'I so wish they were both here': Licking County man grieves wife, daughter this Mother's Day
It’s a carefree day in the early 2000s, and young Nellie Patterson is doting over a cow on her family’s hobby farm in Pataskala.
Nellie is a spitfire with a larger-than-life personality — wears her heart on her sleeve and loves big. She works hard and plays harder. She is strong and kind, resilient and down-to-earth. The animals in her care are the objects of her undying affection, both at home and in 4-H, where she is an uplifting presence among her peers.
To her sister, Grace, between sisterly spats, she whispers her deepest dreams of becoming a wife and mom.
Speech class, Central Ohio Technical College, circa 2014
Nellie, studying business management, has elected to share with her classmates her experience of overcoming a speech impediment. Born with a cleft palate, Nellie learned to confront difficulty head-on, and in the process built the sort of resilience that comes with firsthand struggle.
Sitting in the class and quietly falling in love with her is Justin Hayes, a lanky, red-haired Newark boy who is studying fire science.
He is a man of few words to complement Nellie’s many. He finds her passion infectious and eventually works up the courage to tell her so.
It’s Nellie’s detailed discourse about the process of castrating a steer that seals the deal for Hayes.
“After that, I just knew I had to ask this girl out,” he will later recall.
An avid outdoorsman whose taste in home decor is heavily antlers-centric, he is drawn to her mix of grit and sensitivity.
Their first date is in a pair of kayaks at Dillon Lake in Muskingum County.
They drift 50 yards off the dock, talk for hours and don’t catch a single fish.
Dreams of travel, adventure and starting a life together
Together the pair dream of adventure and travel — the things they will do together, the places they will see. They graduate from COTC and begin blazing trails in life: Justin as an EMT and Nellie working at Kroger and as an office manager at various Licking County businesses.
Hayes knows — has always known — he wants Nellie to be his bride someday. He is pretty sure that when the time comes, she’ll say yes. The hard part is asking her dad’s permission.
Nellie’s dad knows she can take care of herself and tells Hayes as much:
“I figure if you treat her wrong, I've raised her well enough that she'll take care of it.”
In autumn 2016, they take a trip to Kentucky, and Hayes proposes to her on a natural bridge surrounded by hills ablaze with the colors of fall.
She says yes, and her childhood dreams are beginning to come true: This man who loves her, this life of adventure.
On road trips with her sister to visit their grandparents in Wooster, over IGA donuts, she talks about her life, the things she’s learning, this quiet man who loves her so well.
“Everything sisters talk about — marriages and relationships and hopes and dreams and frustrations and jobs,” Grace says. “The ride home was almost quiet because we covered everything.”
White dress, red shirt and a Hocking Hills honeymoon
March 4, 2017. The pastor who oversaw their premarital counseling told Justin he might cry on their wedding day, but Justin is convinced he won’t.
That is until he sees her.
She’s wearing a white dress — it was $100 on the clearance rack at a now-defunct boutique, a perfect fit and clearly meant for her. Her red sash matches Hayes’ red shirt, and with her hair done up, her smile lighting up the room as usual, it’s more than he can take.
He can do nothing but cry through their vows.
There’s pizza at the reception and they honeymoon in Hocking Hills to keep it budget-friendly. Nellie eats wedding cake with Coca-Cola for breakfast the entire first week of their marriage, and Justin loves everything about her.
As newlyweds, home is a single-story, fixer-upper that Justin inherited from his grandfather. It sits next to the railroad tracks across from a field, somewhere between Newark and Utica where the sunsets are unobscured by streetlights and tall buildings.
She vetoes some — but not all — of the antlers and softens the masculine, rustic feel with farmhouse touches.
Over time they accumulate two dogs and two cats, and Justin is ready to add a baby to the mix, but Nellie wants to make sure they’re on their feet financially and would prefer that he quit dipping tobacco first.
Meanwhile, Justin transitions out of EMT work and accepts a maintenance position at Ariel Corp.
The hours and weight of the things he saw on his medic runs were beginning to weigh on him, and he didn’t want his relationship with Nellie to suffer.
“I knew if I stayed there, it would have taken a toll on our marriage,” he says.
Eventually, Nellie agrees it’s time to start trying for a baby, but the pregnancy ends in an early miscarriage.
