Posts Tagged ‘Weddings and loss’

May 2013

Ask Team Practical (Guest Edition): The Hard Stuff

We recently received an important question for Ask Team Practical—one about planning a wedding with a critically ill loved one. To make sure we got the answer just right, we reached out to longtime APW reader Morgan. Morgan was the first reader to ever write in on this subject, when her father was dying. She then wrote about her wedding, after losing her father. These days she writes about more joyful things, like her baby daughter, but today she agreed to give sage advice to all of you planning a wedding while dealing with the really hard stuff.

—Meg

Hi Meg and Team Practical,

This is a somewhat hard and awkward letter to write. I am getting married to my fiancé Dan in July, and a few weeks ago my mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She’s begun her chemo treatment already and, while it can’t always be promised, it looks like we caught the cancer early enough to have some positive results. I can’t say with confidence that this will work out, mainly because we have to wait two treatments to re-evaluate—so even though we know what she has finally, I feel like we’re still in limbo.

I don’t plan to cancel our wedding—if anything I realize the wedding is a source of great joy for my mother and family. But I need some advice on how to get through this personally. I was at the hospital with my mother the other day and while she was getting blood drawn, she told the nurses about the wedding; they asked me questions about it and I could barely hold myself together. At this point, whenever the wedding comes up, I have such strong emotions about it. There are things I need to get done, and I do them, but it feels like the excitement has taken a back seat. That I’m just going through the motions of planning this important event. I feel like I cannot enjoy the thought of our wedding day, mainly because I fear so much that my mother will not be there. I know I should have a positive attitude, or let this situation bring a deeper meaning/perspective to our wedding—and I do sometimes—but I am struggling. These seem to be such contradictory events; I thought maybe you or your readers could share some advice that would help bring them into some type of harmony.

Thanks for your help,

Alyssa

Cancer sucks. I’m genuinely sorry that your family is going through this, and hopeful that your mom will have one of the happy outcomes. But in the meantime, you feel like you are stuck in limbo, right? That’s because you are, and that also sucks. It’s hard to make plans, it’s hard to know what to do, it’s hard to be brave, and it’s hard to hold yourself together. It’s really hard right now, and that’s normal. I mean, as normal as anything can be, when someone you love has cancer.

APW is full of stories about women who did not enjoy their wedding planning, for a huge number of reasons. And that’s okay! They got married in the end, and most people write about what a great time they actually had at the wedding. If you are merely going through the motions of planning a wedding, well, the wedding still gets planned that way, right? It may help if you try to separate your feelings about the two in your head: wedding planning and wedding day. The way you feel about the planning doesn’t necessarily have a huge effect on the way you feel about the day. I phoned in all wedding planning, and still had a day that shines in my mind as one of the most love-filled, grace-filled, transcendent days of my entire life. The day did not suffer because I didn’t care about flowers or centerpieces or details, or, frankly, anything in the lead up. It’s disappointing that this time of planning that you may have really been looking forward to is substantially less fun than you were expecting, and you are allowed to mourn the planning-that-may-have-been. Continue reading Ask Team Practical (Guest Edition): The Hard Stuff

Posted in: Ask Team Practical, The Hard Stuff | 39 Comments »

Mar 2013

Wedding Graduate: Jesse & Warwick’s Celebration After Loss

* Jesse, Theatre Props Master & Warwick, Writer *

The day after my sister passed away, there was a school dance. They offered to cancel it, but I wouldn’t let them. At the time I needed someone to remind me what life, what normalcy could feel like. Choosing to celebrate with a wedding after losing a loved one can seem unimaginably hard. But posts like Jesse & Warwick’s today continue to remind me, years after my own loss, why it’s also so important.

—Maddie

Leading up to my wedding, I was already thinking about my wedding graduate post, composing it in my head day by day as I went through the process. (Note to self—if you find yourself doing this again for any other major life event, step away from the blogs!) I had already written the introduction when I wrote a post about coming to terms with my huge guest list and my less than unique church and reception hall venues. My graduate post was going to talk about learning to take help from my friends instead of doing the massive stack of invites by myself. I was going to talk about the awesome ways I saved money with my bouquets of handmade fabric flowers and thrifted colored glass centerpieces. I was going to talk about coming to grips with not having a massive batchelorette or shower because my friends were spread across the country and couldn’t afford more travel than coming in for the wedding. I was going to talk about how doing what we wanted and adding things we liked made the standard feel personal and unique.

