A true friend is someone who stops over and brings you something you didn’t realize you needed, and now can’t do without it. A true friend tells you how good you are at something and uses the word ‘bastard’ in the same sentence. Jeff Wieber is my true friend.”

  “Even if you met Jeff just once, you remembered him,” said a doctor who worked with Julie at the hospital.

  And Jeff’s niece may have put it best. “Jeff wasn’t just a character,” she said. “He also had character.”

  Julie’s best friend spoke about what she had long observed: “What struck me most about Jeff and Julie was the love they had for each other. They never had to say a word to me about it. I could just see it in their eyes when they looked at each other.”

  Shelley had left an underling in charge at Becker’s so she could go to the wake. As she sat there, absorbing the eulogies, she realized that she knew no couple as close as Julie and Jeff. “How will Julie move forward?” Shelley asked herself. “She’ll never be happy again.” She wondered if Jeff was somehow present, listening to the speeches.

  Jeff and Julie’s daughter Lauren stood up and talked about the major snowstorm that hit Fowler three weeks before Jeff died. Even though his back hurt, Jeff got dressed in his heavy winter coat and headed outside to run the snowblower. Julie decided to join him with a shovel. When Jeff wasn’t looking, Julie winged a snowball at him. He gave her the finger—but with a smile—and then tossed a few snowballs her way. Soon, they were like two kids, tumbling in the snow together.

  Neither of them knew it, but their three youngest daughters were watching them from the living-room window. “We could just see it so clearly,” Lauren said at the memorial service. “Our mom and our dad were each other’s best friends.”

  Julie knew how true this was. Whenever the girls tried to play one parent against the other, Jeff told them straight. “Never try to come between me and your mom,” he’d say. “Mom was in the picture way before you were. And when you’re grown up and have your own life, she’ll be all I have.”

  In the days after Jeff died, Julie couldn’t sleep. She’d exhaust herself and then fall into bed, hoping her eyes would close and she’d have a respite from her sadness.

  One night, lying in bed, she remembered a note Jeff had written to her after his parents died. It was just a simple message that he left on her bedside table, so she’d find it when she got home from work. He wanted her to know how grateful he was for the support she’d given him while he was grieving the loss of his parents. “Julie, I love you so much,” he wrote, “and I appreciate everything you do.”

  And so shortly after he’d died, Julie rummaged through her nightstand, hoping she still had that note. When she found it, she held it in her hands for a while. Then she dug a little deeper into the drawer and came upon another note Jeff had written.

  It was a note he left for her one morning before a hunting trip. Julie had always wanted to kiss him before he left—she was superstitious like that—and was angry that he had taken off without saying good-bye or kissing her. His note was simple: “Julie, I’m sorry you were upset about the way I left. You know you’re my best girl and I love you.”

  “I had forgotten about that note,” Julie later told Shelley, “but it was overwhelming to read it. I really felt I was meant to come upon it after Jeff died. I felt like he was speaking to me, like it was his apology for dying and leaving me behind.”

  After Jeff died, Julie and each of the five kids met separately with a grief counselor. There were wounded feelings and unresolved issues. The kids were on edge and sad, fighting with Julie and one another. It felt as if the family was falling apart.

&nbs
p; Julie’s mother, Helen—who had helped raise the kids while Julie was at nursing school—has always been close with all five of them. After Jeff died, the kids often turned to her for the solace that their mother couldn’t provide. Helen was saddened to see the kids arguing day after day. They were all hurting, and blaming one another for their pain. “Sometimes it feels like I want to disown all of them,” one of the girls admitted to Helen.

  They’d find ways to bring each other down. One daughter would come home smiling about a good grade on a test, and she’d be told by her sister, “Who cares? Dad’s not here to see it.” It took a while for the kids to realize that, though they didn’t have their dad, they still had one another.

  Because of HIPPA laws, the counselor couldn’t tell Julie much about what each of her children was saying in therapy. But the counselor did say this: “Your husband was an amazing man. Each of the five kids, individually, has told me the same thing. Each believed they were their father’s favorite child. Jeff must have had a way of dealing with his children that made them feel very special.”

