BOUNTIFUL, Utah — Here and there around the Bountiful Utah Temple grounds Aug. 26, relatives and friends surrounded newlyweds for photographers — blending in with the landscape as though white-centered blossoms of the human family.
One bridal clusters was distinctive for two reasons. Newlyweds John T. and Tiffany June Chappell Harman were in company of all the immediate Harman families. This included his parents, Dan R. and Janis Lynette Bates Harman, and their five other children and spouses, and his aunt, Diana Harman McGuire, her husband, William K., and their five children and spouses.
All had been in the temple as the newlyweds were sealed.
"It's great to have them all here," said Sister McGuire.
The second point that distinguished this group was that Sister McGuire was there at all, let alone as the mother of five children. Because soon after her graduation in 1968 from Snake River High School in Twin Falls, Idaho, she abruptly suffered kidney failure that appeared terminal.
She had been at her prime at graduation; as valedictorian she was chosen most likely to succeed, and awarded a four-year scholarship to BYU. Then would come marriage and children.
But times in the late 1960s synthesized in turbulent, unpredictable ways. The nation was torn by such issues as the Vietnam War and unrequited civil rights. Controversy over protecting the environment loomed large on the horizon. In this climate, developing medical practices, such as organ transplants, were pioneered in a society that had not yet sorted out whether it was right to place one person's organs into another's body, such as the first heart transplant in 1967.
Not waiting until fall, Diana eagerly started summer school at BYU. She paid little attention to the devisive issues of the times, though the issue of organ donation would soon envelop her and her family. Six weeks into summer semester she became very ill with what was later diagnosed as glomerulonephritis, a terminal kidney disease. Diana lost weight as her kidneys failed. She was given massive doses of steroids and was bloated with body fluid while continuing to lose muscle mass.
"They sent me home to die," she said. "As I was preparing to die, I read my patriarchal blessing and wondered how the promises would take place.
"My parents were inactive and my brother, Dan, was on a mission, so I turned to him for lots of comfort and strength."
Seeing life's expectations jerked away, she cycled through the stages of grief. She was in and out of the hospital. She became withdrawn.
"I was so grateful I had made the decision to become active in the Church. I clung to that...knowing I could meet my Savior with a clean conscience.
"I was really young to face a thing so serious. It didn't draw me away from my relationship with my Father in Heaven. It cemented it. I have never been tempted to waver."
Her illness led her alarmed parents to call for their son to come home from serving in the California Mission. Their father "hadn't wanted me to go in the first place," he said. "They put quite a lot of pressure on me to come home." But he was "in a dynamic area of the mission and I didn't want to come home. I felt I could do more good (for Diana) in the mission field."
In fact, it was his missionary farewell that had brought his father, Tom Harman, into the meetinghouse for the first time in many years.
Dan returned home after his mission and found his sister extremely ill. In the summer of 1969 she sank to a low ebb. She received many, many priesthood blessings from her brother and others. She remains convinced the blessings helped her survive. But one evening she called Dan to her bedside.
"She was sensitive to how her body was responding and she said, 'I don't think I will make it through the night."'
He gave her another blessing, hardly aware of what he said. She told him afterwards that he had promised her that a way would be provided for her to be made well.
"It was a little scary," he said. "Little did I know that the Lord would take me at my word a few months later." He shared the experience with her LDS doctor, who didn't want them to have false hope. Her doctor replied, in effect, "You may think you said that, but she'll be dead in six months."
They changed doctors.
While in the Intensive Care Unit at the University of Utah Medical Center, she was told by doctors about a relatively new treatment for kidney failure, called dialysis. It would take a lot of equipment and a trained operator they said. The Harmans felt this was the answer they had been promised.
Her doting father added a room to house the large apparatus. Her mother was trained to operate it. The dialysis extended her life and as soon as her strength began to return, she wanted to go back to BYU. There a nurse-student operated the equipment. But the then-unrefined process left much to be desired.
"I was very ill," she remembered. "I got down to 85 pounds. I was anemic. I had bone disease, I had congestive heart failure. I was wasting away. I realized this was not the answer."