Six months before our wedding, my little brother died, suddenly, without warning. He went into the hospital on a Friday, there were tests and surgeries, internal bleeding, more surgeries and doctors who couldn’t find the problem fast enough to solve it before it was too late. He passed away on Wednesday. Over the next week as we were planning a wake and visitation and funeral Mass I heard over and over again from friends and family, “I’m really excited for your wedding in the fall, we’re going to need a party by then.”

Adam’s death changed everything about my wedding, and changed nothing. All the plans that were in place stayed in place, all of the vendors were already booked, most of the people were already invited. Those blog posts I was planning to write could still be written, I still learned those lessons and loved my décor and was a money-saving diva. In many ways it was still our day, but in so many ways it became everyone’s. Thinking about not having Adam there on the wedding day was unbelievably sad. Warwick and I had already been engaged for over a year when Adam died. I was already planning on Adam being a part of the day, wearing a ridiculous suit, rolling his eyes and proclaiming he wouldn’t dance, and then spending all night on the dance floor, being the last one to leave the after-after party, sneaking off and having smoke breaks that he would attempt to hide from my mom, hitting on each and every one of my friends, and being the one to pull Warwick aside during the week to make sure he knows that he needs to treat me well or else. I cried on our wedding day or course, especially during the ceremony, but mostly there was so much joy there was no room to be sad.

All of our aunts and uncles, cousins, and friends, people who we were assuming would meet at our wedding, had already met, bonded, celebrated, and cried together. So many of these people had stood vigil with us for days at the hospital, or stood in line for four hours at the funeral home together just to give us a hug and tell us that they were sorry. All of these people needed a party, and all of these people, more than they ever had before, needed to be part of the love and joy of a wedding, so they brought the joy with them and heaped it on Warwick and me and my entire family. Continue reading Wedding Graduate: Jesse & Warwick’s Celebration After Loss

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 30 Comments »

Oct 2012

Life Doesn’t Care About Your Plans

Like yesterday’s post, today’s post is about losing a parent before getting married. But what Sheryl shows us is that even though certain experiences may seem similar on the outside, the way we deal with life’s upheavals can be completely different from one person to another. More importantly though, I think Sheryl boils down what partnership is in its most pure form: letting go of the plan and doing what needs to be done for your family.

Somehow, I was out of bed, dressed and packing up the dog and an overnight bag before I even knew what was happening. A phone call at 4:42 in the morning comes with the implicit assumption that something is wrong. Hearing Bunny’s end of the conversation, his voice strained and giving only one word answers, quickly confirmed that. The next thing either of us remembers, we were hurtling down the highway, faster than I’ve ever know him to drive. As he filled me in on the details of the call, my stomach worked itself into knots that had me leaning out the passenger window and painting the side of the truck.

Wednesday night we had gone to bed with our world perfectly ordered. Jobs weren’t particularly forthcoming for either of us, but we had my cushy savings and his freelance hours to rely on. We lived in an adorable town house that we loved in a beautiful co-op with a great community, and were planning on staying there for another five years. We’d finally started hanging up our artwork and everything. We’d been scrimping and saving for a perfect-to-us, tiny fall wedding with just our very nearest and dearest invited, and with small but meaningful details. We were even talking very seriously about babies, much to his father’s delight and my mother’s horror.

By the time we arrived at the hospital, less than an hour later, it was pretty clear that none of our carefully laid plans mattered at all. The rest of that day is mostly a blur, filled with words like “severe stroke” and “basal artery,” waiting on tests and scans, hopes raised and dashed until finally there was a confirmed conclusion: no brain stem activity. For twelve hours, I wandered hospital halls like a ghost who wasn’t sure where it belonged. That afternoon, Bunny’s father died surrounded by extended family and friends.

I can’t even tell you the number of ways our hearts broke that day. I won’t even try it’s so impossible.

In the next days, our lives changed completely. There was no going home; we needed to be near our families. So we camped out with his momma (and then mine). We slept (or tried to) and sat and stared at TV screens and cleaned and nodded politely when people talked to us and made decisions at funerals homes. Time passed, slower than I’d ever known it could. Bunny and I drove back to our home in Toronto that we have been slowly making our own, but only to pack more clothes, clean out the fridge, and check on the cat.