  In one session with the grief therapist, Julie admitted that she was struggling with great feelings of guilt—about not somehow saving Jeff, and about going on with her life and leaving him behind. “Can I point something out?” the therapist said. “You took marriage vows when you married Jeff, didn’t you? What were those vows?”

  “I vowed to be there for him in sickness and in health,” Julie said.

  “And do you remember the line ‘till death do us part’?” the counselor asked.

  He reminded Julie that neither she nor Jeff could predict who would die first, but in their vows, they were allowing the surviving spouse to move on. “I’m sure Jeff wouldn’t have wanted your life to be over,” the counselor said. “He’d say you lived up to your commitment to him, to your vows, and you were a great wife. And now that death has parted you, it’s your choice what to do next. You can sit around feeling sorry for yourself forever, and ruin your life. Or you can resist feeling guilty, and move on.”

  The counselor spoke of Julie’s responsibility to her four daughters and to her son. He told her: “The best thing you can do for your kids is be happy again.”

  Julie had no intention of getting serious with another man, especially so soon after Jeff’s death. But her brother introduced her to a friend of his named Dean, a divorced man with four children of his own. Dean was a process engineer at the same Cadillac plant where Jeff had worked, though they were only acquaintances.

  “He’s similar to Jeff in a lot of ways,” Julie would tell people. “He’s funny and warm, with a huge heart. And he’s easy. It takes no effort being with him. I used to describe Jeff as ‘a hell of a nice guy.’ That’s how I describe Dean.”

  Very quickly—too quickly for some in Julie’s family—Julie and Dean announced they would be getting married. At Becker’s Bridal, her friend Shelley understood. “I’ve always found that if a widowed young woman had a good marriage, she’ll remarry fast,” she said.

  Before they announced their engagement, Julie says, she and Dean were naïve. “We wanted all our kids on board,” says Julie. “We had this dream that all the kids would be accepting, that they’d help us pick out the ring. It was an unrealistic dream.”

  They got engaged on a Friday night in March 2010, and woke up the next morning to tell the kids. Julie’s oldest and youngest daughters, Stefanie and Macy, were the only ones home. When Julie shared the news, it was as if a bomb had been detonated. Macy was especially livid. She told Dean and Julie she hated them. “How can you do this to us?” she said repeatedly. “We don’t want another man in our house—in Dad’s house!”

  Julie kept responding, “You have to trust me. Have I ever steered you wrong?”

  Julie and Dean headed to Julie’s mother’s house to tell her of the engagement, but Macy had already texted her grandmother and other siblings with the news. It was like an angry, high-tech message chain was moving around Fowler as fast as people could type.

  Middle daughter Camie tried to be accepting. “Mom, I’m happy that you’re happy,” she said, “but I’ll need some time to absorb this.” The others took it harder. For weeks, Macy spoke about her anger toward Julie to anyone who would listen.

  Finally, Julie’s mother, Helen, had had enough. “You know, you’re talking about my daughter, my flesh and blood,” she said. “I’ve watched her go through hell for fourteen months. And now, with Dean, she’s happy again. As a mother, seeing that her grieving daughter is happy again, well, it’s like an answer to my prayers. And Macy, I want to tell you something: You need to be careful about how you’re talking about my daughter.”

  Julie’s kids were surprisingly moved by their grandmother’s tough message—by how sharply she defended Julie. That was a turning point. “My kids saw that I wasn’t just their mother,” says Julie. “I was my mother’s daughter.”

  Julie tried hard to process the ways in which her daughters’ grief was different from hers. “None of us can replace Jeff,” she’d tell Shelley. “But I am able to fall in love again, to start a new chapter. For the girls, it’s different. They’ll never get another dad.”

  Sometimes fitfully, sometimes with true grace, the family began trying to reconcile all of this. And so Julie found herself, at age forty-five, back in the Magic Room at Becker’s Bridal, with her mother and two of her daughters beside her, and her other two daughters at home, not yet ready to celebrate this new engagement.

