The day before my brother’s wedding, we stood together on the concrete car park that covers a fraction of our mother’s yard. I had written my best man speech on the plane from New York, and the loss of our father featured heavily. I asked Jordan, my younger brother, whether he had thought about our father in the days leading up to his wedding.
Jordan, 29, the first of us to marry, recited his vows on Sept. 14 in a quaint chapel in Kansas City, where we both grew up. Our father wasn’t there. He had died more than a decade earlier, just days before Christmas in 2010.
“Of course,” Jordan said. “I think about whether he’d cry, whether he’d be the life of the party, whether he’d be proud.”
The conversation was brief. We were past the point of needing to unpack any lingering grief — and there was a rehearsal brunch to prepare for.
The next day, on the morning of the wedding, my phone rang, and I answered a teary-eyed call from my partner. Her father had been in and out of hospitals for a year, sick with multiple myeloma.
Instead of traveling to the wedding, she had flown to Edmonton, Canada, to be by his hospital bed after he decided that he had enough. He had died that morning.
I sat in a stew of grief and sympathy for her, only to stand in revelry at my brother’s side later that day.
It was a strange dichotomy, and the juxtaposition dazed me.
In a span of days, I went from a wedding to a burial rites ceremony.
Weddings are often trumpeted as the happiest day of a person’s life. But tragedy, be it a sudden death or a re-emergence of grief, can too easily confound such an emotional day.
For some, tying the knot after the loss of a loved one can seem impossible. How can happiness and despair coexist? Where do we file away such competing emotions?
Rituals and milestone events that hold both joy and grief are deeply human and have existed across cultures for centuries. In those moments, experts say, embracing grief, leaning into the joy and making room for both emotions can be a powerful and cathartic acknowledgment of life and love.
“It’s actually extremely common,” Tessa West, a social psychologist at New York University, said of situations in which joy and grief collide. “What’s not common is for us to know what to do with those competing emotions. There’s no right or wrong way to feel happy on a sad day or vice versa. Grief works like that.”
Vasiya Capparo Kemp, 52, married just 10 days after saying goodbye to her father on the phone in a bathroom at her job. “I felt very alone,” she said.
At the time, Ms. Kemp, a public relations professional in Lafayette, Colo., had no reason to think her father, who was 70, would die anytime soon. She and her fiancé, Nikki, had just visited him in San Diego.
During the trip, her father said that he hadn’t been feeling well, but Ms. Kemp didn’t think much of it. He had always been in great shape and had even gone back to school for a psychology degree. He was meant to graduate that summer.
“There was no indication,” Ms. Kemp said.
So when she hadn’t heard from him for a while, and a new TV they had bought as a graduation and birthday gift couldn’t be delivered, Ms. Kemp became worried.
She learned that her father had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and it had spread to his liver.
He had known for months, she said, but didn’t want to add to Ms. Kemp’s stress as she prepared to marry, or burden her three younger siblings.
“I just felt this profound sadness,” Ms. Kemp said. “It was very hard.”
Ms. Kemp had planned to fly to see her father before her nuptials, but he died before she could make it there.
The family did not have a funeral. With friends and family already flying in for her backyard wedding in Englewood, Colo., Ms. Kemp pressed on. She later recognized that having time and space to grieve might have made a world of difference.
“My first reaction was, ‘How do I get out of this?’” Ms. Kemp said. “I didn’t want to get married, I didn’t want to have this wedding, I didn’t want to put on a brave face that I wasn’t feeling.”
She added: “I just felt alone with my feelings. There wasn’t really a sense of community around the passing or a funeral. We just didn’t feel like we had the time.”
That sense of moving forward before there is space to fully mourn is a familiar one, grief counselors say — especially when a loss collides with life’s milestones. Even as grief lingers, people still continue to gather and mark moments.
“As I would tell my clients, You will be sad, and you will be happy — both are important,” said Jill Cohen, a grief counselor in New York. “Your dad is dead, that’s true, and it’s awful, but you are still here.”
After the wedding festivities quieted, Ms. Kemp and her siblings finally had time to grieve. Each took some of their father’s ashes. One sister scattered her share in the Pacific; the other did so on her favorite hike. Their brother still holds on to his part. Ms. Kemp planted hers in her backyard, where a linden tree now grows.
People process ambivalent feelings in different ways, but Ms. West cautioned against keeping one’s emotions completely separate. “What you shouldn’t do is push it down,” she said. “Acknowledging that you’re sad, that you have some guilt, all that yucky stuff, is OK.”
Rituals and symbolic gestures — leaving an open chair at a wedding for a deceased loved one or wearing a piece of jewelry that belonged to that person — can create space for both grief and joy to coexist, said Emily Balcetis, a psychology professor at N.Y.U.
“We see people honor that loved one, not by pushing grief away, but by weaving it into the day,” Ms. Balcetis said.
Don Bradley, 71, lost his older sister to cancer in 2003. Her death drew him closer to her three daughters. When the middle one, Laura Wallace, 44, died in 2012, there was no question that Mr. Bradley would be at the funeral. But another niece, his brother’s daughter, was planning to marry on the same day.
Mr. Bradley and a caravan of extended family attended the funeral in Joplin, Mo., and then drove the roughly two and a half hours to Lee’s Summit, Mo., for the wedding that evening.
Grief didn’t cancel the joy of the day, nor did joy erase the loss they felt. Both events required Mr. Bradley to be fully present. He stopped between them only long enough to change his suit.
“I just couldn’t wear a funeral suit to a wedding,” Mr. Bradley, a retired journalist, said.
Erinn Vargas, 44, the niece whose wedding Mr. Bradley was attending, worried that family members wouldn’t join the celebration, or that grief would hang heavily over the day. She hadn’t been close to her deceased cousin, she said, but she was heartbroken that she couldn’t attend the funeral or be there for her family.
“That week was kind of insane,” said Ms. Vargas, an athletic trainer in Queens. “I remember getting there the day of the wedding, getting ready and having this sort of guilty feeling.”
What Mr. Bradley remembers the most is the expression on his brother’s face when he walked into the wedding: a look of relief, even joy.
“Everyone who cried at the funeral that day, laughed at some point that night,” Mr. Bradley said.
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