Though I’d always hoped to marry one day, regardless of its legality, I’d never envisioned a conventional wedding ceremony. Something quick, private and informal was more what I had in mind, exchanging vows before a judge and then grabbing a bite to eat. That was not what Crankenstein wanted for herself, so we compromised. She would get her church wedding, her dress and the cake of her dreams, the whole kit and caboodle. But we’d keep things simple, and I nixed the idea of an interfaith ceremony (complete with ketubah) since I’m not religiously observant.
We easily agreed on most of the basics, like a modest guest list. Altogether we had roughly 25 guests, and we resisted pressure to invite far-right relatives, including an aunt who once wrote a letter to Crankenstein, on the occasion of one of her graduations, to inform her that no matter her worldly accomplishments, she was destined for hell on the basis of her ‘sinful’ lifestyle. (To be fair, if you consider excessive napping and enthusiastic cheese consumption sinful, my wife is practically Charles Manson.)
Since Crankenstein was still in training and we were drowning in student loans, we allotted ourselves a minimal budget. We spent a grand total of around $1,200 on our wedding, with no outside contributions. That meant thrift-store clothing, $30 silicone wedding bands and an intimate church hall reception catered with takeout from a restaurant across the street. A fellow congregant loaned us colorful tablecloths and a friend made centerpieces from pressed leaves and grocery store flowers. For entertainment, we had conversation and a stack of board games. My cousin and his husband snapped the photos.
Our biggest dilemmas involved music and, separately, my future in-laws. There’s only so much I can write about them while they’re still alive and kicking, but I think if you read between the lines of Crankenstein’s fundamentalist upbringing, eating disorder, alarming sleep disturbance, and her parents’ religious uncertainty about whether they could attend their own daughter’s nuptials, you have a decent beginner’s guide to some of what we’re dealing with. (“Harsh,” I suspect she’ll reply upon reading this. “But not untrue.”) We went back and forth about whether to have music at the reception and on one of those occasions I asked what song she’d want if we had a first dance.
My choice was ‘our’ song, happy and romantic. Hers was the folk supergroup Cry Cry Cry’s cover of Julie Miller’s “By Way of Sorrow.” It’s a lovely and appropriately celebratory song, but also quite depressing. If I heard it in the context of a first dance, I might want to slit my wrists and do a merry jig, which, come to think of it, represents Crankenstein’s personality quite well. She overcame a truly wretched childhood and adolescence (and, hell, most of her twenties) through sheer grit and no small amount of grace, but I knew that hearing “By Way of Sorrow” would make me want to pause the track, kick my in-laws out and resume the festivities without them.
We decided not to dance, which was a relief because I shook like a leaf at the time thanks to Crohn’s-induced struggles with dehydration. Photos of our cake-cutting show Crankenstein holding the knife in one hand, my hand atop hers, while steadying my elbow with the other so I didn’t injure either of us — or, more importantly, the cake. If this sounds grim, it sort of was, though it’s far funnier to us now that we know I’d likely had Parkinson’s or a similar condition for several years by then. If you can’t laugh at that, can you laugh at anything? That’s essentially marriage in a nutshell, anyway, squeezing each other’s hands and looking for amusement through whatever strange challenges life throws at you.