A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
~Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
We always promised ourselves that when our daughter, Annie, got married, the wedding would begin at the exact time printed on the invitations. It never occurred to us that my father-in-law would inadvertently spoil our plans, let alone that he would do so in such a dramatic way.
Annie's would be the first wedding in our congregation's new church building. We let our creativity soar. My husband, Mike, along with the groom, Greg, and other friends and family members hauled in "marble" pillars belonging to the church's Easter cantata set, and we draped white netting from them as a backdrop for all the flowers and candles. We strung hundreds of tiny white lights across the platform and filled the auditorium with other special decorating touches.
In addition to being the mother of the bride, the matron of honor, and the wedding soloist, I was also in charge of the reception food. Two hours before the ceremony was to begin at 5:00 P.M., I hadn't quite finished instructing the kitchen crew about pasta salad assembly when it was time to join the wedding party for formal photos.
At 4:00, twenty-eight people crowded onto the platform for pictures of the bride and groom with Mike's immediate family members. More photos followed, and by 4:30, the wedding party retired to a side room. Mike's brothers, Wayne and Karl, went over their notes for the ceremony. Since they were ordained ministers, Annie had asked them to assist our pastor. I went to check food preparations. The clock above the kitchen sink indicated it was a few minutes before 5:00.
In the side room, my father-in-law, Edmund, lay down on a row of chairs. Annie's groom, Greg, asked if he'd be more comfortable on the carpeted floor. "I'm okay right here," Edmund replied. "I just want to rest a bit."
About a minute later, my father-in-law began to snore and turn purple. As I entered the room, I saw my brother-in-law Karl shaking his father and shouting, "Wake up, Daddy! Breathe, Daddy, breathe!"
My sister, Jaclyn, and her husband, Lamar, are emergency medical technicians (EMTs), so I raced to the auditorium where my brother-in-law was setting up a video camera. "Lamar!" I shouted. "Edmund has stopped breathing!"
He dropped the camcorder. "Get Jaclyn!"
Still clutching the long-stemmed rose I'd held in the photo shoot, I dashed on high heels to the nursery where Jaclyn was dropping off their baby. "Edmund isn't breathing!" I said. "Lamar's doing CPR alone!"
Jaclyn ran to the room and knelt in her bridesmaid's dress next to Lamar. Together they worked on my father-in-law while we all prayed and waited for paramedics to arrive. Greg took Annie to another room.
It seemed an eternity before an ambulance and fire engines screamed up to the front of the church. The auditorium continued to fill with puzzled guests as five o'clock came and went.
Neither Mike nor I knew what to do. Dismiss everyone and postpone the wedding to another date? Proceed with all the fanfare we'd planned? Find a way to combine the joy of a wedding with the drama of a medical crisis? None of the wedding-planning books we'd consulted covered anything like this.
Finally, Wayne said to me, "We've talked with Annie and Greg and the rest of the family. Since the guests are all here and the paramedics are still working on Daddy, we think we should just explain to everyone what happened, ask for their prayers, and carry on with a low-key ceremony. Can you do that?"
I thought about my matron-of-honor duties and the song I was to sing. "First let me have five minutes for a good cry," I said. I found an empty office where I could give temporary release to my emotions. Then I repaired my make-up, squared my shoulders, and joined the processional.
As Mike escorted Annie up the aisle to the strains of Pachelbel's "Canon in D," everything seemed surreal. Somehow I sang "Sunrise, Sunset" without a quaver until I got to the last line, "One season following another, laden with happiness and tears." At that point, Karl, who had just served communion to the couple, broke down and wept. He was a former EMT himself and knew the paramedics would have taken Edmund to the hospital if there was any hope. From the platform, he could see the ambulance still sitting empty by the front door, and he realized they hadn't been able to save his father.
Not only did our family have the first wedding in the new church building, but we also had the first death. My mother-in-law, Noreen, stayed by her husband's side and missed the entire wedding of her first grandchild to get married. When Annie and Greg took a break from the receiving line to find out Edmund's status, Noreen tried to relieve the tension with a bit of dark humor. "Well, your grandfather sure knows how to ruin a wedding!"
