Remembering Destiny
One night while lying on her couch researching ways to honor the loss of a loved one on the anniversary of their death, Jada Schnetter came across the idea of a food drive.
“I thought ‘aha, I can have a Ronald McDonald House food drive.’ So I looked at their wish list online and decided we would have a wish list drive to see how many items on the list we could get for them,” Schnetter said.
Schnetter knows the Spokane and Seattle Ronald McDonald houses all too well. She knows their locations, their layouts and how far they are from the surrounding hospitals. She and her family spent days and weeks at the houses a total of 18 times during the 20-year life of her daughter Destiny Tallmadge.
Tallmadge died Feb. 19, 2013.
“Her first surgery, she was seven months old, I was 18 and my husband at the time was barely 17. We had nothing and we would have to travel and be out of town for a couple of weeks. We didn’t know where we would stay and what we would eat,” Schnetter said.
Tallmadge was born with neurofibromatosis, a disease that caused tumors to form along her central nervous system as well as other part of her body. With the tumors often located near sensitive structures, the surgeries were tedious and time consuming, lasting between 10 and 12 hours.
“It’s a pretty long wait when you’re not sure what’s going on,” Schnetter said.
When Tallmadge was four she had part of her right leg amputated. During one of her later surgeries on her neck her jugular vein was nicked and she lost enough blood to briefly flat-line. She became anemic after that surgery.
While recovering for a couple of weeks at the hospital the family would stay at the Ronald McDonald House. After returning home, Tallmadge would get back to school as soon as she could.
Jada Schnetter said her other children would join her and her ex-husband, Joshua Tallmadge, and later her husband Ben Schnetter for Destiny Tallmadge’s surgeries in Spokane and Seattle. Schnetter said, “All of our kids would go for a couple of days at least to make sure she was going to be alright. We stayed in a room with two queen-size beds and we were just thankful we didn’t have to spend $100 a night.”
“When we first started going we brought a lot of our own food, but now they have almost all the food you could need,” Schnetter said. Now the houses are pretty well stocked with all the necessities a family would need. The Spokane Ronald McDonald House website has a wish list of items from the 22 families housed there while their children undergo treatment at area hospitals.
“On their wish list they have basic stuff like granola bars. How hard is that to donate? If there are 10 in a box, you’ve just fed 10 kids a granola bar,” Schnetter said.
On the one-year anniversary of Tallmadge’s death last year Schnetter refused to sit around and be depressed. “I’m not one of those kind of gloomy people that’s like poor me,” she said.
She didn’t want her three sons to be depressed either. “I didn’t feel like just letting balloons off in the air like a lot of people do,” Schnetter said. Instead her family, her ex-husband’s family, both sets of grandparents and a few other family members traveled to Spokane and put together a potato bar for the families staying at the Ronald McDonald House.
Schnetter was on the receiving end of a couple dinners prepared when she stayed at the house. “It was such a good feeling to know one night out of the week you didn’t have to cook dinner for your family,” Schnetter said. She thought maybe her family would make the dinners an annual event to honor Destiny Tallmadge.
But this year her son, Gage Tallmadge, was the star of the Troy Trojans basketball team and a scheduling conflict with his games made the trip unlikely. That’s when the late night Internet search led to the aha moment for Schnetter; a Ronald McDonald House wish list drive.
“I just had a feeling it could be huge. I was hoping it would be big and hoped we wouldn’t just get two boxes of granola bars. Then I would just have to go out and buy a bunch of items to take over to them,” Schnetter said.
Schnetter’s sister-in-law Pam Tallmadge jumped on board with the project without hesitation. “My motivation was just to help the families at the Ronald McDonald House. We were so touched last year by helping the families over their last year that it just sparked something in me,” Pam Tallmadge said. “It woke something up in me. And we love Destiny so anything to honor her and help other families,” she said.
They approached the school with the idea of starting a competition between the grades to see which class could get the most items from the wish list. “So we made these nice pretty little boxes with a Ronald McDonald House picture and the class grade on them,” Schnetter said.
They put the boxes in the classrooms and periodically checked on them. “The first couple days they weren’t playing into it very well,” Schnetter said.
