The Wedding That Never Was

I still want my wedding.

It is a ridiculous thing to admit at my age, particularly given the circumstances. I am a widow, a mother, a woman who has buried more people than she cares to count, and somewhere beneath the accumulated wreckage of a life that has rarely gone according to plan, I still want my fucking wedding.

Not a grand affair. No horse-drawn carriage, no seven-tier cake, no army of bridesmaids dressed in identical shades of something unfortunate.

Just a wedding.

A dress. Music. Dancing. People I loved gathered in one place. The opportunity to be happy without having to apologise for it.

And someone standing beside me who was delighted to be there.

That last part, I realise now, may have been the most ambitious element of the entire fantasy.

We married in Ljubljana, in a civil ceremony so brief and unremarkable that I sometimes wonder whether it happened at all. Of course it did. There were signatures, official documents, the necessary legal formalities. We emerged from the building as husband and wife, which was rather extraordinary considering how little seemed to have changed.

The celebration would come later, in Amman.

That was the understanding.

I had already lost my father by then. I knew he would never walk me down the aisle, never embarrass me with a speech, never dance with me while I tried not to cry. Those things had already been taken off the table.

I had made my peace with it, or at least with the fact that there was nothing I could do about it.

But I still had my brothers. I still had my mother. I still had a man I loved. I still had the prospect of a room full of people celebrating something wonderful.

It seemed a reasonable thing to look forward to.

Then his brother announced his engagement.

We should wait, my husband said. It wouldn't be right to take attention away from his brother.

I understood.

I was always understanding in those days.

I understood that other people's feelings mattered, that families had expectations, that timing was important. I understood the delicate politics of celebrations, the unwritten rules governing who was entitled to be happy and when.

I understood that my wedding would have to wait.

Then I became pregnant.

Apparently, this rendered the entire enterprise obsolete.

"People don't have weddings after they've had a baby," he informed me.

I wasn't aware of this particular regulation. I had seen no official announcement, received no circular, heard nothing from the relevant authorities. Perhaps somewhere there was an international committee responsible for deciding when a woman ceased to qualify as a bride.

I imagined its members gathered around a table, solemnly reviewing my application.

Applicant has already reproduced. Request denied.

I might have laughed if I hadn't wanted to cry.

I tried explaining that the wedding mattered to me.

Not the legality of it. Not the public declaration of marital status. We had already dealt with those things.

I wanted the celebration.

I wanted the memory.

I wanted to be a bride.

Some people seemed genuinely puzzled by this.

"You're not Arab," they said.

This was apparently supposed to settle the matter.

I had married an Arab man, was preparing to raise children who would belong to two cultures, and had made considerable efforts to understand a family and a society different from the one in which I had grown up.

But when it came to celebrating my own marriage, I was suddenly reminded of what I wasn't.

Not Arab.

Not entitled, apparently, to want a wedding.

I never quite understood the logic. Weddings, as far as I knew, were not an exclusively Arab invention. People had been getting married, dressing up, drinking too much and dancing badly all over the world for centuries.

I wasn't asking for a royal procession.

I wanted a party.

But there was always a reason why I couldn't have one.

And eventually, as the years passed, I stopped asking.

This is something I have thought about a great deal since.

How does a woman stop asking for something she wants?

It rarely happens all at once.

First, she agrees to wait because the reason seems sensible. Then she agrees to wait again because the circumstances have changed. Eventually, she begins to feel embarrassed about bringing it up.

After a while, she tells herself it doesn't matter.

She may even start defending the decision to other people.

Oh, we never bothered with a proper wedding.

We had other priorities.

It's only a party, after all.

She says these things with a little laugh, as though the whole idea were faintly absurd.

And if she says them often enough, other people believe her.

Sometimes she almost believes herself.

The years went by. We had children. We moved through the ordinary business of family life, or what passed for ordinary in ours. There were school runs, laundry, bills, arguments, illnesses, celebrations of other people's milestones.

