Valentine’s Day wedding wasn’t the plan
Pawcatuck couple finally tie the knot after pandemic kept upending their arrangements
Tashara Leaky and Fabian Facey of Pawcatuck had planned a romantic destination wedding in the Caribbean for last August.
Then COVID-19 hit.
Leaky, 29, is the resident care director at Academy Point in Mystic, a senior living community focused on memory care and on serving the needs of residents with forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s. The pandemic coupled with Leaky’s feeling of responsibility toward her residents, postponed the couple’s plans for the Caribbean wedding. Residents and staff were disappointed too, as they had planned to watch a livestream of the Caribbean ceremony.
“I was kind of in denial at first that I would have to postpone, and then our community was impacted in April of 2020,” Leaky said on Saturday. “When that started to happen, I was like, ‘All right, this is real. There’s no more wedding planning. I’m going to have to go into full nurse mode.’”
That’s how the first delay — until the summer of 2021 — sprang up, but as as things progressed, Leaky said, "it was a combination of, ‘Here we are, it’s January, and it’s still not great to travel.’ Then we found out we were pregnant, so in December we postponed to the summer of 2022 for the big ceremony. At the same time we were like, ‘This sucks, we should’ve been married a long time ago’. So that’s how the idea of having something small and intimate came to be.”
So on Sunday, the couple wed in front of a small group of family members and friends in the living room of their Pawcatuck home, not a beach in the tropics.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Leaky said of Sunday’s ceremony. “It does feel really special, especially because it’s just our close people with us. I don’t know, it feels like I did everything backward in life, so this is like the last step.”
The Valentine’s Day knot-tying was also a culmination of Leaky’s and Facey’s personal history, the ultimate validation of a relationship 11 years in the making. Leaky said she met Facey when they were teenagers.
“We’ve always stayed in touch, and when I got to college we became really close friends, and that was that,” Leaky said. “We’ve been inseparable ever since.”
The couple became engaged in December 2018. It was Facey’s birthday, and Leaky took him away for a surprise trip. But he had a bigger surprise in store when he proposed at what was supposed to be his birthday dinner. Now it’s remembered as the engagement dinner.
Leaky said she’ll be glad to at last be wearing her wedding band.
“I’ve had this lonely engagement ring on for all these years, so I’m looking forward to finally wearing that, and he’ll get to start wearing a ring,” she said.
At their home on Sunday, string lights dangled from the ceiling amid a variety of flower arrangements and carefully scattered flower petals.
Around 2 p.m., Leaky was still getting ready upstairs as guests enjoyed food in the kitchen. A classic love songs playlist blasted Marvin Gaye’s “How Sweet it is to be Loved by You.”
Afterward, Facey was gleeful, performing Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” dance with his ring on and posing for photos. Leaky watched as she wiped away happy tears in the kitchen.
At Academy Point, Leaky oversees all things resident care, including the nursing team, the certified nurse assistants, or CNAs, and the residents’ care plans. She said her job involves a lot of family meetings, where she helps guide and support family members, and she works to make sure residents live long, happy lives.
She’s been at Academy Point for more than eight years. She started as a CNA when she was in nursing school — she needed a stable job while in school, so she worked overnight shifts. About three years later, when she finished school, she was asked to stay on at Academy Point as a nurse. One promotion led to another, and she’s been in her current position since 2018.
Leaky described the situation at her job during the early months of the pandemic.
“Our community is part of a larger company, they have like 54 buildings, and we had a couple other communities who were impacted by COVID before we were,” she said. “We were trying to learn from them. I had this illusion in my mind that there was going to be cavalry coming if we were impacted. And that’s not to say they didn’t help us — they really guided us through it — but at the end of the day, the feet on the ground were guided by myself and my executive director.”
When the coronavirus really hit residents in the building, Leaky said she saw it as her battle.
“That reality check was so real, it was so raw, I had to cry because I had to get it out, like, ‘Oh my God, this is happening,’” she said. “There was no wedding happening when you’re in that mindset. I ate, I slept, I drank COVID for weeks and months, but we got through.”
Leaky said she feels more confident about how her building and other health care facilities are handling the coronavirus now, but, particularly for those who have children, health care workers consistently risked themselves and their families.
The couple have three children together, and they’re due for a fourth in August.
“We know what works now, but back in the spring of 2020, no one knew what worked, no one knew what didn’t work, we just had nurses come to work and hoped for the best,” Leaky said. “That was scary, especially when you have kids at home. I wouldn’t step foot into my house until I was completely showered. Did I bring in one little microbe of COVID? You don’t know. Those weeks were tough mentally, and it’s tough because you don’t want your kids to see you like that. They’re learning from home now, so you kind of have to be a teacher at home, and it’s tough.”
Leaky also reflected on the waxing and waning of support for front-line workers from the general population.
“A lot of people said ‘thank you’ at the beginning because everybody else got to stay home, but now the ‘thank yous’ are few and far between, and we still need to carry that stress,” Leaky said. “My story’s just one story, but there are so many others out there. Hats off to health care workers for what they’ve done over the past year.”
Leaky seems more relieved than she is caught up in the sweetness and the charm of a Valentine’s Day wedding.
“I know everyone thinks it’s cute and romantic; I for one am just glad it’s happening,” she said.