Wedding of the century: Hospital wedding proposal decades in the making

Carla Demery received a call from her 86-year-old step-father Neil Klassen on Sunday saying he needed her to come over and help him look for something. When Demery arrived, Klassen asked her to look in the safe for rings he had stored away. Demery, 67, said she started crying right away when her step-father picked one out and said “I’m going to ask your mom to marry me today.” Demery says Klassen told her, “it’s time.” Demery’s Cree mother, 89-year-old Mable Cooper has been in the hospital in The Pas in northern Manitoba for four weeks after a fall that then led to pneumonia. Cooper and Klassen have been together for 33 years now and Demery thinks this past month of him being lonely in the house and alone might have had something to do with the surprise proposal. The videos posted on social media by Demery’s sister Katherine Cooper have tens of thousands of views. Watch the proposal here: Cooper and Klassen met in The Pas in 1992 when Klassen opened a used furniture store in the community. Demery says she remembers her mom wanting to go and check it out. “Neil came up to my mom and they started talking and they haven’t stopped talking since,” she says. Cooper and her eight children are originally from Moose Lake. Their father died in a drowning in his ‘30s in 1971. Cooper was pregnant with her youngest of the eight children at the time. Belinda Merasty, now 53, says Klassen is “the only dad I’ve ever known.” Merasty recalls she and her siblings always telling their mom to go out and meet someone but she always said “I don’t want to hurt your dad.” Even after that first meeting in the furniture store in 1992, the family still had to convince Cooper to finally go out for coffee with Klassen. “He totally became a father figure and stepped up to the plate even though we were all adults by the time they got together,” says Merasty. Klassen and Cooper ran the furniture store until they retired in 2019. During the last four weeks in the hospital, the family was told by Cooper’s doctor that she has been diagnosed with early stages of dementia. “We kind of knew it was coming,” says Merasty recalling a recent visit to the hospital by her dad and her mother looking at her and asking in Cree who that man is. Cooper and Klassen, seen here in an undated photo, met in the furniture store he owned. The family has been receiving a lot of calls and messages all week from people about the proposal video with some calling the impending nuptials the “wedding of the century,” but the family plans to keep it small, given their mom’s condition. “We know dementia is setting in and we know that she knows what’s happening now but we don’t know what will happen in six month,” says Merasty. “Mom was alone for many, many years until she found someone who could treat her like a lady and the kids with respect,” says Merasty. The family expects the wedding will likely take place in the next month. Continue Reading