  Unlike in 1986, the wedding dress didn’t signify young love or an arrival into adulthood. This time it was a tangible reminder that Julie was starting over. It was as if putting on the dress spoke about where she’d been in her life. And it was about going forward, and what it will mean to be married again.

  One night, Julie told Dean, “I will always love Jeff. That’s never going to change. But I know I can love you, too.”

  “That’s more than enough for me,” Dean told her.

  Chapter Twelve

  A Daughter’s View of Marriage

  A few months after Shelley’s daughter, Alyssa, signed on to work at Becker’s full-time in 2009, she began having what she calls

  “the white blindness nightmare.” Now it comes several nights a week. The nightmare usually begins the same way. She is stuck in a thicket of wedding dresses, pressing up against her, and from beyond the whiteness (or the off-whiteness), people are chattering all at once. Some are telling her, in great detail, about what kind of dress they want. Others are complaining about ill-fitting gowns. In the dreams, Becker’s is hosting a trunk show and the store is jammed with women. Barriers are in places, but Alyssa can’t hold back the customers.

  “They’re breaking down the barriers!” she calls out to Shelley.

  “Try to stop them,” her mother responds.

  “I can’t!” Alyssa says. “There’s no way to hold them back!”

  Shelley isn’t surprised by her daughter’s dreams. She’s been having her own “white blindness” nightmares all her life. Her dreams became especially disconcerting once her three kids were born.

  In Shelley’s dreams, she’s at the store, helping customers, and she needs to break away. She has to get to one of her son’s sporting events, or to a parent-teacher conference for Alyssa, or somewhere where her kids need her, but the store is just jammed with brides and mothers.

  In the dreams, Shelley always feels trapped, but she never tells a bride she has to go. She never even walks over to the store’s front door to attempt a getaway. She just knows that there’s no way she can leave, and so she stays—missing moment after moment of motherhood.

  “What kind of train are you considering?” she’ll say to a bride, and then as she listens to the answer, smiling, there’s a sinking feeling in her gut and she’s thinking, “I’ve got to get out of here. I’m late. I’ve got to go!”

  Maybe Shelley is recalling her own childhood, waiting for her mother to come home from the store. Maybe it’s her own guilty
feelings about all that she missed as a mother while running Becker’s. Whatever the cause, it is the dream that keeps presenting itself. And, in another form, it is a dream that has found its way into Alyssa’s head too.

  “You look gorgeous in this dress,” Shelley says to a bride, knowing that she belongs a few hundred yards across town, with her kids. But it might as well be a million miles away.

  Shelley’s 1985 marriage to Gary began on some high notes. They were a young, attractive couple, and people talked of how gorgeous they looked together. Gary was tall and dark, with a Tom Selleck mustache, and some said Shelley was the cutest girl in Fowler. For both of them, there was a natural thrill in the process of starting their adult lives. Just the concept of living together and making plans for dinner or the weekend, as husband and wife, could be exciting, especially for Shelley who for so long defined herself in just two ways: as her siblings’ babysitter and as a saleswoman at the store.

  For a while after they married, Shelley and Gary lived together across the street from the bridal shop, in a small upstairs apartment in the building where the store’s seamstresses worked. Each morning, Shelley walked thirty steps over to Becker’s Bridal, where she logged sixty-hour weeks working for her parents. Gary worked outside of town on construction jobs, and later took care of maintenance at a strip mall.

  Gary’s mother and father were much older than Shelley’s parents. His dad, a World War II veteran born in 1911, worked the assembly line at a General Motors plant for most of his life. When Gary was born in 1963, his dad was fifty-two, and his mom, a homemaker, was forty-four. They were stoic people who clung to their Depression-era values. Given his frugal upbringing, Gary was very taken with the Becker family. True, like his parents, the Beckers weren’t effusive about their feelings. But unlike his parents, they were ambitious risk-takers, and Gary admired that. The Beckers were self-employed businesspeople who understood the financial peril that could result from filling their store with thousands of wedding dresses. They did it anyway. Gary understood his father’s desire to earn a steady paycheck working on the assembly line. But his dad was satisfied living a smaller life, while Gary’s in-laws were building a modest dynasty.