Everybody cries at weddings — brides, grooms, parents, friends, sometimes virtual strangers. Really, it’s almost mandatory.
“Oh, exactly,” Greta Perske said. “A very happy cry.”
In that sense, everything went pretty much according to form Oct. 10 when Greta married Tony Hokanson at Celebration Lutheran Church in Sartell.
But some of the tears that flowed freely into that evening were for an entirely different reason.
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“The wedding was filled with tears of joy. To me, it was nothing short of a miracle,” said Joe Perske, father of the bride. “It was a day we didn’t know if it would happen.”
“It was just amazing,” added Jan Perske, the bride’s mom. “The emotions can just take over.”
These also were tears of gratitude — especially during the reception, when the bride danced with a 51-year-old man whom she had met exactly once before.
This was the man who made the wedding possible, the man whose generosity saved Greta’s life.
“It was special for me, too,” said Danny Daniels, an Arkansas resident whose bone marrow donation in 2007 was pivotal for a Minnesota high school girl with leukemia. “I’m just very humbled that it worked out as well as it did for her.”
“I can’t even describe what that feeling is,” Greta said. “There’s the man who saved my life, standing right in front of me.
“He didn’t have to do what he did, but he did.”
He did.
Greta Perske is now a 24-year-old college graduate, a nurse and a newlywed, all because eight years ago a man she had never met gave her a gift.
Fighting leukemia
Sartell High School had just begun soccer practice in the fall of 2006 when Greta — a sophomore three-sport athlete — realized something was wrong.
“We just thought she had a bad cold,” Joe said. “We thought it might be exercise-induced asthma.”
“She was playing soccer — and you need to put ‘playing soccer’ in quotation marks — and she was very fatigued,” Jan said. “She wasn’t playing soccer like she can play soccer.”
It was leukemia. Greta struggled through the season with her state tournament-bound team, but didn’t respond to treatments.
“It just ripped us to the core,” Joe said.
By March 2007, Greta was very sick and on the waiting list for a marrow transplant. One was located through BeTheMatch.org, a national registry that matches patients with compatible donors.
That donor was Daniels, who had registered because of a personal loss.
“It was due to a friend of mine, when I was in the Arkansas Air National Guard,” Daniels said. “One of our members became ill, and needed a bone marrow transplant. That’s why my wife (Angie) and I signed up then.”
“He said to me, ‘I’ve spent my whole life saving lives in the Air National Guard,’ ” Jan recalled. “ ‘Why wouldn’t I save the life of a 16-year-old girl in Minnesota?’ ”
Life inspiration
Greta, Joe and Jan met Daniels for the first time about two years after the transplant, which inspired Greta’s decision to go into nursing.
“I was always planning to be a teacher, and then that happened,” said Greta, whose parents and two older sisters are all teachers. She works at United Hospital in Minneapolis.
“Then I said, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to help save lives, too. I want to give back.’ ”
Her story also resonated with Hokanson, whom she met four years ago through mutual friends.
“Tony’s mom died of cancer when he was 5,” Greta said, “so he knows the whole cancer thing, too. Of course, that story ended a little differently.”
Their story, meanwhile, progressed to planning a wedding — a wedding that wouldn’t have happened without Daniels.
“Exactly,” Greta said. “I can’t thank him enough.”
Greta and Tony sent the invitation.
Down in Barling, Arkansas, Danny and Angie hopped into the car.
Going to a party
It’s a 12-hour drive from Barling to Sartell, which gave Daniels a lot of time to reflect on the past eight years.
“Greta and I kinda stay in touch every now and then,” said Daniels, who works as a logistics coordinator for a company that does government contracts for unmanned aerial vehicles.
“It was special for me, too. I may have teared up a couple times. Luckily, my wife was there to help me through it.”
There was a lot of that going on during the reception at Kelly Inn, which went through countless tissues.
“Instant tears, of course,” Greta said of greeting Daniels in the reception line. “Unbelievable.”
“I said in my speech at the wedding, ‘Danny, we told you this before — you didn’t just save Greta’s life, you saved all of our lives,’ ” Jan said.
“Because he donated his marrow and was willing to go through that procedure to save your daughter’s life — how do you thank somebody?”
Rousing reception
The Perskes did it publicly at the reception, where Daniels was introduced to the celebrants as Greta’s marrow donor.
“He got a standing ovation that was better than any of the claps I got throughout the campaign,” laughed Joe, who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District in 2014.
“That was pretty special — unnecessary, because I was there for her,” Daniels said. “It’s kind of a blur.
“We had a nice conversation while we were dancing. She got emotional — I tried to hold it together. I hope I did.”
Better than most people, as it turned out.
“From the time I walked her down the aisle all the way through the evening,” Joe said, “there were many, many tears.”
Tears of joy
Greta and Tony are honeymooning in the Dominican Republic this week before returning home to Minnetonka.
The bride still deals with peripheral physical aftereffects of leukemia, but she’s moving ahead with her life.
“She’s got some complications,” Jan said, “and she needs her knee joints replaced. But she’s alive.”
“When I tell people my story at work, they’re like, ‘I never would have guessed,’ “ Greta said. “I’ve got a lot of joint problems, and my hormones are all messed up.”
Still, that’s nothing compared to what this could have been — and probably would have been, if not for Daniels.
“I’m humbled by all of it,” he said. “I just thank God that I was able to help someone.”
Danny Daniels also made everybody cry. But this was a good cry.
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Andrew Noakes and Jo Dixon
