— Losing a loved one is among life’s most traumatizing events. But the grief that follows can be even more pronounced if you’re planning a wedding.
by Abby Ellin
Barbara Spina was delighted when her youngest son, Joseph Spina, got engaged in April. She was looking forward to helping with some of the arrangements and welcoming her son’s fiancée, Mariel Milner, into the fold.
She never got the chance. This past July, Ms. Spina suffered a massive heart attack and died while on a cruise with her husband. Suddenly, the happy occasion was obstructed by a dark shadow. Mr. Spina and Ms. Milner didn’t know what to do: Should they not have a wedding at all? Or, hold a smaller event? And how could they pay tribute to his mother without depressing the crowd?
“My mom was so proud of the life Mariel and I were building together,” said Mr. Spina, 32, who lives in Brooklyn and works in business development at MediaLab, a media holding company.
Losing a family member or close friend is excruciating. Period. But the grief can be even more encompassing if you’re planning a wedding, especially if the person who is gone was supposed to play a major role in it. Even more challenging is the fact that cultural conversations about grief aren’t as ubiquitous as, say, discussions about the Kardashians. And there’s no blueprint for how to handle situations that are emotionally ambiguous.
“We do such a terrible job in our culture of normalizing the fact that things are not black or white,” said Rebecca Soffer, a founder of Modern Loss, which offers resources on loss and grief. She is also the author of “The Modern Loss Handbook: An Interactive Guide to Moving Through Grief and Building Your Resilience,” which was published this year.
“I can’t think of any time in my life, except for when I was in childhood, when there was not some kind of bittersweetness associated with any joyful moment,” Ms. Soffer said. “Chances are great that by the time we get married or go through some major celebratory milestone, we will be mourning somebody we wish were present. It’s disingenuous to pretend that celebrations are purely full of joy.”
An online survey recently conducted by Zola, a wedding registry and planning service, and released this month found that 28 percent of the 4,249 couples with 2023 wedding dates said they will be memorializing a relative or friend at their upcoming wedding. Almost everyone also agreed that there wasn’t enough discussion on the subject.
Zola recently partnered with Lantern, a kind of clearinghouse for death-related matters, to create content for couples in mourning.
“It’s OK that not every aspect of wedding planning is joyful and fun and easy breezy,” said Liz Eddy, a founder of Lantern and the chief executive, who lost her father when she was 9. “There’s nothing wrong with you for feeling sad while you’re supposed to be doing something happy.”
In 2006, when Aimee Fortier, an actor and grief coach based in Brooklyn, was 19 her mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Ms. Fortier left college to be her permanent caretaker: “It kind of dislodged my whole adult life,” she said.
Ms. Fortier, 36, remembers leaving the hospital shortly after her mother’s diagnosis and realizing on a visceral level that her mother wouldn’t be alive if and when Ms. Fortier married. That revelation was so painful that she never made marriage a priority. When her boyfriend, Peter Banks-Kenny, a comedian and restaurant owner, she thought long and hard about what she wanted her wedding day to look like. How did she want her mother to be part of the wedding?
Ms. Fortier, who is from New Orleans, where large weddings are common, didn’t want to elope or go to the courthouse. Plus, her stepmother is a wedding planner.
She knew she would have to rely on other people for support. Her father and a group of her closest girlfriends went dress shopping with her. She deliberately had a large wedding party, with nine bridesmaid and eight groomsmen. Her fiancé’s three sisters were “grooms people.”
While she considered putting an empty chair at a table to commemorate her mother, “that would have brought me down,” she said. Instead, the grooms people wore gardenias — her mother’s favorite flower — in their lapels; she and her bridesmaids slid them into their hair. She also took the words “Love Always, Mom,” which her mother had written in a card years earlier, and monogrammed them in blue onto her veil. “It was near my hand, so I could touch it if I wanted to,” she said, a subtle yet powerful homage that only she could see.
Experts in handling grief stress that there is no one way to represent the person or people who aren’t there.
“Everyone’s ways of coping are different,” said Litsa Williams, 42, a social worker and a founder of What’s Your Grief, an online grief support and education company, and the author of What’s Your Grief, published this year. “It can be helpful in really practical ways to think about, how do I want my connection to my loved one who died to be part of my wedding? And thinking about how that can be personal and private and individual and how it can also be shared and public and something that’s part of the day”
Ms. Soffer, 46, whose mother was killed in a car crash about 16 years ago, had a seamstress snip off a piece of fabric from her mother’s hot-pink, woven wedding dress and create a heart shape. Her mother’s initials were embroidered into the fabric, and the heart sewn inside the hem of her wedding dress.
“I gave myself permission to pull her into the day in a way I really needed to, and I freed up that energy to enjoy myself and not think about how much she wasn’t there,” she said.
Some people, like Debbie Wieck, 58, an early childhood teacher at a preschool outside Sydney, Australia, take even more creative approaches. Ms. Wieck lost her 20-year-old son, Jacob, in October 2015, after a 13-month struggle with Ewing’s sarcoma, a soft tissue and bone cancer.
She made a life-size cardboard cutout of Jacob. She brings it to almost every family function, taking photos with him and toasting him. This past April, he “attended” his sister’s wedding.
“People may think we’re a bit weird in the things we do to keep him connected to our lives,” she said in an email. But she doesn’t care. “He will celebrate with us future engagements, weddings and births of new generations of family in this cardboard form — next to me, next to us.”
After conversations with his brother and father, Mr. Spina and Ms. Milner decided to hold their wedding on Oct. 14, 2023, which would have been his mother’s 59th birthday. White zinfandel, which she always loved, will flow liberally. Bon Jovi, another favorite, will blast during the mother/son dance, during which they will invite everyone onto the dance floor. Bartenders will whip up cocktails named for his mother, along with champagne and, of course, white zinfandel. They will be served in “Barbs Bar.”
The goal is to celebrate her without dragging down the festivities. “You can keep moving forward with your life and keep doing the things you were doing, or you can turn negative,” Mr. Spina said. “Then you can spiral down and let your work shift or postpone your wedding because you’re grieving. I wanted to take the opposite approach. My mom loved to live and loved love. I thought, ‘let’s keep living.’ What other choice do you have?”
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