Weddingbee Blog

Hi bees and readers. I haven’t been a very good blogger lately because of an illness in the family. I try not to get too overly personal in my posts, because I think Weddingbee is a great place for people to find tips, inspiration, and ideas for weddings. But I also know that Weddingbee is not only about weddings, but also a great community and a place of support for real people as well.

My maternal uncle passed away yesterday morning. He had been waiting for a liver transplant for a year and a half and was finally deemed ineligible last week because the cancer had invaded a very important blood vessel. He was sent home to hospice care and was given a sentence of weeks to a month. This was a huge blow to me. My uncle and I were very close when I was a child. He had no children of his own. Most of my earliest and happiest memories include him and his wife taking me on various excursions. As I got older, with school and eventually adult life, I was not able to see him as often. When he was diagnosed with cancer, I was suddenly very involved in his life and health care because his English wasn’t so great. We got to catch up when he was well enough in the past few weeks. He finally gave up yesterday morning and his heart stopped. I had been mentally trying to prepare myself for this all week, but couldn’t have imagined the tremendous weight of grief and sadness that has overcome me.

As I’ve noted in a previous post, my extended family is very close, but particularly in this case, my uncle was my mother’s only living kin. Both her parents and eldest brother died when she was a teenager. Seeing my mother in this state has magnified my grief tenfold.

This unfortunate event has really put so much into perspective, particularly wedding planning. Knowing that my uncle will not be present at my wedding is enough to get me to tear up, but things like having to remove his name from my guest list and counting him out of the tea ceremony has just set me off.

All the time I’ve spent planning and compartmentalizing the aspects of the wedding seem so trivial when it comes to death, something you can’t plan or control. With a little over three months to the wedding, I am going to have to find a way to pick up the pieces and try with as much effort to work out the rest of the “details.” It will probably be a good distraction and force me to focus on something other than sadness. Despite how much work and detail I put into the wedding, it will ultimately be about the people I love sharing and celebrating our special day. Although my uncle will not be there physically, I know he will be in spirit. We had discussed my wedding at some point during one of our conversations and he was so excited. He was certain he would make it, for at least the ceremony, because he wasn’t very fond of dancing and loud music… I know he will be there in some way.

In the meantime, one of the details I will really focus on is a way to incorporate his memory into the wedding. Any suggestions? Have any of you experienced a difficult personal setback in the middle of planning? How did you cope?