Wedding reminds that life goes on

I attended a wedding last weekend at the chapel on Fort Richardson. It was a beautiful ceremony, with the sunlight filtering in highlighting the stained glass windows encircling the church.

The bride was radiant in her flowing white dress and the groom proudly beamed from ear to ear throughout the ceremony and the reception. There weren’t quite as many people attending as expected, mainly because of the foot-and-a-half of snow “Mama Nature” thoughtfully deposited the day before, keeping many at home.

My husband and I were among the attendees who were determined not to let a little last minute blizzard stop us, mainly because we had delayed getting our snow tires removed.

I’ve lived in Alaska too long to be fooled by a week of beautiful 50-degree weather, green sprigs of grass, geese returning from the South and no snow in sight.

No, I knew fully well that there is always one more springtime snowfall to prepare for and that taking the snow tires off early would not bode well.

Okay, that sounded smug, even for me.

The truth is there wasn’t room for our car at the dealership for tire changeovers the beautiful 54-degree sunny day we called for an appointment. So, we decided to wait a day or two and then got the giant snowball from Heaven that hit us all in late April.

But, even with sparse attendees, the wedding was a time of happiness and joy and smiles abounded throughout the room. As I looked around the small chapel there in the center of the Army Post, I reflected on the last several times I had attended ceremonies there.

This was the first wedding I had ever attended at this church on Fort Richardson, but I had been there countless times for memorial services and funerals.

The 14 months my husband spent in Iraq saw the lives of 53 soldiers from his brigade on Fort Richardson extinguished and almost all of those soldiers were memorialized at this Post Chapel. Some of them were buried on Fort Richardson.

I attended many of these solemn, heartbreaking services.

I saw new widows in states of shock and deep grief; infants and toddlers who will never see their daddies again but are too young to know it; children far too solemn for their young years as they were old enough to comprehend the gravity of what they had lost.

They spoke not of the lives lost, but of the lives lived. They spoke of the love these soldiers had for their jobs, their country and their families. They spoke of their sense of humor, their strengths, their joys and their happiness in they way the lived their lives.

Each ceremony for each fallen soldier saw tear after tear shed by all attendees as there were boxes of tissue subtly placed at the end of each pew for everyone to utilize.

Throughout each service, the sounds of quiet, muffled sobs would be heard and, even in the services where I had never met the soldier who had died, I too would use the tissue provided and quietly wipe tears away.

There was the woman, now a widow, who lives at the end of my subdivision who lost her husband and whose little daughters lost their father. To this day, her house peacefully and proudly flies an American flag on its deck, a lingering reminder that while all the soldiers gave some, her husband gave all.

All the memorials I had attended this past year played in my mind last weekend as I sat through this beautiful wedding.

My occasion for being at the chapel this time was for the happiest of reasons: Uniting two people in love.

The sense of excitement and laughter was pervasive throughout the chapel last weekend, and for the first time in my memory, there were no tissue boxes at the end of each pew.

I needed this wedding last weekend. I needed the reminder that this chapel — this beautiful building with it’s candles and organ music and wooden pews was not only a building that marks the end of life: It’s also a place where lives begin. I think, sometime in the last year, I’d forgotten that.

This wedding was the perfect opportunity to remind me that life goes on, and it is beautiful.

Tiffany Horvath is the mother of two and the stepmother of one. Her husband, Drew, was deployed to Iraq and returned home in December. She writes every Sunday abut life at home as a wife and mother.