After Crash, Her Wedding Has the Ring of a Miracle

Roxann Monson clings to her father’s arm as he escorts her down a makeshift aisle to stand next to the man who will be her husband. The bride wears traditional white. The groom, and most of the men in the crowd, wear Hawaiian shirts, a wink against the wedding’s formal overtones and a hint of the honeymoon to come.

There’s a pronounced hitch to Monson’s step as she walks, the visible legacy of a car crash 22 months ago that nearly killed her.

Surviving didn’t come easily. Nine weeks in a coma. Nearly six months in three hospitals undergoing treatment for brain damage. A steady regimen of grueling physical therapy to recover such basic skills as walking down the aisle on her wedding day.

“What we witnessed a few moments ago,” the Rev. Jim Richardson says as the bride and groom stand before him, “was a miracle walk.”

But there was another miracle at play during Saturday’s wedding at the edge of an artificial pond outside the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Costa Mesa.

It was the miracle of human emotion, and the power--and endurance--of love.

Monson and her new husband, Casey Paschal, met in high school 10 years ago and became sweethearts, drawn together at first by athletics. Monson was an ace softball player at Rowland High School in Rowland Heights. Paschal, two years older, was a stalwart on the football team. And he was her first kiss, during a winter formal freshman year.

After he graduated, the relationship changed as Paschal landed a job in construction and, two years later, Monson went to Utah State on an athletic scholarship. But they stayed in touch, slowly becoming closer despite the distance, and even as they dated other people. They became, he says, best friends.

When Monson returned from college in 1996, the couple discovered fresh sparks at the heart of their friendship. Movies and dinners, country dancing and long talks cemented it.

Monson, 25, has no memory of it, but they were talking about getting married the day before her car veered out of control on the Costa Mesa Freeway on Sept. 29, 1997, and was broadsided by another car, a collision that still dominates her life as she struggles to regain her physical health.

Other men might have pulled back at that time, daunted by the suddenly changed circumstances. Some women, their boyfriends in similar straits, might have walked away, too.

But Paschal, 27, now of Costa Mesa, and Monson moved closer, deciding even as tubes and machines performed most of her bodily functions that they would weather her recovery together, that they would find out together how much damage Monson’s brain had suffered, and how much of a physical and mental legacy her injuries would leave.

And that they would spend the rest of their lives together.

Monson proposed to him first, partly, she says, as a test. She wanted to see if he would still love her broken and battered and with an uncertain future. She didn’t know that he bought an engagement ring eight months earlier in anticipation of what he saw as the inevitable, and cried when he returned to the hospital and dropped to bended knee.

At first, Monson’s parents, who moved their family to Huntington Beach a year ago, were uncertain about the engagement.

“I went to him and [said], ‘We don’t want no pity cases,’ ” said Don Monson, a set builder through Hollywood Local 44 of the Affiliated Property Craftsmen. “I went right at him. I just wanted him to understand that this was going to be much more than your average marriage. And he assured me that no, he loved her.

“His commitment to [Roxann] during the course of that time . . . shows a lot of integrity that most people don’t have. It just seemed his love and hope became greater and greater.”

‘I Didn’t Know What to Expect’

Roxann Monson is the only person who could know how the accident happened. But she can’t remember.

To drivers of other cars on that late September evening, the red Toyota Tercel seemed to drift and wobble as it left the Costa Mesa Freeway for the Garden Grove Freeway. The drift became a careen, the right front wheel riding up a temporary construction barrier and then sliding along the top like a skateboard before the car slipped into a spin and cut backward across four lanes of the freeway.

A car traveling in the carpool lane smashed into her passenger door. The driver’s right ankle was broken and his left wrist crushed. His female passenger suffered a miscarriage.

The side impact whipped Monson’s head to the right, breaking blood vessels in her brain stem and bruising the right side of her brain. As she lay unconscious, other motorists pulled her from the car before rescue workers could arrive.

One woman heard Monson’s pager and called the number flashing on the screen. It was Paschal.

“She just basically asked if I was trying to get hold of a blond girl in a red car,” Paschal said. The woman relayed word from a police officer that an ambulance would take Monson to Western Medical Center-Santa Ana. Paschal jumped in his truck and called Monson’s parents as he drove, arriving before the ambulance.

“They pulled her out of the ambulance and I was pretty scared,” Paschal said. “She was still unconscious. I didn’t know what to expect.”

Monson’s parents’ route to the hospital took them past the collision scene in the opposite lanes. Yvonne Monson, 46, could pick out from among the police cars and flashing lights a white Dodge Intrepid nosed halfway into the passenger side of her daughter’s car.

But the full shock, the spike of sheer parental terror, came when doctors began talking about brain stem injuries and permanent damage, indefinite comas and possible paralysis.

Don Monson, 51, struggled against the consuming fear that his daughter might not survive.

