Like the man said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times".  

The days of October 31 to November 2, 1998 were without a doubt the biggest rollercoaster of emotions imaginable, as I married the love of my life first and then inexplicably lost my 24 year old brother Pierre, all in a matter of hours.

That frantic Sunday at the hospital's ER and then ICU, and then the dismal days that followed his death passed me by in a blur.  I should have been on my honeymoon, but instead I was writing a eulogy on behalf of two grief-stricken parents.  I should have been making love in a king-sized bed in a quaint B&B, but instead I was staring blankly out the window as I held my mother's hand.   I remember a grim chuckle, accompanied by fleeting thoughts that I was really in a Dali painting -- the surrealism felt as vivid as colours painted right in front of my eyes.

We  quickly contacted the guy who did our wedding photos to see if there were any of Pierre that I could include in the funeral display.  Look, I don't want to dignify things by calling him a photographer.  Our one true mistake was in trusting my brother-in-law's "friend" to do the job as a favour to him, and it was shite.  The photographs we got back were really awful, although I couldn't really appreciate it at the time what with eveything else happening.  We took the one family shot that was decent, had a rush enlargement made and framed it to put by the casket with some others.

A month or so later, I had a complete and utter breakdown.  I left our one-year-old daughter Serena in Brent's care and went off by myself to Niagara-on-the-Lake for a week, hoping to pull myself together.  I spent most of it in a strange bed, just grateful to able to cry alone as much as I wanted without feeling to need to apologize for my incessant weeping.   I came home empty, a shell.

I suppose life went on as I pulled myself back together, bit by bit -- I honestly don't remember much of it.  But as we approached our first anniversary of wedding/death, one could hardly blame us for feeling slightly anxious.   Our memories of the wedding were so closely linked to the pain of losing Pierre so suddenly that  I felt a new word was needed to replace "bitter-sweet"... it just wasn't strong enough, emphatic enough.

I'm not sure who had the flash of brilliance that October, but I'll credit it to Brent anyways.  We decided to RECLAIM our wedding, refashion it, celebrate it again.  We used a gifted photographer friend and made arrangements to re-shoot everything in our wedding finery.  He rented the tux, I called the florist to re-create my bouquet.  We called the folks at the Enoch Turner School House to ask if we could come in on a weekday afternoon for an hour or two, and they bent over backwards to help us out.    Hair, makeup, gown  -- we planned for the whole shebang.

What a wonderful and joyous time we had of it all!   The day shone with that perfect late-October splendour and I felt I couldn't breathe the air in deep enough.  Jeff had us sneak into the Allan Gardens Conservatory without a photography permit, and shot dozens of gorgeous pictures of us playing in the flowers.

Then we went off to the school house where we frolicked both inside and out.  We posed, we danced, but mostly we just basked in feelings of pure unadulterated love and happiness and let him take his pictures.

At the end of the photo shoot, I surprised Brent by having a limousine waiting for us.   He drove us willy-nilly all around Toronto for the next hour or so as we sipped champagne in the back.  We gazed deeply into each others eyes and re-read our wedding vows, letting the words resonate deeper then ever.

It was magical.  We ended the evening off having a scrumptious dinner at our favourite neighborhood bistro, resplendent in our wedding finery. 

We did it!  Our wedding had been reclaimed as old and new memories co-mingled, leaving us better prepared to deal with the many adventures to come.   Grief stays with me of course, but he's no longer the bridegroom at the wedding,  just an uninvited guest who crashed the party.