And somewhere along the way, the marriage changed.

Or perhaps I simply began to see things I hadn't wanted to see.

The man I had married became increasingly unkind.

There was no single moment when everything collapsed. No dramatic scene in which the loving husband suddenly revealed himself as a villain. It was more insidious than that.

A comment here. A dismissal there. An argument that somehow always ended with me apologising, even when I wasn't entirely sure what I'd done.

My feelings became inconveniences. My objections became evidence that I was difficult. Things I remembered clearly were questioned until I began to wonder whether I remembered them at all.

I grew accustomed to measuring my words.

To anticipating moods.

To calculating whether something mattered enough to risk an argument.

I became very good at not asking for things.

Looking back, I wonder whether the wedding had been an early rehearsal.

I had told him something mattered to me.

He had decided it didn't.

And somehow, that had become the end of the discussion.

At the time, I thought we were disagreeing about a party.

Now I wonder whether we were establishing the rules of our marriage.

There is a peculiar loneliness in living with someone who makes you feel that your needs are excessive simply because they exist.

You begin to shrink.

Not visibly. Not in ways other people necessarily notice.

You still go to work, raise children, cook dinner, laugh at jokes. You still have opinions about books and politics and the correct way to load a dishwasher.

But certain parts of yourself become quieter.

You stop expecting tenderness.

You stop imagining surprises.

You stop believing that someone might do something lovely simply because it would make you happy.

And eventually you become so practised at making do that you forget what it felt like to expect more.

I don't know exactly when I stopped imagining our wedding.

Perhaps I never did.

Perhaps I simply pushed the image into some remote corner of my mind, alongside all the other things I had once wanted and subsequently persuaded myself I could live without.

Then he died.

The sentence looks absurdly small on the page.

He died.

Two words, and suddenly an entire life had to be reorganised.

People tend to assume that death simplifies a marriage. That whatever happened before is swallowed by the enormity of the loss, leaving behind a purified version of love.

It doesn't work like that.

At least it didn't for me.

I grieved.

I was angry.

I missed things about him.

I remembered things I wished I could forget.

Sometimes I wanted him back. Sometimes I wanted to confront him about everything he had done. Sometimes I wanted an apology I knew I would never receive.

Death had taken away not only the man, but also the possibility of ever resolving what had happened between us.

There would be no admission that he'd hurt me.

No conversation in which he finally understood.

No opportunity for him to say that he'd been wrong, about the wedding or anything else.

And I was left with the strange task of grieving someone who had also caused me pain.

There ought to be a word for that particular kind of mourning.

Perhaps there is.

I haven't found one that feels quite adequate.

Then my brothers died.

Both of them.

And something peculiar happened.

I began thinking about the wedding again.

Not the marriage. Not the husband. The wedding.

I imagined my brothers there, laughing, making inappropriate jokes, possibly drinking more than they should. I imagined photographs of us together, all dressed up, caught in the unguarded expressions that make family photographs worth keeping.

I imagined my father, too, although I knew he could never have been there.

The mind is generous with impossible reunions.

And then there's my mother.

My mother is still alive.

I find myself having to make that distinction these days, because although she is physically here, dementia has taken her somewhere I cannot follow.

She no longer knows who I am.

There is something almost unbearably cruel about having to grieve someone who is still breathing. I can stand in front of the woman who gave birth to me, who once knew my face better than anyone, and find no recognition in her eyes.

I am still her daughter.

She just doesn't know it anymore.

And sometimes I think that hurts in a way death doesn't. Death, for all its brutality, leaves you with the memories of being known. Dementia can make you feel as though those memories are being erased while you're still trying to hold on to them.

I imagine her at my wedding. Not necessarily fussing over my dress or crying into a handkerchief, but simply knowing that it is my wedding. Knowing that I am her daughter. Knowing why we are celebrating.

Such an ordinary thing to want from one's mother.

Such an extraordinary thing to lose.