Family and friends descended on the house, and we barely had a chance to breathe. It was overwhelming. Love, I’ve been coming to realize, can be like that. Through the crowds, I wandered from room to room, first checking on Bunny, then his mother, then his sister and her (now) husband, and his niece before working my way back to Bunny. Over and over. I had loved Bunny’s family since the day they moved in next door when I was eight, and his dad had been more of a father to me than my own. I was as lost as anyone else there. In those first few days, I knew that my world had changed. What I didn’t know was how much. Continue reading Life Doesn’t Care About Your Plans

Posted in: Friends & Relations, The Hard Stuff, Wedding Undergraduates | 16 Comments »

Oct 2012

Without Dad, One Year Later

This week we’re exploring the idea of two sides of the coin. This week is a reminder that people can experience something similar and respond in totally different ways, and that similar circumstances can yield a variety of outcomes. This is a message that I think often gets lost in women’s media (no matter how hard we work at it). We’re each searching for personal validation, and in so doing, sometimes we miss important stories. This week, let’s try to change that.

To start things off, today we have a beautiful and complicated post from Beth about losing her father to alcoholism before her wedding; she discusses dealing with the myriad of emotions that come with that loss. For me it was a soul-searching look at the honest ways that emotions work—how they don’t color within the lines of how people tell us we “should” or “shouldn’t” feel. (And also, Beth got married just over a week ago, so all of our love to her.)

My paternal grandfather died young and wasn’t there when his second daughter got married. My Aunt Lori asked my dad, her oldest brother, to walk her down the aisle. She’s always said that was one of her favorite pictures from her wedding, taken just before they entered the church.

I’d never envisioned my dad walking me down the aisle. When I was ten and “secretly” checking out copies of Brides magazine from the library, being “given away” was just something that happened but not something seeped in meaning of any kind. When I was a teenager, I sort of objected to the “giving away” part of it, but I loved being with my dad. I remember being shocked when a friend commented on how cute it was that a seventeen-year-old would still take her dad to the batting cages daily—it was just what we did and I loved it.

Although the walk down the aisle wasn’t imbued with a ton of significance for me, I did, however, imagine our father-daughter dance. Growing up, my family would often eat dinner and then retire to our living room for “performances” (my sister and I dancing around in dress up clothes to music) or for family dance evenings in our living room. I had the run of their collection of vinyl but we mostly stuck to a few favorites (some Statler Brothers, George Strait, and Mickey Mouse Disco). My mom and dad would dance while my sister and I waited our turns to dance on Dad’s feet.

Just as his own dad wasn’t around to walk his daughter down the aisle, as fate or circumstance or life or whatever you want to call it would have it, my dad died just after Forrest and I announced our engagement. Although never much of a traveler, while I was in college, he and my mom traveled to Florida (to watch me play softball) and to Maine (to watch me graduate). After each trip he would talk incessantly for at least two months after about how much fun it was to go somewhere for an event and get to enjoy the place. The dad I remember always had sort of a soft spot for geology (as I learned during some of our late night talks when I was in high school)—no one would have appreciated a jeep ride to see some dinosaur tracks as much as or been as excited as him

Instead of picking out our first dance song, he died last August. He’d been struggling with alcoholism for several years, and I didn’t really know how to feel. What was hard to communicate to my mom, my dad’s siblings, and the rest of my family was that I was actually sort of relieved. When asked how I felt about the strong likelihood he wouldn’t be able to travel to our wedding, I told a friend, “I’d rather plan on his not being there rather than him not showing up,” and quietly I added, “At this rate I’m not sure he’ll make it to next September.” His death meant that even though things were hard, they were less complicated. I didn’t have to dread a drunken phone call, or worse, a call that he’d hurt someone else while driving drunk. I had a very quiet cry on the stoop of our cabin with Forrest’s arms wrapped around me, but I was busier trying to arrange a memorial with a lot of moving parts (a sister in boot camp, a mother in denial, a group of lapsed-Catholic siblings reconciling a lack of Mass, and me living five hundred miles away). Continue reading Without Dad, One Year Later

Posted in: Friends & Relations, The Hard Stuff, Wedding Undergraduates | 34 Comments »

Aug 2012

Why (Sometimes) Wedding Planning Isn’t Worth It

One of my favorite things about APW posts these days is that we’re able to approach a subject from a whole variety of different angles in a way we were never able to when I was the single voice on the site. The best part of that is when two people approach a subject from opposite directions and end up with conclusions that are similar in spirit. That’s just how I feel about Sarah’s post on why wedding planning isn’t worth it, and my post on why wedding planning is worth it. In the end, I think we learned the same lessons (though her post has the sassiest little kid picture ever, so she wins everything). Also, I love posts about people who hated wedding planning, or their weddings, because I want destroy the cultural myth that all women love their weddings. Let’s do it.

