DARRINGTON — Margie Hadaway sensed something was wrong.
Her husband hadn’t texted to wish her good morning.
That wasn’t like Steven.
He’d left that March 22 morning to install a satellite dish at a home on Steelhead Drive west of Darrington. His rig’s GPS later showed that he arrived at 8:15. The mudslide hit at 10:37. Steven, 53, was in the middle of it.
“It doesn’t feel like it has been a year,” Margie said. “It still hurts like it was yesterday.”
She is grateful to the searchers who slogged and dug and didn’t give up.
Forty-three people were lost in the mud. Steven was the 42nd to be found. It took two months to bring him out.
There was a time when Margie wondered if that would ever happen. She left it in God’s hands, relying on her faith for strength.
It is difficult for her to drive Highway 530 through the slide zone.
“You can’t look out there and not feel something,” she said. “And I don’t know if that will ever go away. That’s the place that took my love from me.”
Steven’s presence is felt inside her Darrington home. In a hallway are the three college diplomas he earned online in his middle age as he looked for ways to better provide for his family.
Photos of him are plentiful in the living room where a sign in big block letters reads: “Forever For Always and No Matter What!” That’s how Steven and Margie Hadaway felt about each other. She married the Marine when he came home to Tacoma from training in North Carolina. They later became foster parents. They planned to grow old together.
“They say Prince Charming is a fairy tale,” she said. “That’s not true. I spent 31 years married to my Prince Charming. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”
Her Prince Charming was not the suave, Disney version. He was loud and rough around the edges, the one who’d make a ruckus cheering on his daughter, Brandy, at her volleyball games.
Her Prince Charming had a soft spot for children. If there was a baby in church, Margie knew where to find Steven.
“He couldn’t wait to get kids in the house,” Margie said. “He loved kids of all ages because he was a large child. If he could have adopted 10 kids, he would have.”
They ended up with three. Brandy is 20. Delana is 18 and expecting a child of her own.
Their other child was Brandon, a little boy with a broken body.
Brandon could neither walk nor talk. He chose which videos to watch by turning his head to focus on his preference with his eyes.
When he was 3, his lungs collapsed. He spent five weeks in an intensive care unit and lived afterward with breathing and feeding tubes.
Brandon died in 2000. He was 6 and in the first grade.
Steven called his son Popeye. He later got a tattoo of the spinach-eating cartoon sailor on his forearm to honor the son he adored.
“Everything we struggled through made us stronger,” Margie said.
To Steven, family was more important than the size of a house. Wealth was measured in memories.
The Hadaways moved to Darrington more than eight years ago, trading one small town in Pierce County for another in Snohomish County so Steven could be closer to work. He loved living by the mountains and cutting his own wood.
Margie understands his affinity for Darrington. She has felt the community’s kindness: be it a pickup bed full of groceries in her driveway or cards of encouragement from strangers.
Mainly, though, she feels Steven there.
“This is home,” she said. “He loved it here. This is where I feel him. I need to be where we were.”
For all the sadness and turmoil the mudslide brought, Margie knows she could have suffered even greater losses.
That morning Delana drove to Arlington to look for a prom dress. She missed the slide by about 10 minutes. Brandy left for her deli job in Marysville about 15 minutes after the hill fell, unaware there was no way through.
It was as though the girls grew up overnight after the slide. They did their best to protect their mother. Delana, 17 at the time, intercepted phone calls when detectives and pathologists had questions as they identified bodies.
At one point, Margie had to remind Brandy, “I’m still the mom.”
In recent weeks, Margie has been helping paint a bedroom aqua. Delana’s baby — Blake Neil Hadaway — is due in April.
A baby shower is set for Saturday, the day before the community observes a year since the slide. They wanted to make the weekend a happy occasion, too.
On Sunday, her thoughts, as they so often do, will turn to Steven.
“He is my happily ever after,” she said.
Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; stevick@heraldnet.com.
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