I imagine music and dancing. An untidy, joyous room full of people who are alive, who recognise one another, who know why they have gathered.

And I realise, with a kind of horrified clarity, that the guest list for my imaginary wedding has become a collection of people I can no longer reach.

Some are dead.

One is still here, but no longer knows my name.

There are photographs I will never have.

Not because somebody lost the camera or forgot to print them.

Because the moments themselves never existed.

My brothers and I will never pose together at my wedding.

There will be no photograph of my mother looking at me with the recognition I once took for granted. No ridiculous picture of someone caught mid-mouthful of cake, no blurry evidence of a celebration that went on too long.

Nothing to discover in a drawer twenty years later.

Nothing for my children to laugh at.

No memories to reconstruct from faded images.

There is a particular cruelty in mourning things that never happened.

We know how to grieve what we've lost, at least in theory. There are rituals for it. Funerals, anniversaries, photographs, graves.

But what does one do with the absence of an event?

Where do you put the wedding you never had?

How do you mourn the woman you never got to be?

Because I think that is what I am mourning.

Not merely the dress, the dancing or the photographs.

I am mourning the woman who expected to be celebrated.

The woman who believed that telling her husband something mattered to her would make a difference.

The woman who hadn't yet learned to make herself smaller.

I look back at her with a mixture of affection and impatience.

I want to tell her to stop being so understanding.

I want to tell her that her brother-in-law's engagement is not a valid reason to postpone her happiness indefinitely. That having a baby does not disqualify her from being a bride. That she does not need to be Arab to deserve a wedding in Amman.

I want to tell her that love should not require her to argue for the smallest kindnesses.

Most of all, I want to tell her not to wait.

Not because I know what will happen, but because I know how easily waiting becomes a way of life.

There is always another reason.

Another complication.

Another person whose needs are supposedly more important.

And before you know it, the years have slipped past, people have died, people who once knew you no longer recognise you, and the things you thought you were postponing have become impossible.

I still want my wedding.

I could have a party now, I suppose.

I could buy a beautiful dress and invite friends. We could dance and drink and celebrate my continued existence, which, given everything, is perhaps an achievement worth marking.

But it wouldn't be the wedding I wanted.

And, more importantly, I'm no longer sure I would want the man I married standing beside me.

That is the part I find hardest to admit.

I miss the possibility of what we might have been more than I miss much of what we actually became.

I wanted a wedding with someone who was proud to marry me.

I wanted a marriage in which my happiness mattered.

I wanted to be loved without having to negotiate the terms of my own existence.

And for years, I confused the fact that I had a husband with the belief that I had those things.

Perhaps the wedding has become a symbol of everything I wasn't given.

Perhaps I cling to it because it's easier to say I wanted a party than to say I wanted to be cherished.

Easier to mourn a dress than a marriage that slowly wore me down.

Easier to picture an empty dance floor than to confront how often I felt alone while standing right beside someone.

But I'm tired of pretending it was a silly thing to want.

It wasn't.

I wanted to be celebrated.

I wanted to be chosen, not merely married.

I wanted someone to look at me and think that making me happy was worth the trouble.

And I wanted photographs.

God, how I wanted those photographs.

I wanted proof of a day when everybody was there, when my brothers were alive, when my mother still knew my face, when the music was loud and the future still seemed generous.

I wanted one day that nobody could take away from me.

Instead, I have a marriage certificate, a collection of unfinished arguments and an imaginary wedding populated increasingly by ghosts.

Somewhere, in a life that never happened, my brothers are laughing. My father is smiling. My mother knows exactly who I am. The music is playing, and I am wearing a dress I haven't yet seen.

Someone is waiting for me at the other end of the room.

I can't quite make out their face.

But I can see their smile. They're happy to be there. Happy to see me. And for once, I don't have to wonder whether my happiness is an inconvenience.

I can see my own face clearly, too.

I'm smiling.

And for once, I'm not asking permission.