“They said she was unconscious and that they were trying to revive her,” he said, adding that he and his wife, devout Christians, fell into prayer. “The feeling was a kind of disbelief. You’re kind of in shock. You’re in trauma yourself, your body is just trying to hold on to what’s dear to you. Having your children hurt is more traumatic than being hurt yourself.”

To Yvonne Monson, the whole ordeal touched on the surreal. Her daughter suffered no visible injuries, no gashes to speak of or tell-tale bruises on her face or head. Her left hip was broken and her right thigh was bruised but there was nothing to tell a mother’s discerning eye that her daughter would never be the same.

“They said ‘brain stem’ and all I could think was paralyzed from the neck down,” the mother said. “That was what scared me the most, thinking that she might be paralyzed. . . . I never thought that she would die. I felt that because she was there [in the hospital] and lived through the accident that there was a reason for her to be alive.”

Monson Attempting to Regain Her Past Self

The midafternoon sun keeps a thick fog bank hovering off Newport Beach. Closer to shore, seabirds reel as ghost shadows against the light blue sky. Monson misses all this as she concentrates on moving from her mother’s car to a side door of the Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian physical therapy room. A sign warns that it is not an entrance but Monson raps on the glass until a therapist lets her in anyway. Such are the perks of being a regular customer.

This is where Monson hopes to regain her past self. It’s been nearly 22 months since the accident, 20 months since she came out of the coma, and 16 months since she checked out of the last of three hospitals, at that point still needing help to get from bed to wheelchair.

The damage to Monson’s brain has left her with a weak left side. Her mind, and the creativity that led her into a career as a graphic artist, seem unaffected. The gap between what she thinks and what she can express, though, is a constant point of frustration.

“When I speak,” Monson says, “sometimes I don’t process the words. I know what I want to say but it doesn’t always come out. And I don’t have the volume.”

By last Christmas, after months of intense therapy, Monson substituted a walker for the wheelchair and has now traded that for a cane. She says Paschal’s relentless support has helped her to keep fighting to get better and stronger.

“A lot of times I just wanted to give up,” Monson says. “He would just remind me, ‘Hey, where do you want to be? Do you want to be here for the rest of your life, or do you want to get better?’ ”

They agreed that the wedding date would be contingent on her progress: If she wasn’t out of the wheelchair by this past February, they’d postpone the wedding. It was, he said, an act of both incentive and memory manipulation.

“That wouldn’t be a good memory for her to not walk down the aisle on her own wedding day,” he says.

Paschal says he sometimes feels as though he pushes Monson too hard, but he sees that as better than not pushing hard enough.

“If I don’t do it, nobody else will,” says Paschal. “Everybody else is helping her. If she asks for something, I make her get up and get it herself. I know that sounds mean. I do it because I love her. She wants to get back to normal. Maybe not run like she used to. But when we have kids, to be able to hold them and play with them. I want to help her get there.”

It is what she wants, too. Monson and Paschal are laying plans to open their own design business, Monson handling the creative end and Paschal tending to the sales and other business elements.

Monson spends nearly 80 minutes in the therapy room on this day, beginning with an exercise that breaks down the mechanics of motion to help her learn how to walk again. For the last exercise, she lies on her back on a sliding platform slowly moving herself back and forth by pushing on a rigid board with her weakened leg. The cords in her muscles tighten as she goes through the simple drill. Her face flushes with exertion.

Yvonne Monson watches all of this quietly. She used to clean houses, but her job since the day of the accident has been tending to her daughter, and her eyes fill with tears as she watches the scholarship athlete strain her way through a simple repetitive act. The mother leaves the room for a moment, letting the tears flow in private before returning.

“They’re happy tears,” the mother says. The exercises reflect current abilities. The mother, though, sees them as benchmarks on a long and painful path. “It just brings back the memories of where she was.”

Pledging Their Lives to Each Other

The ceremony is quick, sermonless. Richardson tells the crowd that marriage unites individuals with each other, but also with their God. He mentions the “trials and tribulations of the past couple of years” and the miracle walk down the aisle before moving onto the traditional rites of matrimony.

The couple exchange rings and Richardson leads them through their vows. They pledge their lives and their loves to each other before Richardson pronounces them husband and wife and Paschal sweeps Monson into his arms, spinning her around as they kiss and friends and family applaud.

Moments later they walk back down the aisle, Monson on Paschal’s arm now, instead of her father’s. They move slowly, Monson’s smile wavering in concentration as she climbs a series of terraced steps amid a hail of bubbles blown by the beaming guests.

At the end of the aisle they stop, 10 yards from the rows of chairs, and wait for the rest of the wedding party to catch up. They stand for a moment facing each other, smiling, before Paschal again envelops Monson in his arms, a massive bear hug as they whisper lovers’ soft words into each other’s ears.

They’ve already talked over the future, and the past. So for the duration of a 30-second hug they feel only the eternity of the moment, embracing the indescribable depth of the most human of emotions.