The couple is heartbroken but agrees to try again, and in the summer of 2023, Elleanor Noel appears as a peanut on the ultrasound screen. They choose the name Elleanor (“Ellie” for short) because it’s old-fashioned, and they like the sound of it.
Justin is in awe during the ultrasound visit.
“I sat there; I couldn't even look at Nellie the whole time. I just stared at the screen. It was a beautiful moment,” he says.
Motherhood looks good on Nellie. She stops drinking caffeine and exercises to stay in shape. She is conscientious about the new life growing inside her and gets early practice as an advocate, fighting insurance battles to come to her daughter’s aid.
The weeks go on and they’re showered with gifts from family and friends; they collect them and stash them in their tiny home as they await their little one’s arrival, when they will become a family of three.
Occasionally Justin comes home from work to find Nellie with her hands on her belly in silent prayer.
It gets him every time, the way she holds their baby and prays. He can never hear the words, but he can see the love, and that is enough.
Baptized together in the months before their wedding, faith is a bedrock of the couple’s marriage. They attend services at a Baptist church in western Licking County. While their Sunday routine was disrupted during the COVID era, they try to make a point of attending together.
“Nellie showed strength and courage that I had never seen in her before throughout her pregnancy,” he would later reflect. “Motherhood had now become a sign of absolute bravery and determination.”
The day that will change his life forever
March 30, 2024: Justin has spent the evening taking care of the burn pile in the yard.
After watching a show with him on the couch, Nellie, in good spirits, goes to bed and closes her eyes for what she doesn't know will be the last time.
Justin, who fell asleep in front of the television, retires a while later to find that his world has unexpectedly imploded.
With strength that comes from somewhere else, he begins CPR, clinging to distant hope, praying the desperate prayers of a man whose life is crumbling.
Every effort is made; they arrive at the hospital, and valiant work continues.
Even after Nellie slips away, her daughter emerges in the same room and the baby’s weak heartbeat is revived.
Justin holds all 5 pounds, 14 ounces of Eleanor and silently wonders if she’ll have red hair; even as she joins her mother in a place beyond his reach, he watches the sunlight fall on her face and is struck by her beauty.
She has her mother’s ears and Nellie’s dainty hands and feet.
With strength that comes from somewhere else, he finds gratitude for these moments and the two quietly extraordinary lives, now lost, that changed his own forever.
“I know they're together now, and I thank Jesus for that,” he says four weeks later from the humble living room accented with antlers and pieces of Nellie and Ellie.
“I can't imagine this life right now not having that hope of knowing where they're at. But having that time with her here, it gave me a sense of just having that vision of my baby. It helps with having that vision of them together in heaven.”
Reflecting on what would have been his wife's first Mother's Day
Less than two months after saying goodbye to his bride and daughter, this is not the Mother’s Day Justin was expecting.
He and Nellie's sister Grace agree that Nellie would have wanted to be spoiled — likely with cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory, her favorite.
He has found a support network of people who care about him and has since traveled back to the place in Kentucky where he proposed to the love of his life.
Her journey into motherhood was shorter than anyone would have liked, but watching motherhood grow on her was an experience Justin will never forget.
In reflecting on his wife's motherhood journey, Justin wrote the following:
“Nellie carried our daughter up to within three weeks of the delivery date. I don’t know why her time on this Earth ended when it did. Nor do I know why Ellie was not given a longer time with her mother and I; but I witnessed many of the efforts and sacrifices that were made for our girl by her mother along with other motherly figures in our lives.
“I would not have had the brief, precious moments I had with Ellie if it were not for my amazing wife that had made such a valiant effort to care for our precious child for over eight months.
“Nellie had poured so much of herself into Ellie. I so wish they were both here and I could have had the experience of watching Nellie be the mother I knew she would be.
“They may not be here now, but God has used this time to bring hope to so many people…
“Thank you Jesus for the mothers in our lives, whether blood or by their actions. Your love is shown so deeply through the love of our mothers and the care they give. We pray you bless these women as you have allowed them to bless us. We thank you for the remembrance of the mothers that are no longer with us and the impact they have had on our life. I thank you for the life that was experienced with my Nellie and the sacrifices she made that I may have time with our beautiful little girl prior to her going to be with her momma to enjoy the home you have created for them.”
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Licking County widower marks first Mother's Day since infant's death
