The Wedding Video

1988

“Do you want to see Mommy and Daddy’s wedding?” I asked my kids. All four of them had congregated in the kitchen, drawn by hunger and late afternoon restlessness. As we moved into the next room, I felt relieved. I’d get them started with the DVD and then slip out of the room and make dinner. It had been a long week; I wanted that little snippet of time to myself. 

But, moments after it began, I found myself standing motionless before the TV. A few minutes later, my husband came in and laughed lightly at the surprise of finding our wedding playing. He started to walk away but, a moment later, he was standing beside me. He and I could have been 90 year-olds: so still we were, so touched by seeing the faces of people we knew long ago, and so many years it seemed since that day.

“Hey, is that Uncle Kevin?” my daughter shouted, pointing at a groomsman.

“You knew him way back then?” my son asked.

“We’ve been friends since we were kids,” my husband said. I smiled at the warmth in his voice.

There is our old friend Leigh who would die of adrenal cancer about six years later. Of course we didn’t even know then that she would get sick. She and I would meet for dinner a few years after the wedding when we all lived in New York. Leigh would wear a crocheted cap, covering her bald head. We’d talk about graduate school and books and then she would be gone. In our wedding video, her hair is thick and blond.

There is my bridesmaid Beth who later would move to rural Tennessee and have five children. We write every Christmas now, sending each other pictures of the children with whom we share our days.

There are my husband’s maternal grandparents, she in a long, seafoam dress and he in a cream-colored suit and white leather belt. His grandmother’s eyes radiate joy as they stand quietly at the reception. They have been dead a long time now.

There are our friends Michael and Brad with the word “YES” written in black electrical tape on the back of their shirts under their tuxedo jackets. They flashed that exuberant message to us from the balcony as we recessed from the sanctuary and strolled around the reception, jacketless, to communicate the message. Now they are both fathers themselves, married to people with whom they are crafting lasting marriages.

There are my oldest nieces and nephew, so little, twirling in circles. One of them, a baby, scowls in my mother’s arms. Now this little red-haired baby is a young woman my mother admires – they talk about poetry and social justice and meet each other for lunch.

There are a few others who grin and embrace us in the video, but who are just strangers to us now. Our friendships were broken and the pieces were lost along the way.

And there is the pink wedding cake that I smear onto my husband’s face, the funny floral headpiece I wore, and the bridesmaids in their Laura Ashley prints.

In the homily, the pastor gently warns that there will be hard times ahead. My husband and I are smiling at each other. We make our vows – my voice is very quiet and his loud and high-spirited. We spoke the words, made the promises, but truly we had no idea about texture and tenacity of some of the hard times ahead.

The video ends abruptly as we leave for our honeymoon, pulling out of the church parking lot.

Sitting on the edge of the couch, I look at my husband, proud of the accomplishment of building this marriage, trudging through the hard times, trusting that there would be joy ahead, learning to be parents together, and, simply, keeping our vows as best as we could.

And I felt proud of my married friends. Like us, they have also had to move through painful times. Times when a spouse disappoints us. Times when there is not enough money or not enough sleep or not enough joy and it is difficult to be in the house together. Times when children are sick, jobs are lost, and when the winter seems like it will never end. Some of our friends, friends we see in their late 80s finery in the video, haven't remained married. Their hearts broken, torn irreparably by conflict and disappointment with their spouses, they move on. Some have remarried; others proceed through life, for now, on their own.

“I’m glad you got married,” my oldest son said quietly. “Otherwise –“ and with this he gestured at his siblings, “we wouldn’t be here.”

YES! YES! YES!