A place to smile again: An Eastlake family turns its loss into a gift to the community

The glass leaves glow in lime, peach and lavender, sunlit beads on a wall that slithers alongside a sandbox like some creation of Gaudi. Laurie Stusser-McNeil, the guiding force behind Eastlake's Rogers Playground, hopes it will be everything a public park should be — a centering point for parents and kids, where neighbors become friends, and where families become community.

When it officially opens Wednesday, Stusser-McNeil will be thinking: Fletcher, this is for you.

Just 23 days old

He'd happened as naturally as a nursery rhyme, but when he was born, Fletcher McNeil let out a squawk — and then he couldn't breathe at all. The baby had been born with a diaphragmatic hernia, and with his diaphragm not fully formed, his organs had floated into his chest, impeding the growth of his lungs.

"We heard his stomach gurgling where his heart should be," Stusser-McNeil remembers.

Nine days into the world, Fletcher was in surgery, and it soon seemed he might join his parents and older brother, Harris, at home in Eastlake. The McNeils, Laurie and KC, talked about what it would be like to care for a sick baby. It was summer 1998.

"With all this technology, you don't expect kids to die," Stusser-McNeil says.

But Fletcher did. He was just 23 days old.

It was a devastating event, but Stusser-McNeil couldn't have asked for better support — from her husband to the intensive-care nurses to the neighbors. Before long, Stusser-McNeil, a massage therapist, was pregnant again with her daughter, Coco.

Still, she and KC, a plant manager for Romac Industries, wanted to know what else they could do. Sure, there were the donations to Children's Hospital, but Stusser-McNeil was too much of a community activist to put all her grief in one place.

"There's just something about a baby that dies," Stusser-McNeil says. "People say, 'Oh, you'll have another one.' But this is beyond a miscarriage. He was here. He was alive. We saw him. It's not like he didn't count."

At the time, she was helping with the landscaped "green street" that stretched along Franklin between Seattle's TOPS School at Seward and the underused playground in its lap. The site was little more than a cow's jump away from the McNeils' home, but as she would discover, its origins stretched back a hundred years.

According to a playground history compiled by neighbor Jules James, who runs a nearby mailing business, the spot once marked the midpoint of the trolley run from the waterfront to the University of Washington campus. An eight-room schoolhouse, built in 1905, saw the adjacent play field named for Gov. John R. Rogers and outfitted with metal swings, teeter-totters and a sandbox.

But the glory days of a play field that once hosted the 1912 city baseball champs faded with the arrival of Interstate 5, which coaxed families' slow exit to the suburbs. Seward School, which had replaced the old schoolhouse, finally closed in 1990.

TOPS had taken over the empty space, but a 1998 remodel replaced Rogers' public play equipment with items too sophisticated for kindergartners and situated on school property. Residents didn't think it was a fair trade. With nothing to play on for local kids, families had to drive elsewhere, leaving few local gathering points beyond a Sunday brunch line or two. It seemed like one more blow to the neighborhood.

For Stusser-McNeil, the idea suddenly seemed clear: Why not bring that playground back to life?

A crash course in playgrounds

Making the park happen wasn't the $5,000 weekend project Stusser-McNeil had envisioned. But with help from the city's neighborhood matching-funds program, she and neighbor James were about to undergo a crash course in Playgrounds 101.

It meant bringing aboard TOPS and the Eastlake Community Council, then meeting with city parks and neighborhood officials who would go on to monitor the public permit process, design phase, fund raising and construction that would follow.

"I thought, 'I don't know if I have the time for this,' " Stusser-McNeil says.

But when Coco was born, she decided to go for it, forming Friends of Rogers Playground to line up grants and corporate donations for a project whose cost would grow to $320,000. Glass artist Gerry Newcomb, who had designed the colorful sidewalk art pieces dotting local street corners, created multicolor glass leaves that could be sponsored and personalized along the curved wall gracing the site.

"We weren't just creating a playground," Stusser-McNeil says. "We were restoring a playground."

She didn't want the park to be a memorial, and parks department guidelines prohibited it anyway, forbidding dates or words such as "in memory of." Instead, the words are "inspired by Fletcher McNeil."

As a model, she looked to Phinney Ridge's West Woodland Park, where Kathy and Bob Reitinger had similarly channeled grief over their son Nicholas, who had died of a heart defect, barely a week old.

West Woodland was in progress in 1996 when the Reitingers got approval to sponsor a piece of play equipment, plus an inscribed boulder. "We really just plugged in and made the park our own," Kathy Reitinger says. "We didn't want to just bury (Nicholas) and go visit a cemetery. We wanted to have it be more of a place where he would have liked to play."

The inscription, from Antoine de Saint Exupery's "The Little Prince," reads:

In one of the stars I shall be living

In one of them I shall be laughing

And so it will be

as if all the stars were laughing

when you look at the sky at night

'A go-getter'

One member of the Friends of Rogers committee, Rebecca Sadinsky, says there's something about a playground that unites a community. "There's no replacement for it," says Sadinsky, a TOPS parent. "It's public space. Anybody can use it."

James says Stusser-McNeil would have ended up leading the Rogers Playground project even if Fletcher had been perfectly healthy. She's just that sort of person. "She's a go-getter," he says. "She recognized the need."

Stusser-McNeil says it helped to do something concrete with her grief, although with Fletcher, she thinks she's felt closure for a long time. That came with the birth of her daughter, now 2½.

With the finished playground, she can sense that her son's loss has morphed into something fun and full of life. "I spent the weekend just sitting over there," she says. "I can't tell you how many families we've met. People are finding each other. It's not just an idea. It's actually coming true."

Wednesday, then, will mark a different kind of closure.

"That feeling, that I've done something for him," she says, remembering the little star that shone so briefly in their lives. "He'd be proud of his mommy."

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com.