Last weekend was supposed to be our wedding. It was going to be beautiful, tucked away in the mountains of North Carolina, a homemade celebration of love full to the brim with perfectly poured over details. But it was not our wedding. And as that Saturday came and passed, I found myself filling with joy and reassurance that the wedding I had loved and planned for that day was not for me after all. And I realized too that it was only in the conscious act of not planning a wedding that we found the celebration of marriage we were truly looking for.

Before I go on, let me say that I LOVE weddings. At first, even the minutest details of planning were completely thrilling. I could spend hours on end gazing at lace, searching Pinterest with phrases like “vintage rustic” and “ethereal bridal up-do” while diligently scrapbooking all my brilliant whims. Wedding blogs took the place of hardcovers and to this day, when a Save the Date arrives in the mail, I get downright giddy. I still love weddings—but am so happy that we’re not having one.

Of course, I knew from the first time “I hate this wedding” came out of my mouth that I wasn’t unique. Hadn’t every married person I know hated their wedding at some point during the planning process? Hadn’t I spent countless hours calming my best friend as she haggled and stressed, fulfilling my duty as MOH with pure faith that it would all be worth it? I knew that wedding planning was supposed to be hard and so in the beginning we persevered without so much as a second thought.

And then my dad got sick. Really sick. And I found myself loading and unloading my little Honda for the twelve hour drives to Florida with great frequency, each time wondering if it could, once again, be my last. And somewhere during those months of back and forth, in the midst of arguing with insurance companies and pleading with nurses and waiting for the doctor to ever call me back, the assault of stress and heartache and frustration that we thought was par for the course in wedding planning began to feel personal.

It wasn’t just that I hated the wedding planning; it was that I had started to despise the wedding itself. All the things that I had poured over—the perfect little centerpieces and the homemade menu and the inscribed antique spoon favors I had loved so much—they started to seem downright offensive. The very thought of thinking about these details on the same day and in the same headspace as thinking about my vows and making an eternal commitment to the love of my life now felt almost grotesque. Gracious friends offered to chip in and do the event planning for us, but it wasn’t just that we couldn’t think about it ourselves; it was that we couldn’t imagine anyone thinking about napkins and flower arrangements on the same day we were committing to build a life together. Continue reading Why (Sometimes) Wedding Planning Isn’t Worth It

Posted in: Planning, The Hard Stuff | 43 Comments »

Aug 2012

Wedding Graduates: Anna & Will

*Anna, Coordinator Of A Teacher Credentialing Program & Will, English Teacher*

My three-year wedding anniversary last week made me think a lot about memory and history—how big events like our weddings shape (or don’t shape) our lives, and how their memory intertwines with our present. So this week, in a whole bunch of ways, we’re exploring the idea of history. First up Anna talks beautifully about remembering her wedding, echoing exactly how I felt a week after our wedding on our honeymoon, sobbing about moving away from exactly how it felt.

Remembering my wedding day is like trying to look for too long into a very bright light. It’s been nearly a year since that day, a year filled with adventures—I started my first “real job,” and we bought our first home just two months ago. Everything else from a year ago feels a bit dim with all that’s happened since then. But the day I married Will still dazzles.

Soon after getting married, I saw a show about how the brain works that described how remembering something can actually change the biochemical signature of the original memory. I became reluctant to remember the wedding after that—I wished I could capture the experiences of the day and etch them into glass so that they would never change in the biochemical signatures of my brain cells. Even looking at pictures made me worry that the images I saw through my eyes of our wedding would fade in comparison. One thing that’s nice about pictures, though, is that they can help you remember things that would otherwise fade, and allow you to experience a different perspective on things that can enrich your own.

The best part of the wedding day itself was how I felt once things got going. In the morning I was rattled and overwhelmed, impatient for the event itself. I was wearing a hokey “bride” shirt that my sister had given me, and I was irritated by how it made everyone smile knowingly and console my impatience with reassurances that everything would be fine. I knew everything was going to be fine! I just wanted it all to get going! (This could be a cautionary tale about afternoon weddings, but it’s not.) The thing I wanted was to have my dress on, make-up done, hair out of my face. I wanted to see my fiancé as my fiancé for the last time—for our “first look.” When I finally saw Will waiting for me, and I flew into his arms, I felt, irrationally, like I’d finally arrived at our wedding. Forgive me for the Star-Trek-speak, but it was like there was a configuration of the time-space continuum where I needed to be, and in my dress with Will was it. I didn’t care much about what happened between that moment and the ceremony. Sign the Ketubah with the rabbi? Sure, ok. Doing family photographs on the hotel lawn? Fine! As long as I got to stand next to Will, I felt like I was where I needed to be. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Anna & Will

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 23 Comments »