Hearts for Megan Redux

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Feb. 1, 2009

Every life involves an amount of tragedy. The portion allotted to us may be larger or smaller – the loss of a home, say, versus a loss in the NFC Championship Game – but the time does come when it seems as though the world is falling apart around us.

The way in which we approach that inevitable tragedy, then, comes to mark us. Do we become bitter at life and bear the weight with scorn and vitriol, or do we reach within and pull some light out of our personal darkness?

I am sure that there are better ways to handle tragedy than the way Michael Bates, his ex-wife Kim Fellows, and their daughter Clare Bates have. But if theirs is not the best then at least it will do until the best shows up.

Their daughter and sister, Megan Bates, died in a traffic accident on Feb. 12, 2007, as she was on her way home from a night out in West Chester, where she was attending college. She was just 21. She died when the car she was a passenger in skidded off he road and into a utility pole. Making her death even more horrific was the fact that the driver was her boyfriend, and he was drunk.

I first encountered the Bates-Fellows family at the sentencing hearing for that young man, who would eventually be sent to state prison for the crash. I found it profoundly moving that rather than dwell on the anger and pain that this crime had brought their family, Megan Bates’ parents urged him to atone for his actions and make their daughter proud of his life.

“If she were here today, she would say to you, as she has said to me, to be strong,” Michael Bates told the young man as they stood in a courtroom filled with tears. Looking him in the eye, Bates also said he wanted something else from his daughter’s killer. “I want to hear from you. I want to hear that you’ve made your life better. I want you to do that to honor Megan.”

Some time later, I sat in Kim Fellows’ kitchen in West Whiteland and listened as the family talked about Megan, and what a remarkable force she had been in their lives.

She had a “desire for things to be perfect for everybody,” Fellows said, remarking that she could not remember setting out consciously to instill such values in her daughter . “She had such a strong sense of self, from a very, very early age.”

I was there to listen to the family’s plans to join with Megan’s friends and fellow workers at the Riverstone Cafe in Exton for an event, called Hearts for Megan, that would honor her life and at the same time raise money for the Mommy’s Light charity, which arranges for children who have lost their mother to have certain traditions carried on – such as baking Christmas cookies, playing Monopoly together, or simply going to the zoo on a summer day – as a way of helping to deal with the loss. Fellows said it as chosen because of Megan Bates' devotion to her own family traditions.

The event, organized by the Bates-Fellows family and Riverstone owner Nicholas Cacchione, was held last Feb. 13, and was a deep success, in more ways than the nearly $20,000 that went to Mommy’s Light at the end of the night. In Michael Bates’ words, “I stopped and looked around and all around there were nothing but smiles and people laughing.” It seems the tears had started to dry.

In extending her family's gratitude for those who participated in the event, Fellows related the Cherokee myth of the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf. In it, a grandfather explains to his grandson that there is an ongoing struggle in all people between the Bad Wolf, which represents greed, envy, anger and jealousy, and the Good Wolf, which represents kindness, compassion and forgiveness.

The grandson thinks about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee replies simply: "The one you feed."

Fellows thanked those who came, “for feeding the Good Wolf.”

This year, Hearts for Megan will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 11, at the Riverstone, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Fellows said that students from Downingtown West High School had become involved, and that the television personality Glenn Beck had also taken up the Mommy’s Light cause. “We’re trying to keep it ‘hometown,’ but it is really kind of exciting,” the way the event has grown, Fellows told me Friday.

We have had a lot of tragedy in our community in the past weeks and months, and people have lost things that can never be replaced. But if you want to see how love can fill the cup that has been emptied, you ought to stop by.

For more information, go to www.heartsformegan.com