For the past two weekends, we have been fortunate to have been invited to two weddings. The first was a long-time friend of our son, the second was a graduate student in Mark’s lab.
Each wedding was different in style and feel. At the first wedding, we knew many people and met long-time friends of our son. Friends that he had gone to college with and has talked about for years. At the second wedding, we knew the bride and another graduate student who could only stay for the wedding. For that reception we were on our own.
The first wedding was in a church, the second in an event space. A minister did the first wedding, a brother-in-law officiated the second. There were many examples given of love. What is it? Can you find a clear definition in books, songs, movies? The brother-in-law rattled off examples from Beauty and the Beast to Titantic. Why, he asked, did Rose not just scoot over on the door to make room for Jack and change her whole future?
I wanted to jump out of my seat in the Amen Chorus and yell, PREACH, internet ordained preacher. Why did Rose hog the whole door?
During each wedding the bride and groom recited their vows and promised to be true to each other in good times and bad, in sickness and health. Thirty four years down the road, I thought about those good times and bad. How sometimes they blindside you. How you can look across the table at your husband on an ordinary day and wonder how you got so lucky. Or when you tell that same husband three times that you have to go to West Elm before the wedding to get a gift card for the couple because he keeps asking you what we are giving them. Let’s be generous, he says, they’re good kids. And you snipe back that you are not known for cheapness, and he says “what” for the third-times-thirtieth time because he blasted Pink Floyd relentlessly in his youth and now his hearing sucks.
I thought about both of our dads dying before they enjoyed much retirement. How we aren’t that much younger than either of them when their circle closed and what is that like? To be the one left to go on? I thought about the fight we had a few weeks prior, a screaming match that in the end was about two people worried about one kid in two different ways.
At the second reception we introduced ourselves to our table and it was filled with amazing, interesting people. Mark’s end was about gastroenterology, protein folding diseases, teaching medical students, bbq, the best Kansas City restaurants. Mine was hearing about the Spinach Festival that day, Denver, housing prices, closeted nut jobs on Facebook, a brunch to attend the next day with one of those closeted nut jobs.
Before we left, we had a long chat with the parents of the bride. While Mark and the dad were talking, I told the mom that this was the second wedding we’d been to in as many weeks. You forget, I said, how beautiful it is to hear two people pledge their love to each other, to throw caution to the wind, to look in the eyes of each other and go for broke.
An honor, I said. It’s an honor to be at a wedding.
It is, she said, and there we were. Two women with decades of marriage between us. Two women who could fill hours with stories of the good times and the bad, stories of the ones we saw around us that we were so sure would last but didn’t, stories of love and honor and joy and despair.
Two women quietly standing next to each other in a hallway, giving all those leaps of faith an overdue moment of silence, while just inside the doorway the music played and the dance floor filled.