I want to take a little sidestep from talking about dresses and the exciting parts of the journey to our wedding to talk about a more somber topic. Today, February 26th, would have been my Opa?s 98th birthday.
It?s difficult for me to imagine our ceremony without thinking about my Oma sitting in the front row without him. Opa was, for many years, my biggest supporter. When I went off to college in 2007, we started writing letters to each other and only stopped last year when his eyesight deteriorated to the point that he couldn?t see the lines on the page. I kept writing to him, though, and we talked on the phone once a week.
We didn?t discuss marriage often, but when the topic came up, I loved to pick his brain for advice on his 65-year marriage to my Oma. They got married when she was 21 and he was already in his 30s, then moved to Canada from Rotterdam with $20 in their pocket shortly after WWII ended.
He sometimes joked that he had to marry Oma or else she?d get deported. They had no guests except one of his coworkers as a witness, and the weather was so bad in Quebec City that there were a handful of strangers in the back of the church during their service trying to stay warm. There is only one picture of them on their wedding day. It?s lovely, though, and I?m disappointed that I don?t have a digital copy.
In 2014, he wrote me a letter with this beautiful tidbit in it. English isn?t his first language, so yes, it?s not perfectly grammatically correct.
?When we got ma...