This weekend, Joe is headed to Portland for a wedding reception for our niece, who was married during Covid. (If you’re wondering where I am, I will be taking vacation for the coming week, as I care for the little ones in his absence and then spend time with family who will visit us up here afterward.) The funny thing is, I keep catching myself saying that he is going to Portland for “a wedding” rather than for “a reception” or “a belated celebration.” That’s sort of what it feels like, since none of us got to celebrate together when the small ceremony took place.
Obviously, postponing their big party was the right thing for my niece and her husband to do, given the Covid numbers at the time of their wedding. But it can’t have been an easy decision. They had been a couple for many years by then. With their degrees finally finished and their careers on track, they got engaged, and they were excited to have moved into the next phase of their lives with a wedding to look forward to. Unfortunately, the pandemic crashed their party, leaving them with the choice to either wait even longer to get married, or to have a wedding that was quite different than the one they had probably envisioned.
This is a phenomenon so many of us experienced in some capacity over the last couple of years. And it can be hard to give ourselves permission to say much about the emotional toll it takes to give up those big moments, because we are aware that many people have suffered physically or lost their lives. We might think we don’t have a right to lament the loss of those rites of passage or those big moments in our family or cultural traditions. But the feelings we have still matter. These are losses. They are worth grieving. In fact, we have to grieve them if we are to move forward in wholeness.
The question, though, is how do we carry ourselves forward in the new reality—the one in which the wedding or the graduation or whatever kind of celebration didn’t happen? That probably looks different for each of us. But if there’s something you missed during the height of Covid, I encourage you to mark or address that missed experience somehow. Whether that happens with an official celebration, or by inviting close family to look at photos with you, or by journaling or scrapbooking, it’s ok to devote some time and emotional energy to the things that otherwise seemed to have passed us by.
I’m so happy that my niece is having this wedding reception, and I’m even happier that those who love her are choosing to travel for the occasion—even knowing that it isn’t “the big event” itself. Though I can’t make the trip this time, I am asking myself how I can show support to others in my life whose moments of joy I might have missed. Do I have friends or family who have marked a significant birthday or anniversary, or embarked on a new job, or achievedretirement, or become a grandparent, or anything else that somehow got “swept under the rug” during the darker times of public health? How can I reach out to acknowledge their joy, even belatedly?
Whatever we’ve endured the past couple of years—and I know the trials have been many—we have much for which we can be thankful. Let’s not be afraid to grieve the experiences we’ve missed, nor to ask others to rejoice with us, even months or years later. As we move toward something that starts to feel more normal, let’s care for those pieces of our hearts that still ache from all we’ve lost, and let’s support those in our lives as they do the same, remembering that it is never too late to share joy, kindness, and love.