Chapter 20

Hudson Valley, New York

September 2011

I was told so many times things like “Your wedding will be a blur,” “You won’t remember a thing,” and “It will go by so quickly, it’ll be over before you know it,” that I made a concerted effort not to allow the weekend to go by in a blur. The yogi in me worked hard to “be present” for all of it, and our wedding was quite a bash.

It was funny how Dave had strong opinions about just a few, very specific things: the texture of the bread during the dinner (I’m not kidding, the man takes his bread very seriously, and he did not want the rolls to be too crispy), the forks we registered for (as he said, “We’ll be eating off these forks for the rest of our lives, it’s important we get this right”), the seating arrangements, and a few other things. He sweetly requested that I wear at least some of my hair down as opposed to an upswept look because that is how he prefers it normally. But other than that, he let me and my mother run with most of the planning, and we did, and we had a blast doing it together.

There was one minor mishap a week before the wedding, when the stylist from the big, fancy New York City salon gave me “highlights” that turned out to be a single tone of platinum blond. I am a natural brunette with dark brown eyes; I can pull off natural highlights that fall somewhere in the family of “golden” or “honey,” but this was “porn-star meets Playboy bunny,” according to one rather honest friend. That, I could not pull off. Three appointments later, only after returning to the guy who had originally done my highlights as a teenager in upstate New York before I got all fancy, I got my hair back to some semblance of a naturally occurring color, albeit still a touch lighter than my original preference.

The wedding day itself went off without a hitch. The ceremony was in the local Catholic church and the party was in the backyard of my childhood home, where we danced all night surrounded by hundreds of loved ones. One of the primary reasons we had wanted to get married so close to home was because my grandmother, about to turn ninety-six, was largely housebound by that time. She had waited long enough for this day and there was no way I was going to let her miss it. For our wedding date Dave and I had chosen the same date on which Grandma and Grandpa had gotten married nearly three-quarters of a century earlier, and I wanted to make sure that she and I got our dance together.

My favorite part of the entire weekend was seeing Dave standing at the altar. We had not done a “first look” beforehand, so en vogue these days, and the church was the first place we saw each other on our wedding day. I remember feeling so nervous standing with my dad outside the door to the church in the moments before I walked down the aisle. My stomach felt like I had swallowed an entire bowl of goldfish as I watched my sister and sister-in-law and best friends process past in their gorgeous bridesmaid gowns.

And then, the “Wedding March” began to play, my dad led me inside, and I saw Dave. All the nerves—poof!—were gone in that instant. Our eyes locked. This was what it was all about. I was marrying this man. Everything else, everyone else, vanished. As I walked down the aisle, I saw Dave fighting back tears. “I couldn’t believe it, that first glimpse I had,” Dave told me later. “I couldn’t believe that I was seeing you in a wedding dress and that you were walking towards me.”

When the priest had asked us if we would be writing our own vows or saying traditional ones, we’d decided to go with the traditional. The writer in me believed that there was no way to top those age-old words, uttered on that happiest of days since time immemorial. What could be more powerful than the words “I, Allison, take you, David, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, for as long as we both shall live”?

I meant those words. I did. I did not just blindly recite them; it was a commitment I was thoughtfully and purposefully making. I’d put more thought into that decision than any other in my life. And I realized that all of those contingency clauses, the words like “in sickness and in health,” would have their day of reckoning. I had seen both my grandmothers nurse my grandfathers at the ends of their lives. I knew that would happen to Dave and to me at some point. But as I stood there at the altar, I thought we were looking at, say, seventy years before that was upon us. “For as long as we both shall live.” We would live a long time. At some point in the distant future, I would be required to summon fortitude and accept days that would not be fun, days of caregiving for an ailing and elderly spouse, or vice versa. At the end of a long and happy and full life, about the time our grandkids were making their own wedding vows—I would have a chance to live out the truth of these vows.

I had not realized that it would be so soon, on the near side of thirty.

But on that day we didn’t think about any of that. When I look at pictures of us from our wedding I see only smiles of innocence and confidence and joy, two people so totally consumed in that present elation, a pair who think only with excitement about everything life will throw at them.