When Now Meets Forever
The phone call interrupted a lazy Saturday morning. I passed our baby to my spouse and answered.
“Hello?”
“Abi’s body is shutting down. Can you come?”
“When?”
“Now. As soon as you can. The wedding is today.”
Dan saw the sadness welling in my eyes and nodded.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
I threw on a dress, printed five old wedding ceremonies, and started driving. Time felt compressed, racing too fast. The groom, Jeff, had been my theology student years back at a Catholic high school. A delightful, unintentional consequence of my tenure was that students now semi-regularly ask me to officiate their weddings. He was loyal and good with a dry sense of humor. Abi, the bride, had a boisterous laugh and loud opinions. She was a Hufflepuff, a Dr. Who fanatic and a CPA with an uncanny passion for numbers and spreadsheets. When Jeff and Abi got engaged, she was in the middle of six maintenance rounds of chemo. Her latest MRI came back stable. They set the wedding date two years out and asked me to officiate.
Three weeks after that, Abi went to the doctor with back pain, and he found a large, inoperable lesion pushing on her spinal cord. With no further treatment recommendations, the doctors expected she had about four weeks to live. The phone call implied she might have less than that. Abi wanted to marry Jeff before she died.
My hands trembled on the steering wheel. I forced slow exhales.
I walked up to a two-story Colonial and rang the doorbell. Abi’s dad opened the door, looked me over and said, “I don’t know who you are, but come on in.”
Jeff’s mom whizzed by and added, “Great! There are bagels and wine in the kitchen. Help yourself!”
The living room furniture was crammed to the side to make room for a large bed. Abi was on the bed with three of her college roommates, snuggling and brainstorming the Abi-inspired tattoo they were going to get. I pulled up a chair.
Abi reached out her hand, and I held it in my own. Her grasp was light. There was nothing to say. When her sister came to administer morphine, I moved to a couch across the room and tried to stay out of the way.
The house was abuzz. Friends were huddled in the kitchen sending out text messages and sharing a Facebook announcement to anyone they could think of saying the wedding would start as soon as a bridesmaid living across the state arrived. Family cleaned and ran errands. Grief loves a job to do. The business of pulling off an impromptu wedding felt like mercy.
Jeff walked into the room with bloodshot eyes wearing his wedding garb: the shorts and T-shirt he wore on his first date with Abi. His mom had insisted on ironing them. We hugged and he didn’t let go. His back shook with sobs.
Jeff was attentive to Abi all afternoon. They sat close while eating the same dinner they had on their first date— Japanese Pan Noodles and Thai Curry. Through the revolving door came 25 pizzas, ten bottles of champagne, five tres leches cakes, Mr. and Mrs. pillows, and a strapless, full skirted wedding dress with matching earrings, purse, necklace, and headband. Aunt Nancy set up a makeshift assembly room in the basement, where she arranged every gifted flower into pink-bowed bouquets.
I pulled out my binder to write a wedding ceremony. My skills of writing and creating ritual usually seemed extraneous, impractical, bordering on irrelevant. In this moment, they suddenly felt useful, even vital. I paged through the other liturgies I had written. Nothing could be borrowed. They were distinctly future-oriented and didn’t translate. I had said to other young couples that they were saying more than, “I love you,” in their vows. It took hope, audacity, endurance, and guts to say, “I promise to love you.” To say, “Down the long, winding, and unknown path ahead, I promise to abide.” The language understood marriage to span a long lifetime, implying and assuming decades. Abi and Jeff did not have that luxury of time.
I thought about my spouse, our wedding, and how our vows had taken on layers of meaning as the years accumulated. Jeff and Abi would not move across the country together for a graduate school program. They would not weather buying their first home, having one child, and then another. There would be no trips to Europe or job changes or mid-life couple’s counseling. No walks around the neighborhood lake, dreaming about retirement. There would be no dogs or grandchildren. No quiet conversations on their porch in old age.
The numbers were stacked against them.
Abi and Jeff told me their OK Cupid profiles matched 99%. Their first date at a frisbee golf course lasted five hours, where Jeff’s phone reported that he took 22,717 steps over 11.62 miles. His first Facebook message to her read, “Ravenclaw tie ordered.”
477 days after her first date with Jeff, Abi had a CT scan that revealed cancer in her brain.
Over most of those 477 nights before they fell asleep Jeff would say, “Goodnight pretty lady.”
“Goodnight handsome man,” Abi replied.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
In a whisper, Jeff always added, “Oh good.”
I stared at the blank paper. Abi had hours, maybe days remaining. She was preparing to die. What were they promising each other? Words couldn’t make it ok. Nothing worked. I wrote in pencil and erased a lot.
Brigid, the co-officiant, walked in with a fabric store bag, sat down next to me, and started braiding ribbon for a Celtic hand-fasting ceremony. “What’ve we got?” she asked. I told her. We searched for words elastic and porous enough to capture the couple and capsize “’til death do us part.”
With a rough draft sketched out, I approached Jeff. “When I pronounce you married, what names would you like me to use?”
“She’s taking my name,” his voice broke. “We’ll be Jeff and Abi Winsor.”
A groomsman hung a sheet between the living room and dining room to give Abi privacy while she prepared. The bridesmaids, wearing matching flannel shirts from a quick Target run, strung up Christmas lights and tissue paper flowers bigger than my face, transforming the canopy hospice bed into an altar arch. The photographer, procured earlier in the day, kept spinning the digital camera around so Abi could see how beautiful she looked.
I watched Abi navigate between her dream wedding and what was possible now. The original plan was for her father to walk her down the aisle. Now, she was in a wheelchair and there was no aisle. It was 9:30pm. We were exhausted. The house was packed.
A bridesmaid offered, “Abi, your dad could wheel you in from the side by the stairs so there could still be a moment of reveal.”
Abi closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’d like that.”
We quickly rearranged. Attendees dialed up far away friends to witness the wedding via FaceTime. A groomsman pulled down the sheet and another started the music.
The living room, dining room, and den were full. Abi’s father wheeled her toward a seated Jeff. When she came into sight, uproarious, urgent applause and whooping erupted. It spilled out of the house; it could not be contained. Jeff and Abi locked eyes with a desperate love, and interlaced hands. My legs felt weak. My voice remained steady.
“Abi and Jeff, look at who is here,” I said. “Look at the world your love has created. You have packed more love into your years than others do in decades. The light of your love fills the earth. That is all there is.”
“Jeff, do you take Abi to be your person? Do you promise to love her with your whole being? Do you promise to honor this great love, this great woman in your story?”
“I do.”
“Abi, do you take Jeff to be your person? Do you promise to love him with your whole being? Do you promise to honor this great love, this great man in your story?”
“I do.”
They kissed. Guests came up, one by one, to offer hugs and nose nuzzles through raw, hitching, gulping tears.
Abi died sixteen days later, after living for 9,742 days.
She spent 785 of them by Jeff’s side.
We ate cake and drank champagne late into the night. No one knew how to leave. We did not want to say goodbye.