After the coroner left the church, Wayne volunteered to drive his father's remains some three hundred miles home to the other side of the state. The pastor helped load Edmund's body into the back of Wayne's pickup. Halfway to his destination, Wayne realized he should probably keep to the speed limit since he didn't have a death certificate with him. He imagined trying to explain to an officer, "But the corpse back there really is my father. He died today at my niece's wedding."
Once I got home, all I wanted to do was collapse. Instead, we packed our suitcases, loaded the car with leftover wedding food and flowers, and headed across the state for the funeral.
My husband's family was well-known in the region, and news spread as fast as an Internet virus. Just like in the old bridal-shower game of "Gossip," a few details changed along the way. A couple of people got so mixed up that they announced that Edmund had passed away at his granddaughter's funeral.
Our family handled grief the same way many others do. We alternated between laughter and tears as we recalled Edmund's quirky sense of humor and then remembered we would never again have the opportunity to hear him tell his jokes.
After the country-church funeral, mourners drove to a hilltop cemetery and gathered around the freshly dug grave at the family plot. A tree nearby shivered as wind whipped across the rolling ranchland. To my numb mind, it was a scene right out of an old-time Western.
The patriarch of Mike's clan was gone. In the last photograph ever taken of Edmund, he is surrounded by his large family -- his wife of fifty-six years, their six adult children, four daughters-in-law, fifteen grandchildren, and one soon-to-be grandson-in-law. When the photographer clicked the shutter, none of us knew the way in which we were about to be tested. But we did what all good families do in crises. We helped each other cope. It's a wonderful legacy for a family to have.
Another legacy from that day is the standard reply Annie now gives to people who inquire about any recent wedding she's attended.
"Well," she says, "nobody died."
~Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
We always promised ourselves that when our daughter, Annie, got married, the wedding would begin at the exact time printed on the invitations. It never occurred to us that my father-in-law would inadvertently spoil our plans, let alone that he would do so in such a dramatic way.
Annie's would be the first wedding in our congregation's new church building. We let our creativity soar. My husband, Mike, along with the groom, Greg, and other friends and family members hauled in "marble" pillars belonging to the church's Easter cantata set, and we draped white netting from them as a backdrop for all the flowers and candles. We strung hundreds of tiny white lights across the platform and filled the auditorium with other special decorating touches.
In addition to being the mother of the bride, the matron of honor, and the wedding soloist, I was also in charge of the reception food. Two hours before the ceremony was to begin at 5:00 P.M., I hadn't quite finished instructing the kitchen crew about pasta salad assembly when it was time to join the wedding party for formal photos.
At 4:00, twenty-eight people crowded onto the platform for pictures of the bride and groom with Mike's immediate family members. More photos followed, and by 4:30, the wedding party retired to a side room. Mike's brothers, Wayne and Karl, went over their notes for the ceremony. Since they were ordained ministers, Annie had asked them to assist our pastor. I went to check food preparations. The clock above the kitchen sink indicated it was a few minutes before 5:00.
In the side room, my father-in-law, Edmund, lay down on a row of chairs. Annie's groom, Greg, asked if he'd be more comfortable on the carpeted floor. "I'm okay right here," Edmund replied. "I just want to rest a bit."
About a minute later, my father-in-law began to snore and turn purple. As I entered the room, I saw my brother-in-law Karl shaking his father and shouting, "Wake up, Daddy! Breathe, Daddy, breathe!"
My sister, Jaclyn, and her husband, Lamar, are emergency medical technicians (EMTs), so I raced to the auditorium where my brother-in-law was setting up a video camera. "Lamar!" I shouted. "Edmund has stopped breathing!"
He dropped the camcorder. "Get Jaclyn!"
Still clutching the long-stemmed rose I'd held in the photo shoot, I dashed on high heels to the nursery where Jaclyn was dropping off their baby. "Edmund isn't breathing!" I said. "Lamar's doing CPR alone!"
