“Best-looking bride in this whole hospital.”
I laughed, because if I didn’t laugh I was going to fall apart.
I had known him since we were eight.
By sixteen, our families had already started joking about a wedding.
By twenty-eight, we had mailed the invitations.
Then life kicked us in the teeth.
I was going to fall apart.
Two months before the ceremony, Ben collapsed at work.
Everything I had ever planned turned to smoke.
“He has an aggressive form of cancer,” the doctor had told us. “Advanced. I’m sorry. We’re looking at months, not years.”
I remembered nodding without understanding the words.
I remembered Ben reaching for my hand and squeezing it too tight.
“We’re looking at months, not years.”
We canceled the ballroom, the flowers, and the caterers.
Instead, I asked the hospital chaplain if he would marry us in Room 407.
The chaplain arrived with a worn Bible and kind eyes.
A nurse ducked out on her lunch break and returned with a plastic veil from a party store.
Ben insisted on the ridiculous black bow tie I had bought him months ago.
It sat crooked against his hospital pajamas.
I asked the hospital chaplain if he would marry us.
“A groom has standards,” he said, tugging at it.
“You look like a very sick penguin.”
“Marry me anyway.”
I did.
I stood beside his bed and promised things I had believed since I was a child.
My voice cracked on every vow.
“You look like a very sick penguin.”
The nurses in the doorway wiped their eyes on their sleeves.
When the chaplain pronounced us husband and wife, Ben pulled me down gently and pressed his forehead to mine.
“Best day of my life,” he whispered.
“Mine too.”
I didn’t know then that we both meant those words for very different reasons
“Best day of my life,”
Afterwards, people drifted out with quiet congratulations.
Someone brought a grocery store cake.
Ben dozed with my hand in his, and I sat watching the slow rise and fall of his chest.
I was memorizing him the way you memorize a song you’re about to lose.
I finally slipped out to find coffee.
That was when a nurse caught my elbow in the hallway and told me something shocking.