In 1970, doctors began considering a transplant. At that time, there were few anti-rejection (immunosuppressant) drugs and the survival rate was little better than a coin toss. Dan was the most likely donor. He and his new bride, Janis, were living on a shoestring budget as he went to school. Complicating matters, he had been in a car accident and wasn't well. But none of that mattered.
"We loved Diana," said Janis Harman. "She was very ill and we wanted to do whatever we could to help her." She was "thin, sickly, withdrawn. Her relationships with anyone were difficult, such a physical strain."
As the situation was voiced about, many people in and out of the Church counseled them not to have a transplant. At one point, Dan telephoned the president of the Church, President Joseph Fielding Smith, to ask for counsel. His secretary looked the matter up in the handbook and found a policy that left it up to personal choice, but recommended medical, spiritual and psychological counseling. So Dan didn't get to speak to President Smith, but he did learn the Church's position.
Dan fasted and took the matter to the temple. He received a spiritual experience confirming the choice for a transplant. He was impressed to suggest to Diana's bishop that she receive her endowment. The speed with which the suggestion was approved surprised him: in a week she was endowed. She credits her endowment with providing the spiritual insight and strength for the blessings which were to come.
Everything about the transplant was risky in those days. Even the compatibility test was so difficult that he had to be a willing donor before it was made.
"It was the thing to do," he said. "It was crystal clear." All the controversy, all the opposition were "resolved by the decision of the Lord. I was so confident that the doctors were concerned that I didn't know what I was doing.
The night before the surgery, Diana received a priesthood blessing from Dan that confirmed this, saying simply, "this is what the Lord wants and this will work.
"It wasn't that we believed the Lord could; it was that we knew He would."
On the day of the operation on May 27, 1971, members of their ward in Thomas, Idaho, along with the Protestants and Catholics of the community, unitedly spent the day in fasting and prayer. During the long, long surgery Diana and Dan's mother, Ruby Ward Harman, couldn't stay in the hospital. The strain of two of her children under the knife was too much.
"She was having a hard time emotionally," said Janis Harman. "It was very risky." She explained that one of Diana's kidney patient roommates, with whom she was dear friends, who had chosen not to receive a transplant, had died. The success of the transplant depended entirely on the compatibility of the organs.
So Janis walked the streets with her mother-in-law, offering consolation as the hours passed. Consolation was well-placed. The organs were a perfect match. Not long after the last stitch was in place, Diana's blood cleared up permanently. She regained her health. And her sense of the future. Returning to BYU, she received her bachelor's degree in dietetics in three years, graduating as co-valedictorian. She went on for a master's degree in nutritional science and began a career teaching. That was interrupted by marriage and children. She and William McGuire, a young attorney who is now chief prosecuter for Davis County, were married. After their five children were born — all delivered by cesarean section — she was the subject of an article in a medical journal for having the most children of a kidney transplant patient. She later returned to teaching.
Dan and Janis Harman continued on their frugal budget. Unable to work as he convalesced and the object of rejection by some around him because of the transplant, the young couple literally ran out of food and went hungry. A neighbor brought them food. But so dire were their circumstances that in two and a half weeks, even before his stitches were removed, Dan Harman returned to his college job of hanging insulation.
But the operation was a "wonderful, wonderful miracle," said Janis Harman. "It paved the way for us to be able to live in faith, knowing the Lord would really bless us. We continued to use that as a perfect memory. ....We felt really blessed to have that at the beginning of our marriage to pave the way for how we were going to raise our children.
"We always tell our children that the answer to everything is their relationship with our Savior. He lives, and He blesses our lives."
Diana McGuire said that their parents were sealed in the temple in 1986. She and her brother have a close kinship. "He is the hero here," she said. "I realized that I had been given a very real life similitude to the Savior's sacrifice — an elder brother who was willing to suffer and pay the necessary price in order that I might live. We revel in the joy of having our families together. We are so excited about all being together. "
E-mail to: jhart@desnews.com