By Christie Clough
Right before our wedding, people would ask Bryan and me the same type of question over and over. "Are you nervous?" "Are you scared?" "Are you freaked out about getting married?"
These questions surprised us, because given the fact that Bryan and I had faced one of the toughest challenges a couple can go through – namely, Bryan's diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor – we were not nervous. We were not scared. We were not freaked out. On the contrary, we couldn't wait. We knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that we were brought together nearly three years ago as soulmates who would be faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge. We couldn't wait, after six weeks of intense radiation and chemotherapy, to celebrate together and finally become husband and wife. Because the truth of the matter is, Bryan and I were already married. Not in the legal sense, but in a spiritual, emotional and intellectual sense. We felt, in the best way possible, as though we were celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary rather than the beginning of our lives together. Simply put, a couple doesn't go through something as devastating as a brain tumor diagnosis (not to mention treatment) and come out of it nervous to get married. Instead, they come out of it with a foundation of marriage more solid than a rock. In Bryan's and my case, there wasn't a sentence we couldn't finish for each other, a feeling or look we couldn't immediately recognize, or a silence that didn't speak volumes.
So when people asked us if we were nervous to get married, our reply was always "no." And while I was nervous about practical things, like Bryan's ability to walk to the alter (his leg was weak from radiation) and his energy level (he had finished treatment less than two weeks before our wedding), the one thing I was absolutely not nervous about was becoming Mrs. Bryan Bishop. Because in my mind, I had been that way forever.
You can read more about Bryan's brain tumor and treatments on Christie's blog, An Inconvenient Tumor. |
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