I am Planning My Wedding Without You / A Letter to Caroline
By Savanna Phelan-Jones
I am planning my wedding without you. And, it’s so many exciting things. So many exciting things that so many have done before us: planning our bridal parties, buying rings, writing vows, dress shopping, choosing who we want to be there on our big day, thinking about our future, thinking about family and how it is when we’re all together. It’s also full of grief, and missing you and thinking about the relationship we had and could’ve and would’ve had, as adults, today. Thinking about the family we had when you were with us. How mom and dad only get one wedding, for one daughter, instead of two. How you would’ve loved to do this alongside me and how much fun we would’ve had. You would have helped me- with the monotonous and task-oriented to-do’s but also the “thinking through” that accompanies decisions that aren’t so straight forward. I miss you in the in-between moments where I contemplate the things that actually matter- relationships, and making people feel special, and finding the right words, and sitting silently with joy in the now.
We chose to get married in Fort Collins by the river. Home. So often, in my mind, you are biking by the river- hair flowing behind you and going just fast enough to release the handlebars, spread your arms, and feel the breeze like a mid-air bird. Like the bird that you become in Tai’s high school AP art series after you died. A beautiful, white dove. Free and bright.
I am sitting cross-legged here now, leaning back under an old willow watching the river flow by, and memories of our childhood in it. A birthday, a fight, tears, making igloos, picking up fermented apples and throwing them into buckets, jumping on the trampoline, pretending we got high off that weed, late afternoons spent stomping in the puddles made in the streets by Summer storms. Watching poppies and the grape hyacinths swell in the blooming sea of the backyard, playing with Bear, choosing the paint color for our forever-in-my-mind orange bathroom.
I see us snuggled in the yellow room, in our bunkbeds, smiling for mom’s camera in our little matching sleeping dresses, one two sizes smaller than the other, as if we were little dolls from the 80s. I see us in that same room as teenagers, laying beside each other in the too-small twin bed, heads bucked back in laughter at the selfies we’re taking with our point and shoot camera.
More memories float by, down the river. Us around the dining room table: studying, eating meals as a family, presenting towering home-made birthday cakes to each other, baked with so much love, equally as messy as they are delicious. Talking with mom. Crying with mom. Being teenagers, and confused, and chaotic, and reckless, and hilarious. Doing homework and writing letters that will be forever imprinted into the soft wood of the table.
I am planning my wedding without you. Most of it is so very joyful, but you not being here is tough. Mom and I went dress shopping the other day, and it was full of laughs and smiles and kissing the frog-dresses to find the prince-dress and her being her. We found “the one” and cried quietly in between telling each other we wish you were here with us.
I wrote Vasko and I’s story for our wedding website and I snuck you in. He proposed at the cabin on what is now “engagement rock” and, of course, the group, made up of our forever people, had to take a celebratory birthday suit dunk in the pond that the cabin overlooks: Lake Caroline. We all know it’s a small pond, but mom named it, and so Lake Caroline it is and will forever be. I wouldn’t change it for the world. It feels like a piece of you is there with us even though it’s a place you never got to know. Sometimes I feel you in the breeze and the silence and the padding of moose hooves, and I feel like you’re there. Like you know exactly how it feels to be at the cabin.
I’m planning my wedding without you, and I’ll grieve you for the rest of my life. I find myself grasping at straws for ways to have you be there, at the wedding with me (with us), involved in the fun and the ceremony and the love even though you’re gone. I bought mom, Sissy, Emma, and Grace all the special you-bracelets I also got myself, which holds a gem of your ashes in between a delicate gold chain. I also bought one for Tai, who I invited to the wedding. Your bestie, a lifetime ago, when you two were just younger than the kids enrolled in my program now. She will be a piece of you there- perhaps unpredictable, but full of love nonetheless. I hope that having her there will make me feel closer to you. It will.
I wish you could’ve met Vasko. I know you would have loved him. You two would have had a playful, honest, and loving relationship. I will save a seat for you but I won’t save my tears- the only option is to use waterproof mascara for all the grief and joy that is sure to greet me at the (metaphorical) chapel.
I am planning my wedding without you and even though you can’t be here, I’m gonna try my best to make it feel like you are. I guess this is what we do as humans. We continue to find the breadcrumbs back to each other, and keep digging up the evidence that you were here. Because you were. You mattered. You were alive. You were so very special. You were my sister.