One Funeral and a Wedding
July 20th, 2007 @ 3:48 pm by Guest
by Sarah A.
My second day back to work after the honeymoon, my counterpart at another organization called and asked point-blank what was going on. Apparently a month earlier, he’d called and asked for me, and was told I was “on leave due to a personal tragedy.” Two weeks later, he called again and was told I was on my honeymoon. Both answers were right.
On June 10, thirteen days before my wedding (and seven days before my birthday), my father was killed in a single-vehicle accident. Having lost my mother to breast cancer twenty years ago, and having been “Daddy’s Little Girl” since long before that, it was a huge, horrible surprise. Absolutely the worst thing I could imagine happening. As my tearful fiance called his parents and my boss, I could do nothing but pace around the house, mumbling “Oh my God,” and “I just can’t believe it” and “What am I going to do?”
What I had to do first was call the coroner, then my father’s widow (who had been driving, and I think still believes I blame her for the accident), then his sister, to try to plan out the next week. About four hours after we got the phone call, we cancelled a huge pre-wedding party that had been planned for the following weekend, emailing everyone we could think of, and posting the news on our wedding website. Then I wrote a eulogy because I couldn’t sleep, and went to bed. Still awake few hours later, I emailed a friend whose father had died of a heart attack just days before her planned elopement, and asked her to call me as soon as she could.
