Seattle father, Montana mother finish memorial to children killed in crash
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For much of a decade, Lila Fayler was all but incapacitated by grief.
The artist started creating a statue to honor the memory of her three children shortly after they were killed in a small-plane crash in 1992 in the rugged Mission Range of the Rocky Mountains near their home in St. Ignatius, Mont. Then she stopped, unable to create.
The children's father, Alan Hernandez of Seattle, helped ease his grief by designing a memorial garden. He got as far as making a model. Then he too put it aside, thwarted by a lack of money.
Even when Fayler healed enough to complete the life-size statue last year, the timing didn't feel right. She asked Hernandez to wait one more winter for the hopefulness of spring before planting a garden sanctuary that would surround the statue and fountain. "I don't want the plants to die," she said.
But this weekend, on the weekend when many in the country were thinking about their losses, the timing was right for the statue and garden to be dedicated in a St. Ignatius city park beneath the mountains still shrouded by snow. Slowing life to wait for the perfect day supports Fayler's belief: You can't hurry grief.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it took two villages to help this estranged couple overcome the loss of their three children, whose bodies were found on Memorial Day weekend 12 years ago. The lessons they learned about healing and humanity were helped first by the rush of people and donations from Seattle and St. Ignatius to search for the children's bodies. And then again in the past two years as people from the Northwest contributed $25,000 to the Fayler Family Memorial. "The best human quality that we have is that the worst of times sometimes brings the best out in people," Fayler, 57, said.
She still lives in Western Montana near the mountains where Sierra, 17; Angela, 10, and Jesse, 8, died when a Cessna aircraft piloted by their visiting uncle crashed. Hernandez, 55, and their surviving son, Jonathan, 24, both live in Seattle, as they did in 1992. They've been planting and landscaping all week in St. Ignatius, where the garden is anchored by three sturdy trees — a subalpine fir, a weeping Alaska yellow cedar, and an arolla pine, which can live 1,000 years. One represents beautiful Sierra, Hernandez's stepdaughter who was remembered as someone who made people feel better when she entered a room; another the irrepressible Angela; and the third the calming Jesse.
The children were a source of inspiration for Fayler's art. Without them, she could not work.
Then, two years ago, she pulled out a wax model of the statue she'd wanted to create for her children a decade earlier. Just as people did during the 10-day search in 1992, they rallied around her.
Fellow artists in the studio where she worked — Kristie Nerby, Dave Samuelson and Louise Lamontagne — provided new inspiration, raised money and helped create a life-size statue that was bronzed last year.
Nobody knows the true way to get through grief, Fayler says, but people will say to you, "You've got to get up and go on."
She disagrees. If you don't allow yourself the time to grieve, you never really know what you need to do for yourself.
"Sometimes you just need to wallow in it," she says. "I think you need to feel it, as bad as it is. Feel sorry for yourself. Then you can say, 'I've done that. Now I can do this.' "
Hernandez found it painful not to be able to share his grief with Fayler. They'd split up before she moved to Montana six months before the children died. The deaths only distanced them more.
Then, when Fayler began to heal through the creation of the statue, Hernandez saw his children's personalities recaptured. In a taped television interview, he heard Fayler express exactly how he felt. He and Jonathan helped with fund-raising, and Fayler asked Hernandez, who works in the botanical gardens at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Ballard, to design the landscape.
For the past week, Hernandez and his partner, Susan Carter, and others have worked to create the feel of an "outdoor room," a sanctuary.
Collaboration on the design was a great comfort, said Hernandez. The plane crashed in a beautiful, serene place, he said, "so my thought was to keep it a mountain, alpine look."
Fayler and Hernandez wanted to honor their children with the memorial, but they also wanted to offer hope.
Healing never stops, Fayler says, but you learn to live your life without what has been taken away. You learn to allow the memories to refresh you, even if it takes 12 years.
"It feels right, and it feels good," she says, "and on we go."
Sherry Stripling: sstripling@seattletimes.com