A Tale of Two Love Stories Thirty years apart, a W&L love story continues.

Just before the arched white doors of Washington Hall opened, Sarah Thiessen ’93 turned to her daughter, Heidi Thiessen McLaughlin ’25, and pulled down her veil. Almost 30 years prior, Sarah stood in that same foyer, also dressed in white, preparing to make the same walk down to the University Chapel where her fiancé, Doug Thiessen ’95, waited for her. June 7, 2025, held many nods to Dec. 30, 1995 – the bride putting on her dress in Washington Hall, the guests filling the ivy-covered chapel, the mother of the bride holding the same embroidered handkerchief – but this time, the next generation was about to fulfill their own Washington and Lee University love story.

“I was just like, ‘This is what it is meant to be; this is where you go in life. You find the person you’re in love with that you want to do life with and off you go,’” said Sarah. “And I walked her down the aisle and sat up there in the front looking at them. … What more could I ask for but to see my daughter be loved well, and love her new husband well, and be married in a place that means so much to me and is so deeply representative of the marriage I had to her dad and the foundation of our family? If it weren’t for W&L, none of these kids would exist because it’s where I found him.”

The Thiessens met at a party in the fall of 1991 when Sarah was a junior and Doug was a first-year student. A few weeks later, they started dating. Sarah was a sociology and anthropology major from Highland, Maryland, and Doug, of Oak Lawn, Illinois, would double major in politics and sociology and anthropology. They quickly became inseparable.

After completing their post-graduate degrees – Doug received his J.D. at Wake Forest University and Sarah earned a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro – they moved to Maryland. Sarah became a mental health therapist, and Doug took a job with the U.S. Justice Department. They welcomed five children, Clara Thiessen, Taylor Thiessen ’21, Hannah Thiessen, Charlotte Thiessen and Heidi, and filled their home with motifs — from paintings to plates — of the University Chapel where they were married. To a young Heidi, the chapel represented a fairyland akin to Cinderella’s castle, where love stories were made.

“I would try to draw pictures of the chapel when I was like 5,” said Heidi. “I had no idea what it was except Mom and Dad got married there.”

But her parents’ love story ended in tragedy in January 2009, when Doug died in a skiing accident. He was 35. His children ranged in age from 2 months old to 11 years old.

“I think about the fact that all my mom ever knew as an adult was this person – my dad – and that she did not know how to be an adult person without him,” Heidi said. “My mom really stepped up, which is why I really look up to her. She got remarried in 2016, but for a long time, she was a single mom to five kids and kicked butt.”

The Next Generation

In the fall of 2017, Sarah returned to Lexington, Virginia, driving under the banner welcoming the newest class of W&L students, but this time with a carload for her son Taylor.

Heidi Thiessen McLaughlin ’25 and her brother Taylor Thiessen ’21 visited campus in 2016.

“I remember I dropped him off, and I gave him this big hug, and I said, ‘All your life W&L has been Mom and Dad’s. This is your W&L now. Take it and run.’”

And he did – double majoring in philosophy and politics and minoring in poverty and human capability studies. He was a Bonner Scholar, elected chair of the Constitutional Review Committee and served as Maryland research chair for the 2020 Mock Convention. Heidi, four years younger, was on track to enroll in a music conservatory for voice – she didn’t want to follow her parents’ or her brother’s path. But that changed after she visited Taylor for a weekend during her sophomore year in high school. On the drive home, she sobbed because she didn’t want to leave W&L.

“I wanted to share something special with my parents,” Heidi said. “I wanted to walk around the Front Lawn, and I wanted to have classes in the Colonnade buildings, the same way my parents did. I wanted to do the things that they did, especially because that was a way to connect with my dad.”

Michael McLaughlin ’23 and Heidi Thiessen McLaughlin ’25 met through their mutual love of music.

At midnight rehearsal for University Singers during her orientation week, Heidi met a fellow singer, Michael McLaughlin ’23. Michael was a music major as well as music director of the General Admissions a cappella group, which Heidi joined. They became fast friends as Heidi navigated those initial months of college, but by Winter Term, their friendship had blossomed into something different. In June 2024, Michael asked Sarah and Heidi’s stepfather, Joseph Palencar, for permission to ask for Heidi’s hand in marriage. In response, Sarah gave Michael the diamond from the ring Doug had given her in 1994.

Simultaneously, a friend of Heidi’s asked for help in expanding her photography portfolio and wanted to know if Heidi and Michael would be willing to serve as models. Wanting the proposal to be a quiet, private moment, Michael decided the photoshoot would be the perfect opportunity, whatever day that fell on. Michael called Sarah to tell her that the photographer and Heidi had settled on Aug. 6, 2024. Flabbergasted, Sarah told him that Doug proposed to her on Aug. 6 — 30 years earlier.

Michael McLaughlin ’23 proposed to Heidi Thiessen McLaughlin ’25 exactly 30 years to the day after her parents got engaged.

“He told the photographer, ‘I’m actually going to propose,’ and she was like, ‘What?’ – she had no idea either,” said Heidi. “At the very end, she was like, ‘Oh, I just want to do one more pose. Can we do one more pose?’ And he proposed. He told me, ‘Thirty years ago today your parents got engaged with this very diamond.’”

Little Moments

That pull Heidi felt as a little girl to W&L’s University Chapel manifested as her wedding location. Her mother and stepfather walked her down the aisle, but they had a little help.

“My grandparents gave me a locket with a photo of my dad in it about a year or two after he passed away, and I pinned that locket on my bouquet,” Heidi said. “So, it was kind of like he was walking down the aisle, too.”

Watching Heidi and Michael exchange their vows, Sarah felt a fullness — a continuation of her and Doug’s story through their children’s own marriages, including that of Taylor and his wife, Gabriella Miggins ’19.

“When you grieve, you have to work through a lot of stuff, and though you adjust to loss, it travels with you as you go about life,” Sarah said. “And life does go on. I remarried, and my kids grew up and have done such beautiful things – they graduated, they became valedictorian, they got into Washington and Lee, they fell in love, they got married. You have all these special moments – big moments – and there’s that twinge in my chest of like, ‘He’s not here.’ But on Heidi’s wedding day, it just felt like he was there with us.”

Now living in Massachusetts teaching voice lessons while Michael pursues his master’s in choral conducting, Heidi often thinks about that tearful car ride home from her visit to Lexington and how different her life would be if she had never felt that indescribable tether to the university.

“If there was not that pull to W&L, I would have never met my future husband,” she said. “It really is a full circle of events that led me to him; specific things had to happen in order for me to end up dating him, for me to end up engaged to him, for me to end up married to him. All those things, they’re all related to W&L, and they’re also related to my dad.”

Sarah Thiessen ’93 and Doug Thiessen ’95 on their wedding day

“There was a redemption in Heidi and Michael’s story; my story did not end the way we had intended,” Sarah said. “We expected to grow old together. One of the first gifts Doug ever gave me was this leather bookmark that had a quote from a poem: ‘Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be.’ I actually gave it to Heidi. That was our plan; we were going to grow old together and raise our five children, but that wasn’t what God intended. But here are these two W&L couples that came out of what their father and I created after getting married. And through these two couples, our story goes on. Specifically with Heidi and Michael, I saw redemption throughout – it’s the diamond, it’s the day, it’s the chapel, it’s the locket. … There were so many precious moments.”