The Father Daughter Dance I'll Never Have

On planning a wedding as a member of the dead dad's club.

July 26th marks the eight year anniversary of my father’s passing. As everyone promised it would, the grief has gotten more manageable over time—it’s transformed from a searing pain to a dull ache that’s always there, but easier to ignore—but it’s never fully gone away. And some days, it still really hurts.

As I’ve started to plan my wedding over the last six months, those days of missing him intensely have gotten increasingly frequent. Not just because it breaks my heart that he’ll never get to meet the man I’m going to marry—who, it’s worth noting, has all of his best (and some of his most annoying) qualities—but also because I know how much he really wanted to be there. Watching his daughter get married on a beach (his favorite place in the world) with an all-you-can-eat taco bar would have been a dream come true.

It’s been eight years to the day since I said goodnight to him for the last time, and our final conversation—which happened to be about my wedding—has been replaying in my head nearly every day since my fiancé and I got engaged last October. In that vein, I recently returned to an essay I wrote shortly after he died about how hard going to weddings had become as a newly-minted member of the dead dad’s club.

I’ve always known that exchanging my own vows without my dad would be a whole lot tougher than watching other people do it. And as that moment gets closer and closer (170 days, but who’s counting), I feel his absence more and more. I wish so badly that he could be the one to walk me down the aisle, or that I could see his reaction to me in a wedding dress, or that he could help me explain to my mom that a buffet really is the best option for a beach-front reception.

But though he isn’t going to be there physically, I know he’ll still *be* there in so many ways—in the people he left behind, in the setting, and in me, a person I think he’d be really proud of. My partner and I are constantly thinking up ways to include him in the day that feel meaningful, but not depressing, and have a few ideas that I think will honor his memory in a way he would love. It doesn’t make me miss him any less, but it helps.

Below, you’ll find the essay I’ve been reading and re-reading over the last few weeks (which has rudely been taken off the Internet by its original publisher, and I think deserves a new place to live) to try and make sense of some of the wedding-related grief that’s come along with the planning process.

XOX

Zoë