Jaclyn ran to the room and knelt in her bridesmaid's dress next to Lamar. Together they worked on my father-in-law while we all prayed and waited for paramedics to arrive. Greg took Annie to another room.
It seemed an eternity before an ambulance and fire engines screamed up to the front of the church. The auditorium continued to fill with puzzled guests as five o'clock came and went.
Neither Mike nor I knew what to do. Dismiss everyone and postpone the wedding to another date? Proceed with all the fanfare we'd planned? Find a way to combine the joy of a wedding with the drama of a medical crisis? None of the wedding-planning books we'd consulted covered anything like this.
Finally, Wayne said to me, "We've talked with Annie and Greg and the rest of the family. Since the guests are all here and the paramedics are still working on Daddy, we think we should just explain to everyone what happened, ask for their prayers, and carry on with a low-key ceremony. Can you do that?"
I thought about my matron-of-honor duties and the song I was to sing. "First let me have five minutes for a good cry," I said. I found an empty office where I could give temporary release to my emotions. Then I repaired my make-up, squared my shoulders, and joined the processional.
As Mike escorted Annie up the aisle to the strains of Pachelbel's "Canon in D," everything seemed surreal. Somehow I sang "Sunrise, Sunset" without a quaver until I got to the last line, "One season following another, laden with happiness and tears." At that point, Karl, who had just served communion to the couple, broke down and wept. He was a former EMT himself and knew the paramedics would have taken Edmund to the hospital if there was any hope. From the platform, he could see the ambulance still sitting empty by the front door, and he realized they hadn't been able to save his father.
Not only did our family have the first wedding in the new church building, but we also had the first death. My mother-in-law, Noreen, stayed by her husband's side and missed the entire wedding of her first grandchild to get married. When Annie and Greg took a break from the receiving line to find out Edmund's status, Noreen tried to relieve the tension with a bit of dark humor. "Well, your grandfather sure knows how to ruin a wedding!"
After the coroner left the church, Wayne volunteered to drive his father's remains some three hundred miles home to the other side of the state. The pastor helped load Edmund's body into the back of Wayne's pickup. Halfway to his destination, Wayne realized he should probably keep to the speed limit since he didn't have a death certificate with him. He imagined trying to explain to an officer, "But the corpse back there really is my father. He died today at my niece's wedding."
Once I got home, all I wanted to do was collapse. Instead, we packed our suitcases, loaded the car with leftover wedding food and flowers, and headed across the state for the funeral.
My husband's family was well-known in the region, and news spread as fast as an Internet virus. Just like in the old bridal-shower game of "Gossip," a few details changed along the way. A couple of people got so mixed up that they announced that Edmund had passed away at his granddaughter's funeral.
Our family handled grief the same way many others do. We alternated between laughter and tears as we recalled Edmund's quirky sense of humor and then remembered we would never again have the opportunity to hear him tell his jokes.
After the country-church funeral, mourners drove to a hilltop cemetery and gathered around the freshly dug grave at the family plot. A tree nearby shivered as wind whipped across the rolling ranchland. To my numb mind, it was a scene right out of an old-time Western.
The patriarch of Mike's clan was gone. In the last photograph ever taken of Edmund, he is surrounded by his large family -- his wife of fifty-six years, their six adult children, four daughters-in-law, fifteen grandchildren, and one soon-to-be grandson-in-law. When the photographer clicked the shutter, none of us knew the way in which we were about to be tested. But we did what all good families do in crises. We helped each other cope. It's a wonderful legacy for a family to have.
Another legacy from that day is the standard reply Annie now gives to people who inquire about any recent wedding she's attended.
"Well," she says, "nobody died."
http://www.beliefnet.com/Inspiration/Chicken-Soup-For-The-Soul/2010/03/A-Wedding-to-Die-For.aspx?source=NEWSLETTER&nlsource=49&ppc=&utm_campaign=DIBSoup&utm_source=NL&utm_medium=newsletter
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