So they decided to have their kids get the ball rolling by putting a couple items in the boxes. “We went back a couple of weeks later and I was absolutely amazed, the boxes were overflowing. They started with one box and most classes had three boxes of items from the wish list. We ended up getting a total of around 372 items,” Schnetter said.
Most items on the list were food the students could get relatively cheap. “I didn’t want them to spend a lot of money,” Schnetter said. “Troy is a poor community, but I just couldn’t believe how much stuff we got. It took a couple hours to count the items to see which class won,” she said. For the record, the sophomores won.
“My goal after I saw how big it was getting was to get every item on the list, and it’s a big list,” Schnetter said.
Schnetter put an event invite on Facebook, which brought in financial contributions from several other states. “I had people sending me money or items in the mail with letters about their memories about Destiny,” she said.
Carene Cratty offered her nail salon as a drop spot for community donations and called Schnetter with daily updates. And donations from local businesses and co-workers made the drive more successful than imagined. “People I’ve known or worked with for 14 years that don’t have a lot of money went and bought some fabulous items for this,” Schnetter said.
With a trip to Kalispell this week, Jada Schnetter and Pam Tallmadge picked up the last couple items on the Spokane Ronald McDonald House wish list; they got everything. They also received about $600 to pay for families to stay at the house.
The outpouring of support from the community is very telling about the impact of Destiny Tallmadge on the city of Troy. When Schnetter moved back to Troy, Destiny Tallmadge was in fourth grade. She had already experienced the stares and taunting from classmates and decided it would be best to inform them about her situation.
“So on one of the first days of class she got right up in front of the class and took off her prosthetic leg and asked if they had any questions,” Schnetter said. “From that point on nobody had any questions. Kids are curious, but if you tell them how it is they stop wondering.” Schnetter said adults were much more rude than kids ever were, often pointing and staring.
“She never really let it get to her. She was pretty sick, but she was a cheerleader at one point, graduated and moved to Texas with her friend after high school,” Schnetter said. It was while living in San Antonio Destiny Tallmadge died.
Her funeral in Troy was one of the largest in the town’s history, said Schnetter. “She had nearly 600 people at her funeral at the Baptist Church. It was very humbling to have a funeral for your child with that many people showing up. It really says a lot about who she was,” she said.
Destiny Tallmadge was the kind of person who made cupcakes for her teachers at midnight and crafts for kids at school. She liked to babysit. She would wear jelly shoes one day and high tops the next. On a bus ride home in kindergarten, she took off her prosthetic leg and clubbed a boy with it who called her robot leg.
She was a fighter. With tumors wrapped around her nerves, pain signals were constantly being sent. Still, very few people saw her have a bad day.
Schnetter said the family trips for Destiny Tallmadge’s surgeries opened their eyes. “When you go to those big hospitals and there are kids sicker than your kid your heart just sinks. You forget you kind of have it bad too, and you really feel for the other parents, it’s so humbling,” she said.
Her kids also learned valuable lessons on their visits to the hospitals. They spent time around children with severe disfigurements and handicaps. Now, they don’t bat an eye when they are confronted with someone “different.”
Pam Tallmadge plans to make the wish list drive an annual event. She would also like to start a Destiny Foundation to help other people in need. “We want to reach out to other families in our community and beyond. Because people need encouragement, they need hope,” she said.
Not everybody in Jada Schnetter’s family handles the loss of Destiny Tallmadge as well as she has. Schnetter said her daughter would be super excited with the wish list project.
Schnetter had 20 boxes of contributions sitting in her living room the last couple of days, all with pictures of her daughter on them. Throughout her home, pictures of her daughter grace the walls.
She also has Destiny Tallmadge’s cremated ashes in a vintage suitcase, often sitting in the living room. The suitcase travels with the family on vacations, but not on airplanes, they don’t like human remains on airplanes. Postcards and other items are periodically added to it.
Today, Schnetter and 10 family members will load up a Suburban, Tahoe and two cars with the items collected on the wish list drive and deliver them to the Ronald McDonald House in Spokane.
The trip is to honor the life of Destiny Tallmadge and assist families facing situations similar to what her family faced. Struggles like what Schnetter and her family went through is daunting, so a little help can go a long.
“When a family has a little bit of hope, they do so much better,” Pam Tallmadge said.