MARQUETTE, Mich. (WJMN) – “A wedding is a time to celebrate and be excited about everything that’s going on and that just wouldn’t have happened. I’d want to go right back up to Marquette just in case anything did happen.”
Taylor Talerico was set to get married on September 30in Iron Mountain, but when her brother was in a terrifying side-by-side accident just a week prior, Taylor and her fiancé, C.j. made the difficult decision to postpone their wedding.
“It was just so hard to process and [it was so hard] seeing my parents like that and I just kind of wanted to be a little bit stronger for them,” said Taylor. “So, C.j. and I discussed it and we both just came to agreement that we couldn’t do the wedding because it just wasn’t a time for celebration.”
Taylor’s brother, Michael, was at U.P. Health System in Marquette on a ventilator with severe head trauma when the nurses told her family about the Mariucci Family Beacon House. The staff at the Beacon House set her family up with the usual place to stay and meals to eat, but they also set her up with a wedding.
“So, we already had the marriage certificate, and C.j. and I weren’t allowed to know anything, it was a big surprise,” said Taylor. “So, my two maids of honor, my grandma, my aunt and some other family members and Mary from the Beacon House, they were all just pretty much like ‘okay, this is the situation, this is what’s happening,’ I knew nothing when walking down the aisle, we both knew nothing.”
And it was complete with all the special details.
“My grandmother actually made my mom’s wedding dress into a more modern, today’s type, and I was supposed to wear that for my rehearsal dinner, but I actually wore it at my wedding at the Beacon House, so that came together perfect,” Taylor explains. “Our pastor, who is a family friend, he has coached C.j. and I both in high school and he’s pretty he’s close to our family. So, he and his wife were able to come up and marry us. Our photographer couldn’t be there so the ICU nurses surprised us with a photographer which was so sweet. They decorated everything, flowers were donated. And just walking downstairs off the elevator and they just handed me this big, beautiful bouquet and I just see other aisle pieces that we were going to use for our wedding that my family brought up and decorated the room. Everyone from the Beacon House decorated the room just gorgeous. It was crazy.”
And they even found a way to include Michael in the wedding.
“When Michael got into the accident, they gave us his wardrobe that he was wearing and they obviously had to cut the pants off of him, so my mom just kind of threw them away like ‘what are we going to do with these,’ and my aunt picked them up and she brought them home and, at the wedding she actually cut out a bunch of little hearts out of his pants…so that was my something blue because he was wearing blue jeans,” said Taylor.
Taylor said her brother is recovering well, and that fiancé of hers is now her husband, but she’s still planning to have her originally planned wedding on May 11.
“He was in a very low-stimulation room and, once I first saw him and kind of got to catch my breath a little bit, we could whisper to him and I said ‘you’re not getting out of the wedding so good try,’” Taylor joked.
To learn more about the Mariucci Family Beacon House, you can go to upbeaconhouse.org.