Weddingbee Blog

I know that I am spending a lot of time on Mr. D’s and my relationship, but I think it’s important to know where we came from to see and understand what our story is now. I know I left with a bit of a cliffhanger and probably had some of you worried as to what happened to Mr. D or me that would be considered tragic. Well, nothing physically happened, but what did happen has completely altered our lives.

We had gone up to Mr. D’s grandmother’s home in northeast Iowa to get away for a weekend and discuss our options when it came to our relationship. I had been offered a nanny position near my parents’ home, which was two hours away from Mr. D. Mr. D was still admitting that he was not sure when he wanted to get married, or honestly if he did at all. He said he loved me more than any other person in his life, but he had recently seen his parents’ marriage dissolve and their messy divorce and didn’t want to take the chance of that happening to us. I told him that not getting married was a deal-breaker for me. I loved him, and I would wait IF I knew that it would be coming, but I wasn’t going to stick around in the hopes of it. So I decided to take the job and let him have room to decide once and for all.

On our drive home, we got a call from his father who told us to immediately pull over. Mr. D put the phone on speaker and with what Dad D said, our world crumbled. Mr. D’s younger sister had been arrested that morning. She was being held on suspicion and there was evidence that she had in some way been involved in a crime.

Because Mr. D and I had already been together for almost five years by this point, I knew his family very well.  I knew what she was and was not capable of, and this did not sound like the sister I had grown to love. We were all in complete shock. What was even more difficult was that we didn’t get to see her for the first month after she was jailed. There was a half-million-dollar bond set, and we simply couldn’t pay it, meaning she had to be in jail and be processed, which took awhile. Finally, in late August we got to see her. She was sitting behind a thick plate of glass, and we had to talk through a phone.  One of the hardest things I have ever had to do was to go and see her like this, knowing there was nothing I could do to get her out or to help her.

The nanny job near my parents had fallen through, and I had been offered a new job in Chicago as a nanny to a family with a special-needs child. I wanted to stay with Mr. D during this time, but he urged me to take the job. We had our home searched and torn apart by the police, and we had news vans camped outside our apartment since Sister Doily was living with Mr. D at the time I was taking a break with my parents. He wanted me to get away and not get involved; he saw how much it was already affecting me and he didn’t want it to further hurt me. So I moved. And a miracle happened.

Our relationship grew and got stronger, even with the four-hour distance. Sister Doily was convicted of a crime. Sister Doily is serving a life sentence based on a trial full of hearsay and no physical evidence. We are currently awaiting her appeal, which her lawyers have said that there should be no problem getting.

Mr. D said the thing he learned through all of this was that life is short, that he knew for sure he did not want to live his life without me, and that he would propose eventually. He wanted the trial to be over and for our lives to somewhat quiet down, even though we both knew that as long as Sister Doily was in prison, our lives would never be normal. Our relationship was rescued and preserved by a tragic event that honestly probably would have broken most people up. I could have walked away because it would have been the easy thing to do. He could have shut me out and driven me off because, for him, it would’ve been the easiest thing to do. Instead we grew more in that six-month period of time in our lives than we had during the entire five years of our relationship. The silver lining to this story is that we learned that what we had was worth fighting for and that sometimes life sucks and you need to make the most of the chances and life you have been given.