September Wedding, a 9/11 story.

Everybody has a 9/11 story. That morning as I rode the Red Line to work, I wrote in my journal about the countdown to my impending wedding scheduled for that Saturday. "Just four more days," I wrote in anticipation. When I got to work my colleagues were clustered around the television in the reception area, eyes glued to the now iconic image of the World Trade Center up in smoke. I knew that very instant that my wedding would, at best, have to be postponed. I called my mother in tears before the first tower fell, sobbing openly within the flimsy confines of my cubicle and not giving a damn who heard me. Work closed early, and I got a ride home in the backseat of a colleague's car. Traffic was heavy; everyone was leaving work. I cried the whole way home. I sat on my couch and didn't move for hours, absorbing the horrors of what was happening on television.

Having grown up in Brooklyn, I felt an overwhelming urge to take every last penny that my fiancé and I had saved for our honeymoon and send it to the Red Cross, keeping just enough to get on the next Greyhound bus bound for New York to volunteer to do whatever I could. My fiancé convinced me not to send all of our money, and the talking heads on TV convinced me that unless I had a specific service that I could offer -- emergency psychiatry, for instance -- that I'd just be a burden arriving in New York at that particular moment. In the end I gave $300 to the Red Cross, and stayed in Chicago, and cried. I cried at home, I cried openly in the streets, I cried in the shower. On September 15, 2001, which should have been my wedding day, I woke to a gorgeous blue sky, and a perfect, sunny day. My fiancé went to work; and I hung out at the shop with him. Someone asked when we were getting married, "our wedding was supposed to be today," I said.

As it happened, we had been legally married by Judge Lambros J. Kutubris a few months earlier because my health insurance required that if I make any changes to my coverage, that I do so during the month of June.  At the time it was a lark – we went to the Cook County Courthouse on a work day during my lunch break, fully expecting the experience to be unremarkable.  Judge Kutubris could not have been more serious in his duties, speaking to us with gravity about marriage, that it is not a contract to be entered into lightly, and would we be exchanging rings today?  Outside the courthouse we walked past a man with a Polaroid camera.  “A picture of the happy couple,” he asked, “five dollars for a beautiful memory.”  We declined, thinking that there would be plenty of time for wedding photos.  What had seemed like an exercise in cutting through red tape was now soothing my battered soul; no matter what happened now - if our country went to war tomorrow, if Chicago was the next city to be terrorized, if familiar names were among the dead and missing, we were married.

The importance of our wedding, which, up until that moment, had been higher than almost anything else I could think of, plummeted in the face of what was happening around us. No one was able to fly to Chicago, or anywhere else, and we were in no mood to celebrate. I didn't want the only topic of conversation at our wedding to be the attacks, and I didn't want to have to remember, on every single wedding anniversary for the rest of my life, what else had happened that week.   We made phone calls letting people know our decision; the most difficult one was to my fiancé’s grandmother in Delavan, Wisconsin.  She had been the real reason behind planning a wedding; any time we felt like throwing in the towel, eloping to Vegas and leaving it at that, we’d think of how important this wedding was for her.  She passed on the following month.

We indefinitely postponed our wedding date; our caterer refunded us in full, as did the airline that we had booked our honeymoon travel with. I love pie more than almost anything else in the world, and we'd planned to have scads of homemade wedding pie instead of cake at our reception. My sister had an apple pie delivered to me at work the day we postponed with a note that read, "For a wonderful sister, and a beautiful bride." I cried again, and ate the whole thing in one sitting.

In our apartment that night, my fiancé and I sat next to each other on our well-worn couch, watching the news.  My wedding dress and his suit hung in the bedroom closet, a chart with table seatings leaned against a wall, and our wedding rings rested in the pillowy interiors of two ring boxes on the mantle.  When I was a little girl I was fascinated with ring boxes, delighting in the satisfying pull and snap they made when my mother let me look through her jewelry and try it on myself.  I’d never owned a piece of jewelry that merited its own box, and had spent what seemed like hours opening and closing the boxes that held our wedding bands as I waited for the day we would stop looking at them, and start wearing them.  As we sat together watching the unrelenting images of destruction stream from the television, something took hold of me.  I stood from the couch and walked to the mantle, picked up the ring boxes and returned to the couch.  I opened the one that contained my fiancé’s ring.


“Give me your hand,” I commanded softly.
“What are you doing?” he asked, tears filling his eyes.
“Give me your hand,” I repeated.  He held out his left hand for me, and I slipped the ring, a simple piece of jewelry made from white gold, over his knuckles and onto the base of his ring finger.  “Michael Dalton Palmer, I take you as my husband,” I said. “Now you,” I said, handing him the box that contained my ring.  He took my hand and slipped the antique platinum ring next to the matching 1920’s-era engagement ring that I’d been wearing for almost a year. 
“Jessica Hilary Cohen, I take you as my wife,” he said.
“Now we’re married,” I said. We kissed, and settled back into viewing position, waiting to see what had become of our future.